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AllMusic is a comprehensive music database offering artist bios, complete discographies, and album reviews, along with genre guides and historical context. It helps you explore the evolution of music across styles and eras and discover recommended listening.
More resources on Music History
IMSLP
The Petrucci Music Library, a volunteer-run archive of public-domain scores and recordings covering most of the classical canon. Lets you locate historical editions of a work and compare engravings before deciding which edition to practise from.
Listening to Music — MUSI 112 (Yale / Open Yale Courses)
Open Yale Courses introductory course of 23 recorded lectures by Craig Wright on how Western classical music is built: rhythm, melody, harmony, texture and form, then genres such as fugue, sonata, symphony and opera. Learners can follow and describe what they hear.
Grove Music Online
An Oxford University Press reference work covering composers, genres, instruments, theory, and regional traditions in signed scholarly articles with bibliographies. Readers can trace a term or figure across periods and follow citations into primary musicological literature.
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
Podcast working chronologically from 1938 to 1999, devoting an episode to each of five hundred recordings and using it to explain the performers, producers, labels, and social conditions that shaped rock's development.
Music: A Very Short Introduction
Nicholas Cook argues that music is a cultural practice rather than a fixed set of works, examining performance, notation, criticism and canon formation. Readers come away questioning how Western assumptions shape what counts as music.
The Rest Is Noise
Alex Ross traces twentieth-century classical music from Strauss and Mahler through Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Britten and postwar experimentalism, tying each to its political moment. Readers gain a narrative map of why modern concert music sounds as it does.