Open Textbooks
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- Music Theory by Mark Andrew Cook
Open Textbook Collections
- UC Press E-Book Collection
- ACLS Humanities E-Books
- Open Culture Meta Collection
- MERLOT
- Open Textbook Library
- College Open Textbooks
- Cool 4 Ed
- OpenCourseWare
- Ebooks Directory
- Searchable by keyword or topic.
- HathiTrust
- A collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world, including many of the great philosophy texts.
- Project Gutenberg
- Project Gutenberg offers thousands of free ebooks. Books can be searched by title or by category.
- Open Library searches a variety of sources for print and online books. Many ebooks are freely available for online reading or download.
Multimedia
- YouTube
- Search YouTube by keyterms and try filtering by channel or “Creative Commons” license (these videos are specifically labeled for reuse).
- TED Talks – Cello / Conducting / Creativity / Culture / Guitar / Jazz / Live Music / Music / Performance / Piano / Singer / Spoken Word / Violin / Vocals / World Cultures
- A collection of TED Talks and playlists on Music and related topics.
- Videos through the CSUSM Library
- Select “Books & More” tab and use these limits: Full Text Available Online and Audio Visual.
- Library Media Reserves, including Video on Demand option (allows you to stream videos to CSUSM students). Keep in mind that you should leave at least 1 week of lead time for processing these requests.
Ebooks in the Library
The CSUSM University Library has an extensive collection of ebooks on a variety of topics. To find what’s available:
- Go to the University Library homepage
- Choose “Books and More”
- Enter keywords and search
- Use the limiters to narrow by “Full Text Online” to ensure all results can be accessed directly from your computer
- Limit by “Books” to filter out journals and media
- NOTE: searching for scores or sheet music will return different results, so try both terms. You can also add the instrument, such as ‘piano’, to focus the results.
Journal Articles
Consider including journal articles as required or supplemental reading for your courses. Search through our Music databases for articles. Just be sure to direct students to the article by permalink (or static URL) rather than posting the PDF directly in your Cougar Course. This will ensure two things: 1) that we are complying with copyright and publisher restrictions, and 2) that our journal usage is counted (this allows us to justify maintaining our subscriptions).
This page provides examples illustrating how to find permalinks in the Library’s databases.
Please contact your librarian if you are still unsure of how to find the permalink.
Open Access Journals
- Search for additional Journals
- Selected Titles
- Current Research in Jazz –online open access journal designed to publish peer-reviewed articles of original jazz research.
- JEMS: Journal of Experimental Music Studies – an online peer-reviewed journal devoted to experimental, systems and minimal, and ‘new’ tonal and postmodern music.
- Music & Politics – peer-reviewed electronic journal. Covers impact of politics on the lives of musicians, music as a form of political discourse, and the influences of ideology on musical historiography
Open Courseware
Scores-Free Access
- IMSLP: Petrucci Music Library
Sharing the world’s public domain music. The contents include searchable scores and recordings.
- Mutopia project free scores
free to download, print out, perform and distribute.
1770 pieces of music are now available. search by composer or instrument. - Sheet music Consortium
The Sheet Music Consortium provides tools and services that promote access to and use of online sheet music collections by scholars, students, and the general public. It is fully searchable.
- Harvard: Online Resources
including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, composition, and performance practice with links to archival collections, online scores and sound recordings and more.
- RISM – Répertoire International des Sources Musicales
These primary sources are manuscripts or printed music, writings on music theory, and libretti. They are housed in libraries, archives, monasteries, schools and private collections.
- American Memory-Library of Congress
List of scores available online
Other CSUSM Library Resources
More information about finding and using library resources can be found on the Music submenu of the Visual and Performing Arts Research Guide.
Suggestions
Have a good idea for a free resource? Tell us about it! Email your subject specialist.
Searchable by discipline and academic level, this site provides a broad range of instructional materials, including texts, images, videos, primary sources and more.
Other Open Educational Resources
Much of content is harvested from YouTube, but this site groups the performances by piece played, making comparisons easy to access.