The UNLV Music Library owns a sizable number of
collected editions and historical sets,
including anthologies, collected works of composers, and miscellaneous collections of works by country
(called "monuments"). Locating a specific item in these collections can be daunting, but there are a number of
valuable tools that will help you perform a successful search. Each of the following approaches is useful
in some situations (and unhelpful in others).
1. Look in the Library's Catalog.
In the case of many of the Music Library's more heavily used sets, separate entries have been made in the catalog
for each volume in the collection. For example, there are currently over one hundred individual entries for the set
Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era. The collected works of many composers have been similarly cataloged, although in some cases there is just one record for the
set as a whole. Search the Library Catalog as you would for any other musical work. (See
How to Find Music
in the Library's Catalog for more information.)
Ideally the contents note in the online record for a collection will list all (or many) of the
works included, even though they aren't indexed in the Library Catalog as
titles. If you can't locate a particular
work using the composer and/or title, try a
keyword search using one or more words of the title.
2. Look in Heyer
The standard reference source for large collected music sets is
Historical Sets, Collected Editions, and Monuments of Music : a guide to their contents,
compiled by Anna Harriet Heyer (
Music
Reference ML113 .H52 1980). Heyer alphabetically lists the major sets available at the time of its publication,
by author in the case of collected works of one composer, otherwise by title. Within each set the individual
contents are listed, including the appropriate volume number. There's also a separate index volume, for
locating individual composers within larger sets. You will need to check the Library Catalog to
determine a set's call number within our collection.
Note: Although Heyer's coverage stops at 1980, most music sets in the Library published after that date have
separate records in the Library Catalog for each volume, so this limitation isn't as serious as it sounds.
3. Locate Individual Compositions in a Set of a Composer's Works
This can be more difficult than it sounds, especially if the Library Catalog doesn't have separate records
for each work and the set isn't indexed in Heyer. In fact, it's really a two-step process, unless
the composer's output was relatively limited, or you already know
exactly what work you're looking for. As a general rule, it helps to first locate the item in a
thematic
catalog for the composer, in order to establish exactly which work it is (and obtain a
work number for it). Once you have this
information, it should be relatively easy to determine which volume of the collected works that particular
item will be in.
However, in some cases you will have only a vague title (such as "Suite in C") and the composer's name.
WIthout a musical "
incipit" (the opening notes of a work or movement)
you may find it useless to look
through a
thematic catalog, and worse than useless
to dig through a large set of collected works. In
such a case your best bet may be to allow thousands of music catalogers
to do your work for you, by searching the OCLC online database of
bibliographic
records, called
WORLDCAT.
If you have a common (if vague) title for a work, it's likely that it was actually published in that form
at one time or another, and
if you can locate the bibliographic record for that publication you may find that the
cataloger has already hunted up the necessary information about the item.
This can include its full (or real) title, the original instrumentation, whether the work is actually a compilation
of unrelated movements from several works, and so forth.
4. Browse Through the Collections in the Stacks
Don't underestimate the value of browsing the stacks. In the case of songs, piano works, etc. of a particular
composer you may find it faster to simply look in a collection of those works by that composer. If
you're looking for a particular Barber song, going directly to the collections of Barber songs and looking
in the table of contents may easily be the fastest way to find what you're looking for.
Before you browse the stacks, you may find it useful to check the
pathfinder
for that topic for more information on appropriate call number ranges.
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