The following subscription services are often offered through universities and colleges; check with your institution’s library to see if they have a subscription:

 

Naxos Music Library

Offering access to thousands of classical and jazz recordings, this website allows students to listen online to various styles and genres. The site also contains timelines and descriptions of various art music styles and brief histories of performers and ensembles.

 

Oxford Music Online

Although this encyclopedia-like database includes the more specialized Grove Music Online, there are also more accessible articles from Oxford Music Dictionary, and this gives students the option for concise and more detailed definitions and biographies.

 

Garland Encyclopedia of World Music

Providing the same encyclopedic-style knowledge as Grove Music Online, this resource deals exclusively with world music or music from various indigenous cultures. Loosely these musics are sometimes termed “folk,” but this web resource shows the true diversity of musical cultures that are not the art music of Western Europe.

 

Below are helpful sites that are free and do not require institutional or individual subscriptions:

 

How to Listen to Music: WikiHow (http://www.wikihow.com/Listen-to-Music)

This list, accompanied by helpful videos, reinforces listening skills and can be a good step-by-step reminder for students as they work through the listening assignments in the text.

 

Open Yale: Listening to Music (https://www.coursera.org/learn/introclassicalmusic)

With lectures and examples from Craig Wright’s “Introduction to Music” course at Yale, this online resource helps students review concepts and hear the same basic components taught from a different perspective. This can be a great complement to in-class lectures, can help clarify confusing concepts, and helps students with missed material – especially fundamental listening skills and musical elements.

 

Pandora (http://www.pandora.com/)

This online free radio subscription service allows students to start a radio station based on a certain work or composer and see how it develops according to their preferences and Pandora’s Music Genome Project. This is a great way to see how certain music is related or how works can be connected to one another. Also, this allows students to listen for influence and musical connectivity.

 

British Library Sound Archives Online (http://sounds.bl.uk/Classical-music)

This online sound archive lets students listen to historic recordings by various landmark conductors and ensembles. Including art music, jazz, and popular music, this archive lets students hear many historical sound and spoken word recordings. All of these recordings allow students to make comparisons to modern recording techniques and contemporary art music sound.

 

Classical.com (https://classical.com/)

A general website that contains top-ten lists, timelines, period breakdowns, and varying amounts of general information about art music. This serves as a good starting place for students who have little or no background with “classical” music and can provide good basic information and reference material.

 

Jazz at the Smithsonian (http://www.smithsonianjazz.org/)

Part of the Smithsonian’s virtual museums, this introduction to jazz provides some context for the jazz works mentioned in the textbook and provides some larger context for the genre and its sub-genres. Sometimes termed the “classical” music of America, this website shows the exhaustive work of the Smithsonian to feature jazz as a distinctive American genre, sounding social stories of the United States.