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Choral Literature: Searching within Collected Works

NAVIGATING COLLECTED WORKS


If you need to navigate across collected works, there are a few resources that can help. Each is a bit outdated - the most recent was published in 1997 - but since the bulk of collected work publishing happened in the 20th century, they still work for a large portion of the literature. Below you'll find information on how each resource works so that you can navigate them like a pro.

Grove Music Online

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Composers with long-established thematic catalogs and collected works will provide volume information for individual musical works in that composer's Grove Works List.

Using a Grove Works List
  1. Go to Grove and search for the composer whose catalog you need to browse.
  2. Select the Grove entry for the composer.
  3. Once in the composer's Grove article, look for the left-hand Article Contents menu. At the bottom of the menu are Works and Bibliography.
  4. Select Works.
  5. The easiest way to navigate a Grove Works List is by using CRT+F and entering keywords in order to find the desired work. For example, for Brahms, use CRT+F and the keyword "Requiem" to find Ein deutsches Requiem. 
  6. Sometimes the works information table is too large to view in the article screen. Use the "Open in New Tab" to view the full Works List table.
  7. Collected works information is usually located in the right-hand columns. Using Brahms as an example, the BW column contains the information for the old Brahms edition, and the NA column contains the information for the newest edition. You can also see work premiere and composition information, and text sources.

 

 

"The Heyer" - pub. 1980

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Anna Harriet Heyer was a music librarian who worked at the University of North Texas and Texas Christian University. Her Historical Sets, Collected Editions, and Monuments of Music: a guide to their contents - last published in 1980 - is the standard resource for navigating the contents of M2s and M3s. The Heyer is still a useful resource, despite being almost forty years old, because most collected edition sets were mapped out in advance of their publication. Therefore, even if all volumes of the Haydn Werke were not published in 1980, the information for how they WOULD be published was available, and is still largely accurate. This does not hold true for all sets though, and so the Heyer does have limits to its effectiveness. 

Below is a quick guide on how to navigate Heyer. It's an odd resource because it's an index of sources that has an index to its index. Confused yet? Understandable! Look at the process outlined below to untangle the indexes.

The Contents Volume

There are two volumes of Heyer. The first is a Contents volume, which is a bit misleading because it looks and acts like an index. Each entry is for a composer or a series and includes a volume by volume listing for what was published or planned to be published as of 1980. For example, you can find an entry for Johann Sebastian Bach and for Das Chorwerk. Volume descriptions can include titles of actual pieces, generic descriptions (e.g., a Magnificats), or a list of composers whose works are contained within.

The contents volume is the larger of the two volumes, but can be tricky to navigate without first using the Index Volume. 

The Index Volume

The second volume is an index of an index. Each entry is for a composer, and it will tell you the titles of the series in which their works appear. For example, you could look at the J. S. Bach entry in the Contents volume, but not know that his works are included in the series Das Chorwerk without consulting the Index volume. The Index lists either specific works by the composer or generic descriptions (e.g., Masses).

 

"The Hill and Stephens" - pub. 1997

Available via HathiTrust Emergency Access >>

George Hill and Norris Stephens' Collected Editions, Historical Series & Sets & Monuments of Music: a bibliography is a continuation of Heyer's work, accounting for over fifteen additional years of scholarly edition publishing. It elides the indexing into one volume of entries for composers and heavy use of cross-referencing using an alphanumeric system.