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Online Resources
The Naxos Music Library is our prime resource for online listening. It contains an impressive catalogue of classical music from all eras, as well as recordings of a variety of genres including jazz, folk and blues. Unfortunately, none of its nearly 50,000 recordings is available in the library catalogue. Instead you must go to Naxos itself and use its search box. Naxos also provides well-written and researched notes on the recordings and composers that help with listening and appreciation.
An impressive catalogue of American music is available from the Digital Repository of American Music (DRAM), which we are currently receiving as a free trial. It also provides liner notes and essays that are of assistance to research and listening. Again, none of this material is in the catalogue. Use the search box that DRAM provides.
Searching for recordings
All of our recordings are catalogued in Conifer. Finding recordings of pieces is similar to looking for scores. Often the piece is contained in larger collections. of similar works. For instance, if you are looking for Brahms's Third Symphony, the best approach would be to enter in the search box these words: Brahms Symphonies. That way you would retrieve all recordings and scores of Brahms's Symphonies.
Another approach I recommend is using changing the format to search only for recordings. To change format, click on the arrow and change "all formats" to Music, which is the format of musical recordings. Then, in the search box enter these terms: Brahms Symphonies. You will retrieve only recordings, not scores, of these works.
That search result, however, still yields vinyl and CD recordings. To search only for CDs, you will need to change the location from by clicking on the arrow that says "university libraries," changing it to "Choose a different library," followed by clicking on "Laurentian University" and then choosing "Music Resource Centre." You will now search only the MRC collection, where the CDs are all located.
It is also possible to change the format to Video recordings. For example, we have a number of videos of operas, both in VHS and DVD format, as well as documentaries and concert performances.
Finally, over the years, we have added "contents notes" to the catalogue record of each of our recordings that list the individual pieces on them. This means that by searching under keyword, there is the likelihood you will find the particular work. This is especially important for songs and jazz instrumental pieces. For instance, enter in the search box: All the Things You Are. You will retrieve a number of recordings of the jazz standard by Jerome Kern. The same strategy can be employed to look for individual Schubert songs. However, it is not foolproof. To do a comprehensive search, one should find the song collections as well. For example, we have on CD every Schubert recording made by the distinguished German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. We did not list all the songs since there are hundreds of them!