Citing and Writing About Music

When writing about music, you will often refer to musical keys, notes, triads, etc., as well as stylistic periods.  All of these should be spelled out in your work:

Keys:  A-flat major, F-sharp minor
Notes:  Middle C, E, G-sharp, B-flat, eighth notes, sixteenth notes
Triads: B-flat-D-F
Stylistic Periods:  fifteenth century, twentieth century, Baroque, Classical

Hyphens

Remember that when used as adjectives, many musical words should be hyphenated:

• Fifteenth-century secular music
• Sixteenth-note passage
• Repeated eighth-note motion

Italics

Still other musical terms should be placed in italics in your writing:

• Tempo markings, and foreign-language terms not commonly used in English:
  Andante ; Allegro maestoso
  opéra comique ; cantus firmus
• Or the foreign plurals of terms commonly used in English:
  Tempo, tempos, but tempi
  Alto, altos, but alti

Titles of Musical Compositions

Titles of operas, oratorios, motets, albums, and other large-scale compositions are placed in italics:

• The Magic Flute ; Die Zauberflöte
• Messiah
• Nuper rosarum flores
• Missa Pange lingua
• Master of Puppets

Titles of songs and other short compositions are placed in quotation marks:

• “Für Elise”
• “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”
• “Petite camusette”

Titles of works that are also names of genres are capitalized:

• Beethoven’s String Quartet op.131
• Schubert’s Sonata

Names of individual movements from larger works should be capitalized and italicized only if they are not common to English usage, otherwise they appear with quotation marks:

• The Andante from Mozart's Symphony in G Minor
• "September Song" from The Fantasticks

Names of pieces with specific titles should be italicized:

• Schumann's Scenes from Childhood
• Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 5 (Emperor) ; or, the Emperor Concerto by Beethoven