Music

Mercer University maintains a library and archives of primary and secondary research materials related to the university and the Baptist community. The collection is located on the third floor of Mercer University's Tarver Library.

Tift College was a women’s college that operated in Forsyth, Georgia from 1849 to 1987. There is a small collection of sheet music used by the students from the first half of the 20th century.

One of the most outstanding crowd-sourced, open access resources for music is the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP). IMSLP currently has more than 135,000 works, 440,000 scores, 52,000 recordings, 16,500 composers, and 500 performers, with scores (vocal, orchestral, instrumental, etc.) that are generally downloadable as PDFs.

The Choral Public Domain Library collects scans of scores for works out of copyright (generally meaning they were published prior to 1923). It currently hosts free scores of almost 30,000 choral and vocal works by at least 3000 composers. It includes seasonal and sacred music, as well as translations.

The sources archived include all the currently known sources of polyphony up to 1550 in the UK (almost all sources up to 1450 are available for study through this website); all the ‘complete’ manuscripts in the UK; a small number of important representative manuscripts from continental Europe; a significant portion of fragments from 1300-1450 from Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland and Spain. Such a collection of images, created under strict protocols to ensure parity across such a varied collection, has never before been possible, and represents an extraordinary resource for study of the repertory as a whole.

This digital collection includes manuscripts, first editions, and early editions of music from the 17th to the early 20th century. Many items, such as variant editions and annotated proofs of 19th-century operas and related libretti, are meant to be seen and used together. As a group, they give scholars a window into the study of historical performance practice.

This repository's selections lead to experimental prototypes of the ways in which musical scores and recording liner notes might be used in conjunction with sound recordings available online through VARIATIONS (which is now Media Collections Online).

The Juilliard Manuscript Collection is an extraordinary collection of 140 priceless autograph manuscripts, sketches, engravers proofs and first editions, which were donated to the school in February 2006 by Juilliard Board Chairman Bruce Kovner. These digitized scores include works by Liszt, Bach, Barber, Mahler, Ravel, and more.

Chopin Early Editions consist of digitized images of all scores in the University of Chicago Library's Chopin collection. Users can search or browse Chopin Early Editions via a variety of data points, including titles, genres, and plate numbers.

This project was conceived in 1996 both as a multimedia thematic catalog of the UNT Music Library’s collection of early editions of operas and ballets by the French Baroque composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), and as a nucleus for collecting information useful to anyone studying those works. A pilot version of the Lully Web Project has been on the web since 1997.

The digitized version offers the musical text and the critical commentaries of the entire Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, edited by the Internationale Stiftung Mozart in cooperation with the Mozart cities of Augsburg, Salzburg, and Vienna. The printed edition has been published by Bärenreiter-Verlag. Some restrictions apply to the reproduction of images of source materials, particularly in the supplement to the edition.

The online database provides free online access to digital images of more than 500 music manuscripts and more than 600 first and early editions of works by Franz Schubert. In addition, the digital collection includes a selection of autograph letters and biographical documents.

Music scores of all Carl Nielsen's works are available for free download on this website. Also find introductions to his works and see what manuscript and printed sources are extant.

The Saint Jean de Lalande Library is derived primarily from Jeff Ostrowski’s personal collection of rare Gregorian chant books. While it doesn’t contain every single book in his possession (some were too fragile to scan), the most important ones are there. About 23,000 pages were uploaded to the CCW server in 2008. Some very important books were thereby made available to the entire world, including: (A) the Nova Organi Harmonia of Flor Peeters and company; (B) both editions of Fr. Hermesdorff’s Graduale; (C) the 1903 Liber Usualis of Dom Mocquereau; (D) both editions of the Liber Gradualis by Dom Pothier.

The Sheet Music Consortium, hosted by UCLA, is a group of libraries working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music. A large proportion of the original sheets in participating collections has been digitized, allowing users direct access to the music itself and in many cases covers and advertisements that offer evidence of the cultural context in which the songs were published.

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IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana University brings together sheet music by Indiana composers, arrangers, lyricists or publishers as well as sheet music about the state. Some digitized images are available.

A growing selection of early sheet music from the holdings of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University. These scores consist mostly of popular songs dating from the 18th through the early to mid 20th centuries. The instrumentation is usually piano and voice, but the selection also includes many works for piano solo. The vast majority of the scores were published either in the USA or United Kingdom. Most are English language when lyrics are present.

This is a collaborative project between the Center for Popular Music and the American Antiquarian Society to inventory, catalog, digitize, and provide web-based public access to their extensive music manuscripts collections. It concerns manuscripts inscribed before 1910 that are mainly American in provenance, with contents that are preponderantly vernacular in style.

The Inventions of Note Sheet Music Collection was established in 1997 by the Lewis Music Library at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This sheet music collection consists of popular songs and piano compositions that portray technologies (old and new alike) as revealed through song texts and/or cover art. Today we take for granted such inventions as the automobile, airplane, radio, and telephone; they have become part of our daily lives. However, the initial appearance of these and other inventions created a myriad of responses in American society ranging from excitement and delight to anxiety and scorn. This collection reflects those varied reactions through the medium of popular music publications.

This collection consists of over 29,000 pieces of American popular music and is especially strong in music spawned by military conflicts.

The Irish Sheet Music Archives website is the home of the online sheet music collections found in the Ward Irish Music Archives located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Visit Browse Collection to browse and search over 5,000 pieces of Irish and Irish American themed sheet music in our collections. This page functions as an online catalog for all of the sheet music across our collections. Users can narrow down the collection by filtering items in the Public Domain (published before 1923) to view free online sheet music.

American Sacred Music provides fulltext access to sacred music published in the United States, with a focus on publications from the Midwest. Dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries, these are primarily collections of hymns and anthems, with other types of sacred music, such as cantatas and revival songs, also represented.

The Library of Congress's Performing Arts Digital Collections showcases digitized scores, papers, recordings and more! Some examples collections include: the Aaron Copland Collection, America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets, the Andre Kostelanetz Collection, American Choral Music, and Baseball Sheet Music.

The New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives was launched in February 2011, and currently comprises more than four million pages, including printed programs, marked conducting scores, business documents, and photographs. Growing continually, the scope of the online collection is every document in the New York Philharmonic Archives from 1842 through 1970. This includes correspondence, marked scores and parts, contracts, and minutes from meetings of the Board of Directors — as well as all public documents from 1970 through today (e.g., marketing materials, press releases, and annual reports)