Primary Sources: Music: Music

"The sheet music in this digital collection has been selected from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University. The full collection consists of approximately 500,000 items, of which perhaps 250,000 are currently available for use. It is one of the largest collections of sheet music in any library in the United States. "

"The Civil War Era Sheet Music collection contains nearly 35 different pieces of sheet music. Crandall numbers are indicated if they were referenced in Marjorie Lyle Crandall's book, Confederate Imprints: A Check List Based Principally on the Collection of the Boston Athenæum (1955)."

"... consists of over 2500 pieces culled from the Library's collections. The collection is limited to music about the war and therefore does not include every piece of sheet music published during the war. In addition to the music, many of the covers are worth noting. They treat a variety of subjects ranging from conventional portraits of generals to battlefield scenes to the popular image of Jefferson Davis escaping in petticoats."
The Library of Congress

Listen to 1000 hours of early jazz music collected by David W. Niven.

"... an electronic archive of more than 14,000 images, to assure their permanent preservation, and is able to present a significant number of them through this website to facilitate detailed study of this music and its sources."
Based at the University of Oxford

"The Early Music Online project has digitised 300 of the world’s earliest surviving volumes of printed music, using copies in the British Library, and has made these freely available online."

"... contains nearly 20,000 pieces of original American popular sheet music dating back to the mid-19th century including several hundred published musical and film song folios, musical artist folios, musical genre folios, and dance folios. Mr. Wildin collected the materials over many years and continues to acquire more." Provided by Gonzaga Univeristy

Located in the Special Collections at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of The Johns Hopkins University, the collection contains over 29,000 pieces of music and focuses on popular American music spanning the period 1780 to 1960. Pieces are indexed on this site; a search will retrieve a catalog description of the pieces. An image of the cover and each page of music will also be retrieved if the music was published before 1923 and is in the public domain.

Sheet music in the Library of Congress related to baseball.

"The Louisiana Sheet Music Collection is comprised of sheet music published in, or with topical relevance to, Louisiana (with an emphasis on New Orleans). Many important local composers are represented, including Basile Bares, Eugene Chassaignac, Edouard Dejan and Louis Moreau Gottschalk as well as several interesting, but lesser known, nineteenth-century composers. The collection covers 100 years in the history of local publishing (1838-1938) and represents a wide range of styles of popular and vernacular music, including Creole songs, nineteenth-century dance music, Confederate anthems, Mexican and Cuban danzas and danzon, ragtime, blues, and jazz . "

"The goal of the Music Manuscripts Online project has been to create and to provide online access to high-quality images and descriptions of music manuscripts owned by The Morgan Library & Museum.

Works by J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Fauré, Haydn, Liszt, Mahler, Massenet, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Puccini, Schubert, and Schumann, among many others, can be viewed on these pages. "

"The Sheet Music Consortium is a group of libraries working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Harvested metadata about sheet music in participating collections is hosted by UCLA Digital Library Program, which provides an access service via this metadata to sheet music records at the host libraries. Data providers have chosen to catalog their sheet music in different ways, but 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."