Internet Resources by Subject: Music

Sheet music, books, recordings, and more documenting the American experience.

"All genres and styles of music are covered here, ranging from the most commercially popular to the most obscure." Provides biographical information on some artists as well as discographies, and awards. Reviews are also available.

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

"Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology (DDM) is an international database of bibliographic records for completed dissertations and new dissertation topics in the fields of musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology, as well as in related musical, scientific, and humanistic disciplines."

"... provides records of productions from the beginnings of New York theatre until today. Details include pertinent people involved as well as interesting facts and production statistics." The database includes links to the show website when available. These sites sometimes provide links to reviews.

Sheet music, books, recordings, and more documenting the American experience.

Provides information and links about medieval music and musicians.

"...browse the Metropolitan Opera season calendar, buy tickets, purchase items from the Met Opera Shop, review education and lecture events from the Metropolitan Opera Guild and read articles at Opera News. Please review the sites listed below and enjoy the Metropolitan Opera Family of websites." The site also provides study guides to some Operas (http://archive.operainfo.org/).

A virtual museum that "gives people a unique opportunity to examine, explore, and experience the finest examples of 19th and 20th Century musical instruments. "

A BBC website providing access to information for learning about music.

" "Physics and music have been related for thousands of years. The art and the science of music acoustics are presented here, in musician-friendly format, as is some of our research in music science. "

"The National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture (NADAC) is a repository that facilitates research on arts and culture by acquiring data, particularly those funded by federal agencies and other organizations, and sharing those data with researchers, policymakers, people in the arts and culture field, and the general public. "

"The Opera Platform is a partnership between Opera Europa, representing 155 opera companies and festivals; the cultural broadcasting channel ARTE; and 15 theatres from across Europe. " Provides access to at least 1 "showcase complete opera" each month. Also includes additional material such as interviews and looks "behind the scenes".

Provided by the Library of Congress, users can "search and browse descriptions of more than 235 music, theater and dance resources by subject, title, or name. " Browsing features are also provided.

Find a variety of playbills for Broadway shows, includes links to articles, photos and other materials.

Prepared for the staff at WOI Radio, Iowa State University, the dictionary has been made freely available. The dictionary contains 30, 000 entries and is available in .pdf format.

The Pulitzer Prize is actually 21 different awards that cover journalism, fiction writing, history, biography, and non-ficition writing, poetry, drama, and music. The site provides background on the prizes, access to the full-text of some of the winners' works (including photographic award winning pictures), a timeline of the awards and more.

"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. "

"This archive contains critical editions of seventeenth-century Italian madrigals and arias, together with introductions to the editions in Italian, German and English, and translations of the texts into English and German."

"Begun in December 1998, CPDL is one of the world's largest free sheet music sites. You can use CPDL to find scores, texts, translations, and information about composers." The site can be browsed or searched.

"... 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 Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum (ISM; International Mozart Foundation) has digitized Mozart's music and made it available online for free. Access is available to everyone for private, scholarly, and educational use. Users may need to select the English edition for search interface if it comes up in German.

"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

"... is a project for the creation of a virtual library of public domain music scores based on the wiki principle; it is also more than that. Users can exchange musical ideas through the site, submit their own compositions, or listen to other people's composition; this makes IMSLP an ever-growing musical community of music lovers for music lovers."

"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." Ward Irish Music Archives

"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."

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, books, recordings, and more documenting the American experience.

"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 . "

"Measuring Polyphony presents, for the first time, digitisations of polyphonic compositions copied in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts in in mensural notation, and linked directly, where possible, to high-resolution images of the original manuscript sources, and MIDI audio files."

"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 Mutopia Project offers sheet music editions of classical music for free download. These are based on editions in the public domain. A team of volunteers typesets the music using LilyPond software. "

"The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) is an international, non-profit organization with the aim of comprehensively documenting extant musical sources anywhere in the world."

"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."

"SFSMA digitizes and archives music that was published specifically for use in the silent cinema; music from collections related to specific cinemas or silent film musicians; and music that was clearly marketed to cinema musicians and managers for use in the theater. Music on the site has been researched for intended use and provenance. We’ve recently begun preliminary work into digitizing and including period recordings of the pieces we post as well."

A collaboration between Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS), Pitts Theology Library at Emory University, John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky (UK),Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Archives and Special Collections (SBTS), andCenter for Popular Music (CPM) at Middle Tennessee State University.

"... is composed primarily of digitized materials held in the Edna Mae Sandborn Music Rare Book Room. The collection is particularly strong in eighteenth-century French opera, due in large part to the influence of musicologist Lloyd Hibberd on the development of the collection. In addition to holdings from the UNT Music Library, the Music Virtual Rare Book Room also contains some items that have been borrowed from private collectors and scanned with permission."