Primary Sources: America (U.S.A.): Performing Arts

A multimedia anthology that illustrates the vibrant and diverse forms of popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, that thrived from 1870-1920. Includes 334 English- and Yiddish-language playscripts, 146 theater playbills and programs, 61 motion pictures, 10 sound recordings and 143 photographs and 29 memorabilia items documenting the life and career of Harry Houdini.

"A collection of over two hundred social dance manuals at the Library of Congress. The list begins with a rare late fifteenth-century source, Les basses danses de Marguerite d'Autriche (c.1490) and ends with Ella Gardner's 1929 Public dance halls, their regulation and place in the recreation of adolescents. Along with dance instruction manuals, this online presentation also includes a significant number of antidance manuals, histories, treatises on etiquette, and items from other conceptual categories. Many of the manuals also provide historical information on theatrical dance. All illuminate the manner in which people have joyfully expressed themselves as they dance for and with one another."

"This online presentation includes items selected from the Federal Theatre Project Collection at the Library of Congress. Featured here are stage and costume designs, photographs, posters, playbills, programs, and playscripts, including productions of Macbeth and The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus as staged by Orson Welles, and Power, a topical drama of the period. Selected administrative documents from the project are also available."

"...brings together a host of ephemeral records and artifacts that "document America's local and national music history and its diverse cultures." The heart of the collection is, not surprisingly, a massive archive of John Philip Sousa's personal papers and documents. In the "Research the Collections" area, visitors can browse through an alphabetical listing of the digitized materials, which include sheet music, newspaper clippings, and so on."Copyright 2010 Internet Scout Project - http://scout.wisc.edu

"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."