Music

Art Song Central is principally an archive and directory of free, printable sheet music for singers and voice teachers. An emphasis is placed on standard classical and traditional repertoire.One can either browse the sources, or search the site for a specific song.You can browse in the Song Index. See Songs and Sources for other ways to browse these posts, including by language or general range.
IPA transcriptions are now available for every German, French, Italian and Latin song in the index.

A digital library of Johann Sebastian Bach's autograph manuscripts and original parts in high-resolution scans, and a catalog of information about all of Bach's works and their written transmission. In German, but you can translate it using the en button on the upper right corner.

The Chopin Collection at the University of Chicago Library consists of over 400 first and early printed editions of musical compositions by Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849). Most are digitized and available for viewing.

The CMME Project, a scholarly initiative to offer free online access to new, high-quality early music scores produced by today's leading experts. Here, the brilliant polyphonic styles known to the modern world through the works of such masters as Dufay, Josquin, Machaut, Palestrina, and Tallis can come to life again in the central medium of the 21st century.

Medieval and early modern manuscripts from Swiss libraries, including the Abbey Library of St. Gall

300 of the world’s earliest, starting in the 1600's, surviving volumes of printed music digitised and free to the public. Using copies in the British Library. You can also explore detailed descriptions of the content via the British Library Catalogue. Included are in the catalogue are full details of each digitised book, with an inventory of the contents of each, searchable by composer name, title of composition, date and subject, and with links to the digitised content.

Provides ballad facsimiles, transcriptions, recordings if a tune is extant, extensive cataloguing of the ballads including illustrations/ woodcut impressions, and both basic and advanced search functions for individual ballads and their constituent parts or makers. Also included are backgrounds on the EBBA ballad collections, ballad culture and other ballad resources.

Ethnomusicological video for instruction and analysis (Indiana University)-you must creat an account to view the videos.

Multi-media reference archive and resource center for traditional and popular song, music, and dance of Africa and the Americas.

This online collection is a complete catalog of the entire Hoagland "Hoagy" Carmichael (1899-1981) Collection, access to selected digital objects, and supplemental research information, such as genealogy. It contains sound recordings, letters, photographs of him and his family, print and handwritten musical compositions, and more.

Early print and manuscript scores, mostly chamber and keyboard music, published during the composer's lifetime.

This is a search and discovery system for accessing sheet music from the Indiana University Lilly Library, the Indiana State Library, the Indiana State Museum, and the Indiana Historical Society.

Petrucci Library free score project

ITMA is the largest Irish music collection in existence. They publish selections of digitized materials from the collection on this site; presented in four sections: Sound Recordings, Visual Materials, Printed Items, and Interactive Music Scores. Search the entire library for separate items by using the search function, or browse each section individually. NOTE: most of the language used on this site is traditional Irish Gaelic.

The Julliard Manuscript Collection is composed of 138 priceless autograph manuscripts, sketches, engraver's proofs, and first editions donated to the school in 2006. Among it's highlights is the late engraver's proof of Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 with hundreds of notes and annotations by the composer. The images and music have been digitized using adobe flash so you can not print them out.

The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music consists of over 29,000 pieces of American popular music. The collection spans the years 1780 to 1980, but its strength is its through documentation of nineteenth-century America through popular music. The collection is especially strong in music spawned by military conflicts from the War of 1812 through World War I, and minstrel music is also well-represented.

The Library and Archives Canada Canadiana sheet music collection is the most comprehensive in the country, and includes over 20,000 patriotic and parlour songs, piano pieces, sacred music and novelty numbers, some dating back to the 1700s. Besides the expected Canadian imprints, it includes music by Canadians or about Canada published anywhere in the world.

American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. Databases range from African-American Southern US recordings, 1938-1943 to Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1873-1920.

The multiformat Aaron Copland Collection from which the online collection derives spans the years 1910 to 1990 and includes approximately 400,000 items documenting the multifaceted life of an extraordinary person who was composer, performer, teacher, writer, conductor, commentator, and administrator. It comprises both manuscript and printed music, personal and business correspondence, diaries, writings, scrapbooks, programs, newspaper and magazine clippings, photographs, awards, books, sound rec

This collection consists of 1,305 pieces of African-American sheet music dating from 1850 through 1920. The collection includes many songs from the heyday of antebellum black face minstrelsy in the 1850s and from the abolitionist movement of the same period. Numerous titles are associated with the novel and the play Uncle Tom's Cabin. Civil War period music includes songs about African-American soldiers and the plight of the newly emancipated slave. Post-Civil War music reflects the problems of

The Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress holds 4291 song sheets. Included among these American songs are ninety-seven British song sheets from Dublin and London. The collection spans the period from the turn of the nineteenth century to the 1880s, although a majority of the song sheets were published during the height of the craze, from the 1850s to the 1870s.

Band Music from the Civil War Era makes available examples of brass band music that flourished in the 1850s in the United States and remained popular through the19th century. This online collection includes both printed and manuscript music (mostly in the form of "part books" for individual instruments).The collection features over 700 musical compositions, as well as 8 full-score modern editions and 19 recorded examples of brass band music in performance.

The WPA California Folk Music Project is a multi-format ethnographic field collection that includes sound recordings, still photographs, drawings, and written documents from a variety of European ethnic and English- and Spanish-speaking communities in Northern California. The collection comprises 35 hours of folk music recorded in twelve languages representing numerous ethnic groups and 185 musicians.

The Historic American Sheet Music collection presents 3,042 pieces of sheet music drawn from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, which holds an important, representative, and comprehensive collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century American sheet music. This selection presents a significant perspective on American history and culture through a variety of music types including bel canto, minstrel songs, protest songs, sentimental songs, patriot

Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870-1885 consists of over 47,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the years 1870 to 1885. Included are popular songs, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra.

This site has digitized copies of Mendelssohn's work or Mendelssohn's Werke. The site is actually in German and the main page for the collection is in German with no translation. This link takes you into the collection and has the English translation to navigate through the site.

Munich Digitization Center (MDZ) handles the digitization and online publication of the cultural heritage preserved by the Bavarian State Library and by other institutions. It provides one of the largest and fastest growing digital collections in Germany, now comprising 332,736 titles available online. Access is free of charge!

The Music Treasures Consortium provides online access to music manuscripts and print materials, held at the most renowned music archives. You can search or browse materials, access metadata about each item, and view digital images of the piece. Current members : The British Library, Harvard University- Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard College Library and Houghton Library, Juilliard School. Lila Acheson Wallace Library, The Morgan Library and Museum, The New York Public Library.

Scores and books in the public domain. Many of these are unique to the Sibley Music Library collection.

This is the Neue Mozart Ausgabe completely online. The site is in German but can be somewhat easily understood enough to get around.

This link takes you to the license page.Click yes and you can then enter the site and either search or browse through the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe.

Sheet Music about Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Civil War, from the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana

(Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University): digitized string quartet parts from rare or unique publications. Includes compositions by Mozart, Pleyel, Spohr, Fesca, Rossini, Weber, and others.

The Vatican Apostolic Library is now digitising its valuable ancient religious manuscripts free.
founded in 1451 AD and holds over 80,000 manuscripts, prints, drawings, plates and incunabula (books printed prior to 1500 AD) written throughout history by people of different faiths from across the world. This alsoincludes letters from important historical figures, drawings and notes by artists and scientists such as Michelangelo and Galileo, as well as treaties from all eras in history.