MUS450: Senior Seminar: Open Access Resources

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 sheet music, primarily vocal music of American imprint, dates from the 18th century to the present day, with the largest concentration of titles in the period 1840-1950.

Multimedia collections from the Library of Congress of digitized documents, photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures, and texts. Over 100 collections, including, for example, African-American pamphlets, Chautauqua flyers, Depression photographs, Coca-Cola advertising, and the papers of Alexander Graham Bell, to name just a few.

Established in 1991, Indiana University's Archives of African American Music and Culture (AAAMC) is a repository of materials covering a range of African American musical idioms and cultural expressions from the post-World War II era. Our collections highlight popular, religious, and classical music, with genres ranging from blues and gospel to R&B and contemporary hip hop. The AAAMC also houses extensive materials related to the documentation of Black radio.

The Aria Database is a collection of information about opera and operatic arias.
Besides providing basic information about each aria, the Database includes translations for many arias and aria texts for those that are not affected by copyright restrictions. The Database also provides access to a collection of operatic sound files to give visitors an idea of what each aria sounds like. In addition, the Aria Database contains information on available scores and sound files that can be purchased to aid in study and enjoyment. Currently, the Database holds information on the complete operatic aria collections of Mozart, Verdi, Berlioz, Wagner, and Puccini as well as the partial collections of over 50 other composers.

Art Song Central is principally an archive and directory of free, printable public domain sheet music for singers and voice teachers. An emphasis is placed on standard classical and traditional repertoire.

Black Grooves is a music review site hosted by the Archives of African American Music & Culture (AAAMC) at Indiana University. Their goal is to promote black music by providing our readers with monthly updates on interesting new releases and quality reissues in all genres─including gospel, blues, jazz, funk, soul, R&B, world music, and hip-hop—as well as classical music composed or performed by black artists.

The Center for Black Music Research (CBMR) is an independent research unit of Columbia College Chicago devoted to documentation, research, preservation, and dissemination of information about the history of black music on a global scale.

The Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL) is a collection of free public domain choral music. CPDL currently hosts free scores of at least 23680 choral and vocal works by at least 2754 composers.

The Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation currently holds approximately half of the known letters and documents of the Mozart family, thus possessing the largest collection of this kind worldwide.

Free-Scores.com is a collection of free public access resource that provides users with free contemporary, classical and educational sheet music for all instruments.

FreeSheetMusic.net is a indexing database that allows users to search a compilation of websites for free sheet music, articles, lessons, and other topics of interest to the musician.

From approximately 2001-2006, Project Gutenberg volunteers were been engaged in digitizing public domain sheet music, using a variety of techniques, to enable study and performance. For the most part, the musical pieces created were chamber music, with composers such as Brahms and Beethoven. This sub-project is no longer active, because there are other efforts that have stronger workflows for sheet music. Project Gutenberg is, mostly, focused on text.

This site provides access to digital images of 3042 pieces from the collection, published in the United States between 1850 and 1920.

International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), is an extensive collection of free public access music scores.

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 thorough 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. Other topics include music about the circus; dance; drinking, temperance, and smoking; fraternal orders; presidents; romantic and sentimental songs; schools and colleges; and transportation.

Integrates the collections, commissions and live concerts of the Library of Congress, allowing users to discover the Library's music and performing-arts collections through a single gateway on the Web. The site brings together thousands of materials digitized from the Library's vast collections of sheet music, sound recordings, moving images, manuscripts, photographs, and oral histories.

American history through songs. Recordings, essays, articles. From the Library of Congress.

Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music 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.

Mutopia Project contains 2024 pieces of music. Free to download, modify, print, copy, distribute, perform, and record – all in the Public Domain or under Creative Commons licenses, in PDF, MIDI, and editable LilyPond file formats. More

A merger of the American Music Center and Meet the Composer. Their Online Library contains works by more than 6,000 composers with over 14,000 media samples (recordings and scores).

The purpose of this web site operated by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute is to make Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's musical compositions widely and conveniently accessible to the public, for personal study and for educational and classroom use. 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.

Presents performance histories, synopses, libretti, discographies, pictures, and information on operas and composers. Includes information on librettists, opera companies, opera people, other opera Web sites, selected reviews, and more.

Online Sources of Opera Libretti

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.

The Sibley Music Library at the Eastman School of Music has digitized thousands of public domain music scores, emphasizing those not widely available.

The music you will find here is from an uncataloged collection of individual sheet music - from song sheets to solo piano and violin sonatas - housed at the UWM Music Library. Only music that is in the public domain, i.e., written prior to 1923, has been digitized. Likewise, only music not already digitized and available through another collection is included here. Check back as we continue to add music to this collection.