Music: Music Resources on the Web

"The Alan Lomax Collection includes ethnographic field documentation, materials from Lomax’s various projects, and cross-cultural research created and collected by Alan Lomax and others on traditional song, music, dance, and body movement from around the world. Lomax conducted fieldwork in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, England, France, Georgia (Republic), Haiti, Ireland, Italy, Morocco, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Spain, the United States, and Wales from the 1930s-1990s. The collection contains approximately 650 linear feet of manuscripts, 6400 sound recordings, 5500 graphic images, and 6000 moving images."

Digital images of Copland photographs, letters, and sketches.

During his tenure with the Utah Symphony, Maurice Abravanel became known particularly for his pioneering recordings of the complete symphonies of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). In an effort to preserve and increase accessibility of the printed scores, the McKay Library is digitizing them. Scans of the maestro's notated scores of the nine Mahler symphonies will form the backbone of the Abravanel Studio digital collection as it continues to grow.

Contains over 350 historical arrangements and recordings.

"Contains 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. Held by the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress."

A searchable database of arias, each includes vocal part and contextual information. Some have sound files and translations.

Compiled from various postings about Bach Cantatas, especially recordings of them, which have been sent to the "Bach Cantatas Mailing List" (BCML) (and some from other mailing lists) and may be considered as the Web Archive for that list.

A database of Latin ecclesiastical chant, the earliest written musical repertory of any significant size. The texts are almost all in Latin. There are thousands of individual chants, and they came into existence over a long period, beginning in early Christian times and continuing until as late as the nineteenth century.

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 Civil War Sheet Music Collection at the Library of Congress consists of over 2500 pieces culled from the Library's collections. This collection is unique in that it offers a contemporary perspective from both sides of the conflict, unfiltered by generations of historical interpretation."

DDM-Online 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.

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.

A musical adventure of historic scope and proportion, the Milken Archive was founded in 1990 to document, preserve, and disseminate the vast body of music that pertains to the American Jewish experience. Over two decades, the Milken Archive has become the largest collection of American Jewish music ever assembled.

The Library of Congress has a large collection of American sheet music from the 19th century online - free to be searched and the scores downloaded.

Featuring over 10,000 Christ­ian hymns, Author Bios, Composer Biographies, Hymn Histories and Gos­pel songs from ma­ny de­nom­in­a­tions. You’ll find lyr­ics, scores, MI­DI files, pic­tures, his­to­ry, & more.

This site is indispensable to any analysis of Mozart's works. It is a digitized version of the entire NMA; but, it is even more than that: it includes some facsimiles of sketches and audio recordings that you can listen to while you page through a score.

Contains articles on various topics of interest to Bach scholars.

A comprehensive and searchable database of Web resources available for music research.

This database is a cross-index of data for over 38,000 opera and oratorio premieres. It allows complex searches across multiple categories or simple browsing within any single category, such as genre, composer, librettist, premiere date, country, oratorio subject, or theater.

The production database contains 1849 vernacular texts (21.2 million words, 479,000 unique forms) the majority of which are dated prior to 1375, the year of Boccaccio's death.

This is an outline of the M, ML, MT sections of the Library of Congress classification scheme as related to music. This link was developed at Bowling Green State University.

The Performing Arts Encyclopedia (PAE) is a guide to performing arts resources at the Library of Congress. The PAE provides information about the Library's unsurpassed collections of scores, sheet music, audio recordings, films, photographs, and other materials.

From Seth Keeton, SongHelix creator:

"This online art song database will grow to become a centralized comprehensive hub for song repertoire discovery revealing the ‘DNA’ of every song.

The database currently holds 4,000 songs with rich metadata. You can search by tons of different criteria at once including themes and keywords! We’ve taken an extremely granular approach to the metadata we collect. With the Search & Filter, for example you could find, “all the songs in Russian by women poets written between 1890 and 1910 written for high voice.” Or Browse to go down the rabbit hole of keywords. You’ll see that each song is richly linked with all the other songs in the database so that you can easily follow ‘breadcrumbs’ from one song to the next.

We’ve also made it easy to contribute songs, so please consider cataloging your favorite songs, or your songs(!). Our goal is to eventually include all recital appropriate repertoire.

Use of the website is FREE. I hope you’ll try it out and let me know what you think."

The Sheet Music Consortium is a group of libraries working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music.

"From 1914 through 1920 the Library of Congress acquired over 14,000 pieces of sheet music relating to what ultimately became known as the First World War, with the greatest number coming from the years of the United States' active involvement (1917-1918) and the immediate postwar period. "