Online Resources for Music

Sharing the world’s public domain music. The contents include searchable scores and recordings.

Music website that specializes in choral music scores in the public domain.

Open collection of digitized sheet music from libraries across the United States.

In the 1800s, publishers printed the lyrics to popular songs, without their tunes, on small sheets called song sheets, handbills, or broadsides. These would often be illustrated with a woodcut scene or portrait and sold at gathering places where people sang together. Duke’s collection of broadside verse includes around 1800 of these ephemeral productions, from “The Star Spangled Banner” to “Pop Goes the Weasel,” forming a rich source for research on American society and culture. The American South and the Civil War era are especially well documented, including well over one hundred Confederate broadsides. The collection also includes carrier’s addresses, non-musical poetry, and other ephemeral verse.

This music was generously donated to The Johns Hopkins University by Lester S. Levy over a period of years starting in 1976 and is now housed in the Special Collections Division of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. The collection spans the years 1780 to 1980, but its strength is its thorough documentation of nineteenth-century America through popular music. 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.

Nearly 5800 titles make up this collection of vocal music scores.

The GMHA is an effort to preserve the legacy of gospel music in a state-of-the-art digital archive. The GMHA digitizes and catalogues important documents and makes them available in a searchable database to scholars, gospel artists, librarians, church historians, teachers, and anyone with Internet access. The archive contains original audio and visual video interviews, music files, publicity materials, photographs, film, scholarly articles, and analysis from academic and gospel-community-based experts. When complete, the GMHA will be the largest and most advanced digital repository for these collections in the world.

Brown University had digitized over 1400 music scores that pertain African Americans. The earliest is from 1820.

Digital reproductions of works/sources by J. S. Bach and the whole Bach family.

Open access online collection of Mozart scores, libretti & texts, letters & documents, and other information.

Chopin Early Editions consist of digitized images of all scores in the University of Chicago Library's Chopin collection. Users can search or browse Chopin Early Editions via a variety of data points, including titles, genres, and plate numbers.

Holds 27 digitized works by Lully.

There are 51 symphony pieces digitized within this collection.

WPA Music Manuscripts is a digitization project with the goal of bringing the unique holdings of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra online. These music manuscripts represent the unique work of music copyists--men and women employed by the government with the task of copying music for the WPA orchestras, bands and choruses to perform.

The Ferdinand Praeger Collection of Scores, circa 1829-1891, consists of 484 items, all but a few of which are manuscript scores. Due to the fragile condition of some of the scores, not every score was digitized. As a result, there are only 472 digitized scores in this digital collection.

The International Guitar Research Archives scores database features over one thousand public domain works from composers and arrangers across the globe. In addition to the diverse array of guitar compositions and method books spanning centuries, the database contains works for other plucked strings such as banjo, mandolin and ukulele. Scores are presented in the PDF format.

The string quartet, for two violins, viola and violoncello, was one of the most widely-cultivated genres of chamber music during the Classical period, with the Viennese masters Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all contributing substantially to the literature.

This binder’s collection of sheet music contains twenty-seven duets bound in two separate volumes, the first for flute and the second for violin. The first thirteen compositions were written for flute and violin, and although undated, they were most likely published in the first two decades of the 19th century. The remaining fourteen pieces consist of operatic transcriptions arranged by Charles de Bériot (1802-1870).

The cello music collections at UNCG constitute the largest single holding of cello music-related materials in the world. Presently, the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections & University Archives boasts the collections of eleven cellists: Luigi Silva, Elizabeth Cowling, Rudolf Matz, Maurice Eisenberg, Janos Scholz, Fritz Magg, Bernard Greenhouse, Laszlo Varga, Lev Aronson, Lubomir Georgiev, and Marion Davies.

A collection of 24 scores from pianist Robert Helps.

The Piano Bench Collection is comprised of sheet music published before 1923. The nucleus of this collection came from Fred Edmiston, a former librarian at Auburn University. Mr. Edmiston began collecting the items around 1944 or 1945 when he spent summers in Mobile, Alabama, with his sister and brother-in-law. His brother-in-law, who owned a piano store (Piano Sales Co., just off Dauphin St., on North Joachim St.), was unable to get new pianos during war. The next best thing was second-hand pianos which could be repaired and re-sold, and they came by the boxcar load from the Midwest, especially from the Chicago area. Usually the pianos came with their benches, which often contained sheet music which was given to Mr. Edmiston. Although he later added some items, these pieces form the bulk of the Piano Bench Collection.The

The International Harp Archives were formally established at Brigham Young University (BYU) in 1994. The Archives serve as a support center for research dealing with aspects of the harp, its music and harpists.

Joe Williams, vocalist, was born Joseph Goreed in Cordele, Georgia in 1918. He began singing professionally in the late 1930s, and during WW II was vocalist for the big bands of Coleman Hawkins and Lionel Hampton. After the war he sang with other bands, including a stint with Count Basie. He would return to the Basie band in 1954 and remain with it until 1960. With Basie, Williams had his first recording hits, including "Everyday" and "Alright, Okay, You Win." He toured extensively in the 1960s, from Chicago, and continued to tour after a move to Las Vegas in the early 1970s. He sang blues, jazz, and popular ballads, recorded much, and won many awards and wide recognition for his singing.

The Kuehn Appleman Family Collection of German Music includes over 100 pieces of original German sheet music brought to Texas from Germany.