Music

Broadside ballads, printed cheaply on one side of a sheet of paper from the earliest days of printing, contain song-lyrics, tunes and woodcut illustrations and bear news, prophecies, histories, moral advice, religious warnings, political arguments, satire, comedy and bawdy tales. Sold in large numbers on street-corners, in town-squares and at fairs by travelling ballad-singers and pinned on the walls of alehouses and other public places, they were sung, read and viewed with pleasure by a wide audience, but have been handed-down to us in only small numbers. The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford holds nearly 30,000 songs, many of them unique survivals, printed from the 16th to the 20th Centuries. Digital facsimiles and an online database were first made accessible in 1999. Broadside Ballads Online updates that database and links it to other resources.

The Center for Popular Music (CPM) is a research center devoted to the study and scholarship of popular music in America. The Center maintains an archive of research materials stretching from the early eighteenth century to the present and develops and sponsors programs in vernacular music.

CPDL was founded in December 1998, ported to ChoralWiki in August 2005, and incorporated in May 2010 as a U.S.A. 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable organization. Here you will find free choral/vocal scores, texts, translations, and other useful information.

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University holds a significant collection of 19th and early 20th century American sheet music. The Historic American Sheet Music Project provides access to digital images of 3042 pieces from the collection, published in the United States between 1850 and 1920.

A dramatic music database of over 18,000 shows and productions dating from the 1690s to the present, containing more than 67,000 songs. These pieces come from all over the world and cover every conceivable topic, portraying the culture and history of their time and place in unique and valuable ways.

The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music consists of over 29,000 pieces of American popular music. 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.

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.

2124 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.

The Sheet Music Consortium provides tools and services that promote access to and use of online sheet music collections by scholars, students, and the general public.

The Digital Archives contain unique music manuscripts, first editions, letters and pictures from the museum's and library's collections of the Beethoven-Haus. By linking more than 6,100 documents on 37,600 coloured scans of high quality, 1,600 audio files (music examples, audio letters) and 7,600 text files, Beethoven's thinking, life and work become tangible and can be experienced in a visual and audible way. Portraits and topographical depictions show the composer and the world he lived in. In the Beethoven-Haus you can additionally
view all digital documents in high resolution
and listen to music pieces in full length.

The Chopin collection at the University of Chicago Library includes over 400 first and early printed editions of musical compositions by Frédéric Chopin, maintained in the Special Collections Research Center. Because Chopin's works were often published concurrently in several countries with variant texts, scholars can establish a sequence of publication by comparing a range of printings. 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.

A scholarly initiative to offer free online access to new, high-quality early music scores produced by today's leading experts. Based at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, the project represents a collaborative development effort of specialists in musicology, information science, and music retrieval. The major purpose of the enterprise is to produce and maintain an online corpus of electronic editions, in addition to software tools making them accessible to students, scholars, performers, and interested amateurs.

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.

The Munich Digitization Centre (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 31,102 titles available online.

Digitized Opera and Musical Theater Scores at The Internet Archive.