A site devoted to music and dance bibliography and reference. Contains bibliographies, a blog, and guides to common types of music reference sources.
The music manuscripts collections contain key works from various periods of music history. The oldest works date back to medieval times; the library holds medieval liturgical manuscripts that form key resources for research into English plainsong as well as sixth century treatises on music. One of the most important collections of manuscript music in the Library is the group of nine lute manuscripts copied by Mathew Holmes in the early years of the seventeenth century. A selection of these have been digitized and described in collaboration with the Lute Society.
The c. 5,500 digital images in the CFEO archive were obtained from five lead institutions (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bodleian Library, British Library, Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina and the University of Chicago Library) and seventeen other libraries. The full score of each first impression appears along with commentary on particularly significant textual features.
Cornell Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections features a significant archive on the history of hip hop, documenting its emergence in the Bronx in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Explore Bach’s major works through graphics, video, and text that follow the course of Bach’s own manuscripts. Follow at your own pace as these interactive score studies integrate performances by world-renowned artists with articles and analysis by leading scholars.
The DME is currently being developed at the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg in cooperation with Packard Humanities Institute. The DME will provide world wide access to the complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756- 1791) in digital form via the internet for study and performance purposes. In addition to the presentation of all works of music online, the DME will include a critical edition of letters, documents and libretti as well.
The Early Music Online project has digitized from microfilm more than 320 anthologies of printed music from the 16th century. The earliest, a collection printed by Ottaviano Petrucci, dates from 1503. Highlights of the collection include sacred music by Josquin des Prez, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd; secular songs from Nuremberg, Paris and Lyon; lute music from Venice and organ music from Leipzig. Over 9000 individual compositions have been digitized.
The Early Music Theory website has been set up as an evolving scholarly resource dedicated to a variety of issues relating to the notation and intellectual context of music in the medieval and early modern period, as well as to the inter-relationships between these issues and musical performance and composition.
The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads.
Library and Archives Canada is the official repository for the Gould archives, and their Glenn Gould Archive (GGA) contains a number of online exhibits and collections related to Gould’s life and career.
Harvard’s searchable compilation of online resources for music scholars.
Hofmeister XIX is an on-line, searchable version of the Hofmeister Monatsberichte for the years 1829-1900. Containing some 330,000 records of music publications, it is the most extensive resource for establishing what was published where and when during that period. Records are linked to facsimile images of the Monatsberichte on the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library) website.
An extensive, community-built library of scores, primarily in the public domain, scanned to PDF.
The Library of Congress has one of the largest collections of notated music in the world with over 22 million items. These include popular sheet music, instrumental and vocal music, scores and parts, and original manuscripts from composers of all eras.
Non-profit initiative dedicated to digitizing collections of classic media periodicals. Collections feature extensive runs of several important trade papers and fan magazines.
Mozart: New Documents is a collaborative project for the digital publication of newly discovered documents that refer to Mozart or his music during his lifetime. This website is intended as an open working draft, and contributions and feedback from readers are welcomed.
The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a community-driven effort to create a commonly-accepted, digital, symbolic representation of music notation documents.
This site is maintained by the Legislation Committee of the Music Library Association (MLA) as a resource for anyone interested in issues of copyright as they apply to the fields of music and music librarianship.
Visit Music Library Association. Copyright for Music Librarians
Includes a directory of music publishers, copyright information, and more.
Index of musicians who died in recent years, organized alphabetically and by year of death.
Historical recordings from the Library of Congress, available free of charge for online listening. For more information, see the press release.
An organization that aims to support and promote new music from the USA.
By 2012 all of the archival material from 1943 through 1970 (the “international era”), from the letters of Presidents to the smallest scrap of paper, will be available in the Digital Archives – 1.3 million pages.
Opening Night! 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 database is linked to SearchWorks, Stanford University Libraries catalog, allowing users to easily find related scores, recordings, and writings.
A blind, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of Western musical performance practices.
Visit Performance Practice Review (from Claremont Colleges Digital Library)
The contemporary music portal is a search engine for art music resources from 1945 to this day held by French institutions.
The Golden Pages provide announcements for forthcoming conferences in musicology and related disciplines, an archive of dissertation abstracts, links to music departments worldwide, and other links of interest to musicologists.
Visit Royal Holloway. University of London. Golden Pages for Musicologists
Music blog with links to digital sound files of cassettes.