Music Resources on the Web

Individual Composers

This list includes Web-accessible libraries, research centers, and Web sites devoted to research on selected composers.

The Bach Bibliography provides for basic and advanced searching of over 14,000 items, including scholarly books, articles, dissertations, and conference papers, on J. S. Bach. Maintained by Yo Tomita (School of Music, Queen's University of Belfast).

J. S. Bach Home Page is a comprehensive source, with an classified index of works (browsable by category, title, year, instrument & title, instrument & year, BWV number, or key), a database of many of the cantata texts, a recommended recordings list, and links to related sites. By Jan Hanford and Jan Koster.

Beethoven: The Emerson Expedition is an introduction to Beethoven's string quartets, including historical background, sound files, and a timeline. By the Emerson Quartet.

The Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies is the only institution in North America devoted solely to the life and works of Ludwig van Beethoven. The Center's Beethoven Bibliography Database accesses records for over 9,000 records for books, articles, and scores from the collection at San Jose State University. Enter "O" for "other databases" at the main menu screen.

The Berlioz Society Home Page includes performance schedules, reviews, a bibliography of current research, and links to other Berlioz sites.

The Leonard Bernstein Collection, ca. 1920-1989 (American Memory Project, Library of Congress) makes available a selection of 85 photographs from the collection as well as the complete finding aid to the entire collection, numbering some 400,000 items.

Bernstein's Studio explores the life and works of Leonard Bernstein.

The American Brahms Society maintains a Brahms Archive and Research Center as part of its mission to foster and disseminate research on the life, music, and historical position of Brahms.

Britten Pears Library (University of East Anglia) contains materials related to the lives and works of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Log in as "nepac," then select 13 (other catalogues) and 2 (Britten Pears Library).

Francesca Caccini  in a Transitional Florence is an essay about the 16th-century Italian composer. By Julie Hovis.

The Hoagy Carmichael Collection (Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University) will present a complete catalog of the entire collection, access to selected digital objects, and supplemental research information.

The Chopin Foundation of the United States, Inc. provides biographical information on Chopin and other Polish composers, and links to related sites.

The Official George Crumb Home Page includes a works list, bibliography and discography. Designed and maintained by Jaco van der Merwe.

MaxOpus is the "official website of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies". Maintained by Judy Arnold.

Delius, 1862-1934 is the official Delius Web site, featuring a biography, a discography, a bibliography, and a works list.

Elgar is the homepage of the Elgar Society and the Elgar Foundation.

The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive includes a variety of G&S related items, including clip art, librettos, plot summaries, pictures of the original G&S stars, song scores, audio files, and links to other opera resources.

The Grieg Archives (Bergen Offentlige Bibliotek) houses the composer's personal collection of books and scores, manuscripts, and letters, first editions of Grieg's works, and related materials.

The Georg Frideric Handel Homepage offers a chronology, works list, Handelian potpourri, and more. By Brad Leissa.

Life and Works of Hildegard von Bingen contains a biographical essay, a bibliography and a discography of St. Hildegard's works. By Kristina Lerman.

The Charles Ives Society pages includes a biographical essay, a program guide to performances of Ives' music, a works list, and a bibliography.

Janacek Archive and Museum (Moravian Museum, Brno) contains much of the primary archival, musical and pictorial material relating to Janacek, along with an extensive archive of material from the whole of Moravia and the Czech Republic.

The Maple Leaf Rag Ring: Devoted to Scott Joplin is a gateway to over 30 sites on the composer, his music and all aspects of ragtime.

The Zoltan Kodaly Homepage (Indiana University) contains biographical information, works lists, and related links. Maintained by Dr. Jean Sinor.

Instituto Liszt in Bologna presents an overview of the collection, with links to other Liszt societies and Web sites. In Italian and English.

The Lully Web Project consists of a thematic catalog of the UNT Music Library's collection of twenty-one first and second editions of operas and ballets by the French Baroque composer.

The International Machaut Society provides links to resources for the teaching, study, and performance of Machaut's poetic and musical works.

The Mozart Project: The Life, Times and Music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart offers essays on the composers' life and works, a thematic listing of works with detailed information on many, a bibliography and links to other resources. By Steve Boerner.

The Jacques Offenbach Society gives information about the Society and links to many Offenbach resources on the Web.

The Orff Society promotes the dissemination of Carl Orff's methods of music education, known internationally as Orff-Schulwerk.

The Harry Partch Information Center discusses the works, life, and instrument collection of the twentieth-century composer, theorist and instrument maker.

The Arnold Schoenberg Archives provides links to biographical and bibliographical information. By R. Wayne Shoaf.

The Schubert Institute Research Center aims to provide "a central point of access to information on the Web about Franz Schubert, and to provide the merely curious with a few facts about his life and works."

The Richard Wagner Archive includes quotations, letters, compositions, articles, genealogical information, and links to international Wagner Web sites. By Hannu Salmi.

The Kurt Weill Foundation provides a clearinghouse for information about the composer and actress-singer Lotte Lenya.

Lists of Composers

Classical Composers Archive provides brief biographies, timelines, and lists of composers from over 40 countries.

Classical Composers Database  has information and links to other Internet resources for over 1000 composers. By Jos Smeets.

Composers' Catalogues of Works contains biographical information and the complete catalog of works (based on thematic catalogs) for J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, Buxtehude, Chopin, Debussy, César Franck, Handel, Mendelssohn, Ravel , Schumann, Telemann and Vivaldi. In French.

Dr. Estrella's Incredibly Abridged Dictionary of Composers has lists of composers sorted by historical period, with links to composers' Internet sites. By Steven Estrella (Esther Boyer College of Music, Temple University).

Early Music Women Composers Web-Ring provides a selected overview through links to annotated CD discographies, biographical and historical information, fine art illustrations, song texts and MIDI soundfiles.

International Association of Music Information Centers consists of forty members in thirty-six countries, each of which is responsible for documenting and promoting the music of its own country or region. Hyperlinks in the main directory lead to individual members' sites, with information on composers, national music, and much more.

The Portrait Gallery of Classical Composers reproduces portraits and photos of well-known composers. Created by R. Christian Anderson.

The Theodore Presser Composer Gallery gives biographies and lists of works for over 40 contemporary composers.

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Organizations

Libweb (University of California at Berkeley) currently lists over 3000 pages from libraries in over 90 countries.

Music Libraries Online was founded in 1998 "to create a virtual union catalogue for music in the UK, enabling anyone with access to the web to see the holdings of all the libraries in the consortium with a single search."

Repositories of Primary Sources (University of Idaho) provides links to over 3,300 websites of archives and manuscripts repositories around the world. All sites are checked and approved for relevance. Search by name of the archives or specific geographic area. Maintained by Terry Abraham.

Selected Music Libraries in the U.S.:

The Cornell University Music Library collection numbers over 121,000 volumes, 46,000 sound recordings, and 600 videorecordings. [online catalog]

Duke University Music Library & Media Center comprises some 90,000 volumes, 10,000 microform units, 20,000 sound recordings, and 540 videorecordings. [online catalog]

Eastman School of Music's Sibley Music Library holds over half a million volumes [online catalog]

Harvard University's Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library at Harvard University can be accessed through HOLLIS Plus.

Indiana University's William and Gayle Cook Music Library contains more than 537,000 cataloged items. [online catalog]

Library of Congress Music Division currently holds more than five hundred named collections which vary in size from fewer than a dozen items to more than a half-million. In all, the collection numbers nearly eight million volumes. [online catalog]

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Music Division, holds extensive collections in all areas and genres of music, with particular emphasis on documentation of American popular and classical music. [online catalog]

Northwestern University Music Library holds over 220,000 scores, books, manuscripts, CD-ROMs, microforms, and sound recordings. [online catalog]

Oberlin Conservatory Library has holdings in excess of 175,000 items, including over 50,000 sound recordings, over 84,000 musical scores, and more than 43,000 books about music. [online catalog]

Stanford University Music Library holds over 85,000 books and scores, and 32,000 recordings; particularly strong coverage in performance practice, historical musicology and computer applications to music. [online catalog]

University of California, Berkeley Music Library holds some 160,000 volumes of printed music, books, and periodicals, 46,000 sound recordings, videos, and other materials, with particularly strengths in reference works and in opera scores and librettos. [online catalog]

University of Chicago's Joseph Regenstein Library comprises some 46,000 books, 50,000 scores, and 32,000 audio and video recordings, with a strong collection of books on jazz and the sociology of popular music in the Chicago Jazz Archive [online catalog]

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Music Library contains more than 120,000 monographs, scores, serials, sound recordings, videos, and microforms. [online catalog]

University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill Music Library holds more than 110,000 volumes, 8000 microforms, 30,000 audio and video recordings, and over 6500 rare books, scores and librettos, with special strengths in early theoretical treatises, librettos, large-scale vocal works, tunebooks, keyboard works, and music histories.[online catalog]

University of Pennsylvania's Otto E. Albrecht Music Library contains over 103,000 score and books, a large collection of microforms, with emphasis on primary sources, and 34,000 sound recordings [online catalog]

Yale University's Irving S. Gilmore Music Library holds approximately 120,000 scores and books, 25,000 recordings, 7500 microfilms, and  45,000 pieces of sheet music, in addition to other archival materials. [online catalog]

Schools and Conservatories

The  College Music School Address Book, maintained by the University of Alabama, lists more than 900 college music programs in the United States.

The Golden Pages University Music Departments' and Faculties' Home Pages (Royal Holloway University of London) features

Scholarly Associations

The American Music Center aims to "foster and encourage the composition of  contemporary (American) music and to promote its production, publication, distribution and performance in every way possible throughout the Western Hemisphere". Information on grants for performing ensembles and individuals is included on the site.

The American Musicological Society is a non-profit organization which aims to "advance research in the various fields of music as a branch of learning and scholarship." The Web site includes a long list of scholarly resources.

The College Music Society is a consortium of college, conservatory, university, and independent musicians and scholars which gathers and disseminates ideas on the philosophy and practice of music.

Early Music America is the non-profit service organization for the field of historical performance in North America. Site includes an online concert calendar and numerous links to early music resources on the Internet.

The Film Music Society is a non-profit educational corporation established in 1974 by professionals in film and music to address problems related to the survival and preservation of film music manuscripts and related materials.

International Alliance for Women in Music, maintained by members, contains more than 3500 pages of
archival resources on women composers and women in music.

The International Association for the Study of Popular Music promotes inquiry, scholarship and analysis in popular music and the processes involved in its production and consumption. Site includes bibliographies and resources for research and education.

International Association of Music Information Centers consists of forty members in thirty-six   countries, each of which is responsible for documenting and promoting the music of its own country or region and co-operating internationally with other centres and international organisations on issues of common concern.

International Association of Music Libraries encourages and promotes the activities of music libraries, archives and research centers for the purpose of strengthening cooperation among institutions and individuals in these fields.

The International Computer Music Association is an affiliation of individuals and institutions interested in the integration of music and technology, particularly in the technical, creative, and performance aspects of computer music.

MENC: The National Association for Music Education strives to "advance music education as a profession and to ensure that every child in America has access to a balanced, sequential, high-quality education that includes music as a core subject of study." Formerly the Music Educators National Conference.

The Music Library Association is the professional organization in the United States devoted to music librarianship and to all aspects of music materials in libraries.

The Society for American Music (formerly the Sonneck Society) "seeks to stimulate the appreciation, performance, creation, and study of American music in all its historical and contemporary styles and contexts".

The Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the U.S. (SEAMUS) is an organization of composers, performers and teachers of electro-acoustic music representing virtually every musical style.

The Society for Ethnomusicology is an international organization which promotes the research, study, and performance of music in all historical periods and cultural contexts in a multidisciplinary framework.

The Society for Seventeenth-Century Music is dedicated to the study and performance of music of that era.

Other Organizations

American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada offers member services and links geared to the needs of the professional musician.

The Music Publisher's Association Web site contains its Sales Agency List, a directory of music publishers and
index of publishers' imprints, with hypertext links to entries in the directory of publishers.

National Endowment for the Arts
 

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Instruments

American Guild of Organists promotes the organ in its historic and evolving roles and provides a forum for  support, education, and certification of members.

The American Musical Instrument Society is dedicated to promoting the understanding of the history, design, construction, restoration, and usage of musical instruments from all periods and cultures.

The American Recorder Society offers a short history of the recorder and links to ensembles, performers, teachers, etc.

Arto Wickla's Music Page features many links to early music resources in general and the lute in particular.

Brass Resources offers links to an interesting potpourri of resources on brass instruments of all types. By Ralph J. Jones.

The Dayton C. Miller Collection (American Memory Project, Library of Congress) is the first phase of an online catalog to the collection of nearly 1,650 flutes and other instruments, and other materials mostly related to the flute.

Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments is an online catalog of over 1000 examples of the music-instrument maker's art spanning the past four centuries. Includes an electronic picture gallery and sound files illustrating the different instruments.

The Electric Guitar: From Frying Pan to Flying V: The Rise of the Electric Guitar (Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, National Museum of American History) contains sections on the history and development of the instrument, with an annotated gallery of 40 guitars and sound clips. Based on the 1996-1997 exhibit.

The Galpin Society for the Study of Musical Instruments was formed for the publication of original research into the history, construction, development and use of musical instruments.

Gamba features nearly 100 bibliographic resources related to the viola da gamba, including instrument history and care, learning methods, and information about the 18th-century French composer Marin Marais.

A Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Instruments (Musica Antiqua, Iowa State University) highlights the ensemble's collection of 12th to 17th century reproductions. Descriptions of each instrument include pictures, history, construction, and performance notes, with some bibliographies and sound files in .wav format.

Historic Brass Bibliography, 1988-96 covers writings about Western brass instruments and their makers, making, original performance situations, performers, performance practices, repertory, and depiction in works of art through the nineteenth century. Compiled by David Lasocki, Indiana University.

The Historic Brass Society is dedicated to study of the history, music, literature and performance practice of early brass instruments.

The International Clarinet Association is a group dedicated to the artistry, technique, teaching and physics of the instrument. Site includes many links to clarinet and other related resources.

The International Directory of Musical Instrument Collections (CIMCIM: International Committee of Musical Instrument Museums and Collections, and the American Musical Instrument Society) is a new edition, with continual updates planned, of the Music Library Association's A Survey of Musical Instrument Collections in the United States and Canada, published in 1974.

Music Instruments of the World is a compendium of information on all varieties of musical instruments. From the International Music Archives Website.

Musical Heritage Network Instrument Encyclopedia is searchable by instrument name or browsable by either Sachs-Hornbostel classification or geographical area of origin.

The National Pipe Organ Register at Cambridge (British Institute of Organ Studies) contains three linked databases with information on organ builders and instruments in Great Britain.

The Newband Instumentarium houses the the Harry Partch Instrument Collection, Dean Drummond's zoomoozophone and juststrokerods, and a large assortment of exotic percussion.

120 Years of Electronic Music: Electronic Musical Instrument 1870-1990 gives an overview of the topic with historical references, a bibliography, and related links.

The Piano Page contains a wealth of information on the instrument. From the Piano Technicians Guild.
 

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Bibliographic Databases

These databases provide citations not only to journal articles and reviews, but to books, conference proceedings, and other materials. Entries followed by FT also deliver the full text of some or all of the referenced materials.

E-Books in Music
Made available by netLibrary, check out new electronic books in music.

E-Journals in Music
Check out selected electronic journals in music--full-text right to your computer!

The Australian Music Centre Library online catalog offers access to the Centre's collections, including works of more than 300 contemporary Australian composers and a unique collection of reference materials on Australian composition, musical life and performance history.

Bibliographic List of Published Songs Composed by American and British Women, ca. 1824-1930  (University of California, Davis) has information on more than 2700 titles by 453 women composers. Searchable by title, composer, lyricist, publisher, city and accompaniment. By Christopher Reynolds.

The Bibliography of Swedish Music Literature, an annual bibliography and database of Swedish literature on music, is produced by the Documentation Centre at the Music Library of Sweden.

Boethius Server includes the Society for Music Theory online bibliographic database and Electronic Discussion Forum archives. FT

CAIRSS for Music (Institute for Music Research, University of Texas at San Antonio) is a bibliographic database of  music research literature in music education, music psychology, music therapy, and music medicine. Citations have been taken from 1,354 different journal titles.

Canadian Music Periodicals Index  provides bibliographic sources for information on all aspects of musical activity in Canada. Updated monthly, the database currently includes more than 25,000 entries indexed from 475 Canadian music journals, newsletters and magazines from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

CANTUS provides indices of Gregorian chants in selected manuscripts and early printed sources of the Divine Office. Developed at the Catholic University of America; now maintained at the Faculty of Music of the University of Western Ontario.

Composers' Catalogues of Works contains biographical information and the complete catalog of works (based on thematic catalogs) for J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, Buxtehude, Chopin, Debussy, César Franck, Handel, Mendelssohn, Ravel , Schumann, Telemann and Vivaldi. In French.

Dissertations in Music Theory is an index of recently completed doctoral dissertations in music theory. Includes abstracts. Edited by Eric J. Isaacson.

Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology-Online is an index to dissertations-in-progress and a bibliography of completed dissertations reported since mid-1995, arranged under the traditional broad categories. In addition, DDM-Online includes all the records previously published in the earlier printed editions of Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology. An online registration form enables authors to register their topics or completed dissertations online.

The Encyclopedia of Record Producers (Watson-Guptill Publications) contains artist, producer, label, and title information for over 100,000 popular music recordings from the 1920's to the present.

GramoFile on the Web contains classical music reviews which appeared Gramophone from March 1983 onwards, numbering more than 24,000.

Handwritten Sources of the Theory of Music in the Middle Ages (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) gives the date, origin, source, and RISM reference for more than 1200 manuscript sources.

Historic Brass Bibliography, 1988-96 covers writings about Western brass instruments and their makers, making, original performance situations, performers, performance practices, repertory, and depiction in works of art through the nineteenth century. Compiled by David Lasocki, Indiana University.

International Inventory of Villancico Texts (University of Kansas) currently includes information on about 22,000 villancicos in two databases: Imprints, with about 13,700 entries, derived largely from the collection of over 2,000 pliegos sueltos at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid; and Manuscripts, with almost 8,000 entries. Compiled by Dr. Paul Laird.

Mario Biondi's Opera Recordings Database, contains records for 1020 opera titles and 2280 performances, which can be searched by composer, title, or performer. His Aria Database can be searched for aria title as well.

Monumental Musicae Byzantinae (University of Copenhagen Institute for Latin and Greek) is an inventory of manuscripts in the field of Byzantine chant.

MuseData (Stanford University Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities) contains encoded files for music by  J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Corelli, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Telemann, and Vivaldi, which may be used both to create printed scores and parts. FT

The Music Education Resource Base (MacPherson Library, University of Victoria) is a bibliographic database of more than 30,000 resources in music and music education from 32 Canadian and International journals and other sources covering the period 1956 through the present. The journals are fully indexed by title, author, and subject.

MUSICA: The Music and Science Information Computer Archive (University of California at Irvine) contains references & abstracts on scientific research in music as it relates to behavior, the brain and allied fields.

National Library Service of Italy Data Bank (SBN) provides access to a music database of more than 350,000 records for printed and handwritten musical documents from the 16th to the 19th century from over 500 public and private collections.

Renaissance Liturgical Imprints: A Census (RELICS) (University of Michigan) includes information on over 12,200 titles dealing with church worship and liturgy before 1601.

RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) represents a worldwide effort to identify and describe sources of music and writings about music from the earliest times through ca. 1825. Online databases include RISM A/II: Music Manuscripts after 1600, a graphical database of more than 200,000 bibliographic records for manuscripts in 24 countries; the RISM-US Libretto Database of  over 13,000 libretti from the Schatz Collection at the Library of Congress; the RISM Libraries Directory, with information on more than 5,500 libraries; and the RISM Bibliographic Citations Database, containing citations for thematic catalogues and other secondary sources cited in RISM bibliographies.

The Scribe Medieval Music Database (La Trobe University) is a collection of scores, color images, texts, and bibliographic information on medieval music, searchable by text or melody, which will retrieve information in the form of a modern score, text data and, where available, a color manuscripts facsimile. Includes the complete annual cycle of liturgical chant taken from original medieval sources, and the complete works of selected composers from the 12th to the 15th centuries. Directed by John Stinson.

Svensk musikhistorisk bibliografi (Documentation Centre at the Music Library of Sweden) is an annual bibliography and database of Swedish literature on music.

THEMA  (Music THEory of the Middle Ages) contains transcriptions of fourteen theoretical treatises related to musica mensurabilis of the thirteenth century. Texts in Latin. Created by Sandra Pinegar. FT

Thesaurus musicarum latinarum (Indiana University) is an evolving database of the entire corpus of Latin music theory written during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Thomas J. Mathiesen, project director. FT

The Wighton Database(Central Library, Wellgate, Dundee) contains over 1000 records describing Dundee's Wighton Collection, said to be one of the finest repositories of  Scottish music in the world.

The Women Composers Collection (University of Michigan Music Library) contains scores by women composers in the art music tradition from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.

Zam'ru: The Jewish Choral Music Database (Zamir Chorale of Boston) lists choral works in the Jewish tradition by over 240 composers.
 

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Virtual Music Libraries

These virtual libraries are organized according to the format which predominates within the collection. Sheet music collections often include some sound files, and online audio collections often include images scanned from print or other materials.

Sheet Music Collections

African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920: Selected from the Collections of Brown University (American Memory Project, Library of Congress) consists of 1,305 pieces of African-American sheet music dating from 1850 through 1920, all searchable by keyword. Includes subject, name and title indices.

America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets (American Memory Project, Library of Congress) is a digital archive of some 4291 song sheets from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, including ninety-seven British song sheets from Dublin and London. Searchable by keyword, personal name, title, or publisher.

Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads (University of Oxford) makes digitized copies of the library's collections of over 30,000 broadside ballads, ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries, available to the research community.

California Sheet Music (University of California, Berkeley) includes images of some 2,000 pieces of sheet music published in California between 1852 and 1900, along with related materials such as programs, songsheets, advertisements, and photographs. Includes indices by culture and topic and brief and/or full MARC bibliographic records for each item. By Mary Kay Duggan.

Digitized ragtime sheet music (Mississippi State University) The sheet music illustrates a broad spectra of music genres, from the ragtime of Scott Joplin to the dixieland of W. C. Handy to the smooth ballads of Irving Berlin to the stirring patriotic anthems of John Phillips Sousa and George M. Cohan to the early roots of big band sounds.

Florida Sheet Music Collection Guide is an online catalog of the collection, giving the title, first line, author, publisher, lyricist, other bibliographic data and cover page image for selected items in the collection. Browsable by title or author.

GMD Music Archive: Sheet Music contains ready-to-print sheet music, scores and parts, most of which are stored as compressed Postscript files. Some selections have accompanying MIDI files. In English, German, French and Italian.

Hi-Fido (Chicago Jazz Archive, University of Chicago) features sheet music and sound files dating from jazz's beginnings in the early 1910's through Chicago Jazz's heyday in the 1920's up to the Depression era.

Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920: Selected from the Collections of Duke University (American Memory Project, Library of Congress) presents 3,042 pieces of sheet music in a variety of contemporary musical styles and forms. The collection is particularly strong in music of the antebellum South, Confederate imprints, and Civil War songs and music.

Inventions of Note (Lewis Music Library, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) consists of popular songs and piano compositions published in the U.S. which portray new and old technologies as revealed through song texts and/or cover art, most dating from approximately 1824-1920.

The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music (Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University) contains over 29,000 pieces of music, chiefly popular American music from 1780 to 1960. Catalog desciptions are available for each piece, with images of the cover and each page of music for items published before 1923 and in the public domain.

Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music 1870-1885 (American Memory Project, Library of Congress) consists of over 47,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during that period, all searchable by keyword. Includes author, title, and subject indices.

The Music Scores Library On-line allows users to select and e-mail scores from their growing selection of works from the standard repertoire by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Schumann, and others. Includes new compositions posted by members.

Parlor Songs: Musical Reminiscences of Days Gone By contains images and MIDI files of some 600 sheet music titles in a private collection covering the period from the 1800's to the 1940's. By Richard A. Reublin and Robert L. Maine.

19th-Century American Sheet Music (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) provides digitized images and descriptive indexing for some 1200 pieces of sheet music from the 1830's through the 1860's.
Includes index by composer.

"We'll Sing to Abe Our Song!": Sheet Music about Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Civil War (American Memory Project, Library of Congress) includes more than two hundred sheet-music compositions from the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana, representing Lincoln and the war as reflected in popular music from 1859 through 1909.

Audio Collections

Download a free copy of RealPlayer G2 to listen to MIDI and other audio files.

California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties (American Folklife Center, Library of Congress) is devoted to the WPA California Folk Music Project, one of the earliest ethnographic field projects to document European, Slavic, Middle Eastern, and English- and Spanish-language folk music in a single region of the United States. The collection comprises 35 hours of folk music collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell, recorded in twelve languages.

Classical MIDI Archives includes more than 8200 MIDI files of the music of over 600 classical composers. By Pierre R. Schwob.

Cyber Hymnal contains MIDI files for over 1,900 Christian hymns and Gospel songs, in addition to lyrics, background information, photos, links, and scores.

Fast MP3 Search was created by Lycos as a search engine exclusively for MP3, with current content of over 500,000 files, searchable by artist or song name. Include links to MP3 players and encoders and an introductory guide. Search results do not differentiate between legal and bootleg files at present.

Hispano Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande: The Juan B. Rael Collection (American Memory Project, Library of Congress) presents online sound clips and other related materials from an ethnographic field collection documenting religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado.

MP3.com is an archive of downloadable MP3 files in all genres of music.

19th Century American Popular Music contains MIDI files for music in the public domain, arranged by composer or topic. Compiled chiefly from the virtual collections of the American Memory Project and others, it provides references for source materials. By Benjamin R. Tubb.

Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip (American Memory Project, Library of Congress) provides topical, name and keyword indexes to search an ethnographic field collection of nearly 700 sound recordings and other materials representing a broad spectrum of traditional musical styles.

Standard MIDI Files on the Net is a compilation of over 40,000 links to sites with MIDI files. By Charles I. Kelly.

Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection (American Memory Project, Library of Congress) is an online guide to an ethnographic field collection documenting the life of migrant workers in central California in 1940 and 1941 which includes audio recordings of traditional songs.

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