Music Research Resources: Web and Reference Resources

A large digital collection that includes many manuscripts and editions of musicals books and scores. Contains the complete Handel Werke, Liszt Musikalische Werke, Mendelssohn Werke, and many other scores.

The Digital Archives Archives contains the unique collections of the Beethoven-Haus: Music manuscripts, first editions, letters and pictures.

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.

Online version of the edition by Friedrich Chrysanderis which is still considered a pioneering work in musicology and is still classified as the most comprehensive collection of Händel's works.

This website is a portal to worldwide collections of medieval polyphonic music manuscripts (the resource does not include plainchant). The music and the manuscripts date from approx 800 to 1550, and the original documents are kept in libraries and archives around the globe. This website includes detailed information for all the known sources of European polyphonic music (which is almost entirely vocal) and high-quality colour images of some manuscripts.

The Petrucci Music Library is an internet-based collaborative music score library, and is currently the main project. You will find tens of thousands of scores composed by thousands of composers here.

Includes works by Beethoven, Back, Brahms, Copland, Liszt, Mozart, Schumann, Stravinsky, and others.

Comprehensive website for all ages

A digitized version of the musical text with critical commentaries of the entire Neue Mozart-Ausgabe.

University of Rochester's collection of public domain scores. This digital collection emphasizes scores not widely held by other libraries.

UC Berkeley's online collection of of over 2,700 pieces of sheet music published in California between 1852 and 1900, together with related materials such as a San Francisco publisher's catalog of 1872, programs, songsheets, advertisements, and photographs.

CPDL is one of the world's largest free sheet music sites.
Use CPDL to find scores, texts, translations, and information about composers.

Includes 19th century American popular songs, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra.

The Mutopia Project offers sheet music editions of classical music for free download. These are based on editions in the public domain, and include works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Handel, Mozart, and many others.

Contains the online sheet music collections of UCLA, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University.

The Library of Congress National Jukebox makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives.

Produced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, this is a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions. It provides educators, students, and interested listeners with an unprecedented variety of online resources.

This website's resources cover the latest developments in contemporary American music. It contains NewMusicBox a multimedia publication including Counterstream, a radio site for American music and Online Library, a comprehensive digital database that contains works by more than 6,000 composers, and including over 14,000 media samples (recordings and scores).

Scores of Music from Movies, Game, TV & Anime

Movie soundtrack music

From the Library of Congress collection: for most of the nineteenth century, Americans learned the latest songs from printed song sheets. Not to be confused with sheet music, song sheets are single printed sheets, usually six by eight inches, with lyrics but no music.

From Duke University's collection of broadside verse which 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.

The Bodleian Library holds over 30,000 ballads, contained in several collections. These have been gathered into a single catalogue which is now presented, along with a scanned image of each ballad sheet, in the Broadside Ballads Project.

ML102.P66 C66 2003eb WEB SITE

ML100 .G16 1998
CL Reference

ML100 .A64 2003eb WEB SITE

ML113 .S28 2013
CL Book Stacks

ML100 .S37 2002
CL Book Stacks

ML100 .PE 2007
CL Book Stacks

ML113 .S46 2015eb WEBSITE

All genres and styles of music are covered here, ranging from the most commercially popular to the most obscure including critiques of albums and artists within the context of their own genres - from opera to garage rock to traditional country.

Collection of more than 300 of the earliest surviving printed music, containing over 10,000 individual works.

Guide from the William and Gayle Cook Music Library, Indiana University School of Music to explain the difference between varying score types.

Links to Classical music websites for individual composers; academic departments and institutes; organizations; journals; and software

This research guide from the William and Gayle Cook Music Library, Indiana University School of Music contains the Library of Congress classification system for books and scores relevant to each main tab (bassoon, horn, etc.) and other related information.

In-depth interviews with current film music composers.

The Archive contains nearly 1,000 individual pieces of sheet music; scores; collections of short pieces (also called photoplay albums); cue sheets; instruction manuals; and more for the silent cinema.

Directory of song lyric databases.