Introduction
This page can help you find reliable, scholarly editions of printed music online that have been created by musicologists. The resources collected here are not meant to be an exhaustive list or guide to online music editions, but rather a selection of reputable tools to help you identify and locate online music editions yourself.
Key Resource Lists for Online Collections
These sites only list various online historic sheet music collections, but do not search them.
- Digital Resources for MusicologyThis website provides links to substantial open-access projects of use to musicians and musicologists. With a burgeoning number of digital resources available, remembering titles of sites and pathways to them can be difficult. Digital Resources in Musicology (DRM) is organized topically and provides a rapid search tool for specialties within heterogeneous collections.
- EVE (Electronic and Virtual Editions)Electronic editions have diverse purposes and therefore pursue different avenues of development. Most are open-ended: further development and refinement can be expected. As pioneers, all share the possibility that changes in hardware, software, and internet protocols may necessitate changes of design and delivery methods. Our listing is limited to open-access projects from which music may be downloaded and in some cases searched, analyzed, listened to, visualized, and re-edited.
- Princeton's Digital Scores: A Guide to Online Notated Music SourcesThis guide is a work in progress, begun in the summer of 2016. The goal is to produce a selective list of digital score websites arranged in broad categories to facilitate access to and discovery of this expanding body of online material that comes to us from a diverse, disparate, and diverse body of sources. These include library digital initiatives, academic organizations, commercial publishers and vendors, aggregators and resource providers, creative commons repositories, and the websites of artist-composers.
- Yale's Finding Scores OnlineA collection from Yale University of websites where you can find free public domain scores, manuscripts, etc.
- Music Collections Online (via MusRef)A collection from MusRef of hundreds of publicly available online music collections.
- ViFaMusik Virtual Library of MusicologyViFaMusik, the central portal for music and musicology, allows you to access an extensive digital library containing the latest scholarly research and online resources. Using a single search engine you can find bibliographical data, full text data, and information about experts in musicology. ViFaMusik is “work in progress” and is continuously being extended.
Online Collections By Category
- BabelScores (Library Subscription Resource)BabelScores is a new showcase for contemporary music and a powerful tool for present-day composers to promote their work and to receive a fair benefit for it. With over 210,000 music pages they feature the most important contemporary music online library.
- Contemporary Music Score Collection (UCLA Music Library)The Contemporary Music Score Collection is published by the UCLA Music Library. The collection includes the digital, open access scores from the Contemporary Score Edition series, the first open access edition of new music published by a library, and scores from the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library. The Contemporary Score Edition is made possible because of the Hugo Davise Fund for Contemporary Music.
- New Music USA Online LibraryThe New Music USA Online Library is a vast and comprehensive digital database that contains over 57,000 works by more than 6,000 composers, and includes over 14,000 media samples (recordings and scores).
These collections generally include popular music (piano and or piano-vocal pieces) from the mid-late 1800's to the early 20th century, but scope varies by collection.
- UIUC's Historic US Sheet Music CollectionThe MPAL Historic US Sheet Music Collection is comprised of almost 100,000 pieces of music, including from popular songs to art songs for piano or voice and piano. In many cases there are duplicate copies of pieces when there are differences in the content and/or the cover art. The dates range from the early 1800s to the mid 1990s.
- African American Sheet Music (Brown University)The sheet music in this digital collection has been selected from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University. The full collection consists of approximately 500,000 items, of which perhaps 250,000 are currently available for use. It is one of the largest collections of sheet music in any library in the United States. The sheet music, primarily vocal music of American imprint, dates from the 18th century to the present day, with the largest concentration of titles in the period 1840-1950.
- IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana (University)IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana is a search and discovery system for accessing sheet music from the Indiana University Lilly Library, the Indiana State Library, the Indiana State Museum, and the Indiana Historical Society. Funded through a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), IN Harmony features Indiana-related sheet music - sheet music by Indiana composers, arrangers, lyricists or publishers as well as sheet music about the state.
- Performing Arts Encylcopedia (Library of Congress)including The March King: John Philip Sousa and much more
- Sheet Music ConsortiumThe Sheet Music Consortium is a group of libraries working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Harvested metadata about sheet music in participating collections is hosted by UCLA Digital Library Program, which provides an access service via this metadata to sheet music records at the host libraries.
- Music Online: Classical Scores Library This link opens in a new windowThis series of four volumes provides a reliable and authoritative source for scores of the classical canon, as well as a resource for the discovery of lesser-known contemporary works. The collections encompass all major classical musical genres and time periods from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. It includes full, study, piano, and vocal scores, enhancing the study of music history, performance, composition and theory.
- Julliard ManuscriptsDigitized collection of 140 autograph manuscripts, sketches, engravers proofs, and first editions.
- Sibley Digital Scores (Eastman)Scores and books in the public domain. Many of these are unique to the Sibley Music Library collection.
- Chopin's First Editions OnlineThe 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.
- Neue Mozart AusgabeThe digitized version offers the musical text and the critical commentaries of the entire Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, edited by the Internationale Stiftung Mozart in cooperation with the Mozart cities of Augsburg, Salzburg, and Vienna.
- CPE Bach Collected WorksCarl Philipp Emanuel Bach: The Complete Works (CPEB:CW) is an editorial and publishing project of the Packard Humanities Institute, in cooperation with the Bach-Archiv Leipzig, the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, and Harvard University. Its goal is to make available, in both printed and digital formats, a critical edition of the composer’s works. CPEB:CW is a “living” edition. As new information or material relevant to the edition becomes available, we will report it. Substantive errors in the music or text of any volume will be reported and subsequently corrected in the online, digital edition. Links to any Addenda & Corrigenda are found in the table of contents page for individual volumes.
- Early Music OnlineEarly Music Online has digitised over 320 volumes of 16th-century anthologies of printed music, from holdings at the British Library.
- English Heritage Music SeriesThe English Heritage Music Series mission is to:
- Source unpublished/out-of-print English composer compositions that are in the U.S. public domain
- Preserve these compositions through the preparation of performance scores using notation software
- Provide open Internet access to the scores to facilitate study, performance and sharing of performance material (program notes, audio, reviews, etc.) - Integrated Database for Early Music (IDEM)The Integrated Database for Early Music (IDEM) is an interdisciplinary, multifaceted database of manuscripts and printed books. It especially focuses on the musical heritage of the Low Countries from the early Middle Ages until 1800.
- Web Library of Seventeenth-Century MusicThe Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music is a service offered by the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, making available a growing catalogue of music in modern editions for scholars, performers, and students.