Music

Access online discography and library of ex-copyright recordings, see details about publications, or find information about early recording history and methods for analysing recordings.

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

Free account (with restricted downloads) required to download from Musopen, a 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on increasing access to music by making recordings, sheet music, and textbooks available to the public for free.

The Public Domain Music Library has thousands of 1922 or earlier books, hymnals, periodicals, and sheet music.

The Aria Database is a collection of information about opera and operatic arias. Besides providing basic information about each aria, the Database includes translations for many arias and aria texts for those that are not affected by copyright restrictions. The Database also provides access to a collection of operatic sound files to give visitors an idea of what each aria sounds like. The Aria Database also contains information on available scores and sound files that can be purchased to aid in study and enjoyment. Currently, the Database holds information on the complete operatic aria collections of Mozart, Verdi, Berlioz, Wagner, and Puccini as well as the partial collections of over 50 other composers.

The Library of Congress has one of the largest collections of notated music in the world with over 22 million items.

IMSLP believe that music should be something that is easily accessible for everyone. For this purpose they have created a music library to provide music scores free of charge to anyone with internet access, with several other projects in planning. IMSLP is also entirely collaborative, and all contributions are greatly welcomed.

The Choral Public Domain Library contains free choral/vocal scores, texts, translations, and other useful information.

This collection holds digitised images of some of the world's oldest surviving volumes of printed music.

Early Music Online is the result of a pilot project in which more than 300 volumes of 16th-century music from the British Library were digitised from microfilm.

The scores and libretti in this Virtual Collection include first and early editions and manuscript copies of music from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by J.S. Bach and Bach family members, Mozart, Schubert and other composers, as well as multiple versions of nineteenth century opera scores, seminal works of musical modernism, and music of the Second Viennese School. Many, such as variant editions of nineteenth century operas and related libretti, fall into intellectually related sets that are meant to be seen and used together. As a group, they give scholars a window into the study of historical performance practice that cannot be duplicated using the holdings of any one other library.

Project Gutenberg volunteers have been engaging in digitizing public domain sheet music, using a variety of techniques, to enable study and performance. For the most part, the musical pieces created have been chamber music, with composers such as Brahms and Beethoven.

A library of virtual musical scores in the Humdrum **kern data format.

An electronic library of classical music scores.

Free account (with restricted downloads) required to download from Musopen, a 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on increasing access to music by making recordings, sheet music, and textbooks available to the public for free.

Sheet music editions of classical music for free download.

The Public Domain Music Library has thousands of 1922 or earlier books, hymnals, periodicals, and sheet music.

The 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.

Scores and books in the public domain. Many of these are unique to the Sibley Music Library collection.

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.
All of the manuscript scores and sketches have been digitized. Also available on this website are selected manuscripts from the Juilliard Library’s Peter Jay Sharp Special Collections, including scores in the Artur Rubinstein Music Collection.

The Aria Database is a collection of information about opera and operatic arias. Besides providing basic information about each aria, the Database includes translations for many arias and aria texts for those that are not affected by copyright restrictions. The Database also provides access to a collection of operatic sound files to give visitors an idea of what each aria sounds like. The Aria Database also contains information on available scores and sound files that can be purchased to aid in study and enjoyment. Currently, the Database holds information on the complete operatic aria collections of Mozart, Verdi, Berlioz, Wagner, and Puccini as well as the partial collections of over 50 other composers.