Sheet Music Collections
- American Memory American Memory provides online access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.
- Archive of Popular American Music The UCLA Music Library's Archive of Popular American Music is a research collection covering the history of popular music in the United States from 1790 to the present. This fully digitized collection is one of the largest in the country, numbering almost 450,000 pieces of sheet music, anthologies, and arrangements for band and orchestra. The collection also includes 62,500 recordings on disc, tape, and cylinder.
- E. Azalia Hackley Collection This collection consists of over 600 pieces of 19th and 20th century sheet music published between 1799 and 1922. Song themes cover early 19th century plantation life in the American South, the Civil War period, including abolitionism, emancipation and Reconstruction, early 20th century popular music, and the stereotypical themes associated with black face minstrelsy.
- Sheet Music Consortium The Sheet Music Consortium is a group of libraries working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music. Users have direct access to the music itself and some of the covers and advertisements that offer evidence of the cultural context in which the songs were published.
- Spencer Collection The Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Sheet Music at Baylor University is one of the few collections of its kind and size in the country. This collection of approximately 30,000 scores spans the late 18th century to the early 20th century. Included are many fine examples of first editions such as Jingle Bells and Battle Hymn of the Republic, as well as first editions of prominent American composers of the time such as Stephen Foster and Scott Joplin.
- University of South Carolina Sheet Music Collection The USC Sheet Music Collection contains over 10,000 pieces of classical, popular, and sacred music from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Items in the public domain are fully digitized, providing access to images of the cover and each page of music.
Introduction
Historic materials or Primary Source materials are documents or manuscripts contemporary to a specific period in history. For example, the original manuscript of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is considered to be the primary source of information of the piece; an edited and printed version is a secondary source.
Additionally, a musical review published just days after the première of Rite of Spring is considered to be a primary source of information. An article published in 2009 summarizing the critical response to the Rite of Spring is a secondary source.
The key to finding primary sources is to match up the historic dates you are investigating to the dates covered by the database. The largest and most comprehensive historical indices and collections have been listed here to assist you in this type of research.
Historic Newspapers and Books
- RIPM: Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale The Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals is an international, highly annotated database with detailed content analysis of writings on musical history and culture between 1800 and 1950 - all provided by internationally recognized scholars and editors. RIPM currently indexes the contents of 120 music periodicals including articles, reviews, illustrations, music examples, advertisements, press reviews, and more.
- JSTOR JSTOR's music collection contains the backlog of over 30 scholarly music journals, some of which date as far back as 1844. All of the articles are full-text and searchable by keyword. JSTOR also has archives of over one thousand historical journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
- Historical Newspapers Online Historical Newspapers indexes the London Times from 1790 to 1980, providing full-text access for the period 1785-1870. It also covers The New York Times from 1851 to September 1922.
- Proquest Historical Databases ProQuest offers over two dozen historical databases, indexing major newspapers like the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The San Franciso Chronicle, and The Wall Street Journal. Click on "Select Multiple Databases" to view the full list of historical newspapers available.
Historic Sound Recordings
- Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection The Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection provides online access to digital audio files of cylinders in the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive at Syracuse University. Belfer’s cylinder collection includes over 22,000 cylinders, 12,000 of which are unique titles. The goal of this digitization project is to provide 6,000 audio files by 2010.
- Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project The University of California at Santa Barbara Libraries have created a digital collection of nearly 8,000 cylinder recordings which can be freely downloaded or streamed online. The collection includes musical and spoken word selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Manuscripts
- RISM: Répertoire International des Sources Musicales The International Inventory of Musical Sources aims to document the worldwide existing musical sources. Musical sources are manuscripts or printed music, works on music theory and libretti stored in libraries, archives, monasteries, schools and private collections. Use this database for manuscripts after 1600.
- Archival Collections in Music at USC The USC Libraries owns 34 distinct archival collections in music. These collections consist of unique materials like manuscripts, letters, and photographs. This site includes a description of all collections as well as contact information for access.
Music Librarian |
Stephanie BonjackDescription
Loading content... please wait
 |
Loading content... please wait