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
- Listener Historical Archive 1929-1991The Listener was a weekly publication that served as a print complement to BBC radio. The Archive includes program listings, interviews, and written pieces by notable writers.
- JSTORJSTOR'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 OnlineHistorical 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 DatabasesProQuest 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.
- Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)ECCO is a project based on the English Short Title Catalogue, a union list of the holdings of the British Library. Over 200,000 items have been digitized, most of them published in the UK during the 18th century.
Manuscripts
- RISM: Répertoire International des Sources MusicalesThe 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 USCThe 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 Manuscripts OnlineMusic Manuscripts Online provides high-quality digital access to the manuscripts owned by The Morgan Library & Museum. This digital project is still in process, but many gems, including Schubert's Erlkonig and Mahler's 5th Symphony, are fully available online.
Sheet Music Collections
- Library of Congress Digital CollectionsProvides digital access to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.
- E. Azalia Hackley CollectionThis 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 ConsortiumThe 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 CollectionThe 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 CollectionThe 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.
Historic Sound Recordings
- Belfer Cylinders Digital ConnectionThe 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 ProjectThe 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.
- National Jukebox This link opens in a new windowThe National Jukebox features more than 10,000 78rpm disc sides issued by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1900 and 1925. The collection continues to grow, with thousands of records housed in archives around the country targeted for digitization in the near future.
