Music: Scores

For most of the nineteenth century, before the advent of phonograph and radio technologies, 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. These were new songs being sung in music halls or new lyrics to familiar songs.
Included among these American songs are ninety-seven British song sheets from Dublin and London. The collection spans the period from the turn of the nineteenth century to the 1880s, although a majority of the song sheets were published during the height of the craze, from the 1850s to the 1870s. Held by the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress.

his music was generously donated to The Johns Hopkins University by Lester S. Levy over a period of years starting in 1976 and is now housed in the Special Collections Division of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. The collection spans the years 1780 to 1980, but its strength is its thorough documentation of nineteenth-century America through popular music.

A collection of free sheet-music by Brazilian composers representing various genres and time-periods.

Part of the Library of Congress' American Memory historical collections.
Consists of over 47,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the years 1870 to 1885. Included are popular songs, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra.

Also known as IMSLP. Provides free access to digitized images of myriad printed and manuscript musical works of many genres.

Search for records for music manuscripts, printed music, libretti, and treatises held in music libraries, archives, churches, and other institutions around the world.

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. 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. Data providers have chosen to catalog their sheet music in different ways, but a large proportion of the original sheets in participating collections has been digitized, allowing users direct access to the music itself and in many cases covers and advertisements that offer evidence of the cultural context in which the songs were published.