Music Composition: Online Scores

Partifi is a free and automated tool for creating parts from music scores ... Partifi is made for musicians by musicians. By freely offering this part-making tool, and by maintaining a publicly accessible library of user-contributed parts, we seek to support and encourage the study and performance of early music.

Collection of popular sheet music from the Margaret Herrick Library in digital format. The Margaret Herrick Library is a world-renowned, non-circulating reference and research collection devoted to the history and development of the motion picture as an art form and as an industry.

Select online scores from Albinoni to Webb

Links to the complete works of J.S. Bach.

Scores and parts for choral works by Bach, Handel, Mozart, Vivaldi, and more.

National Library of Denmark's Digitised Music Scores - digital facsimiles of printed and manuscript music.

via IMSLP

A list of digitized sheet music compiled by the folks at Duke University Libraries!

In this project, about a half of the British Library’s holdings of 16th-century anthologies of printed music, as listed in RISM B/I have been downloaded. These volumes contain approximately 10,000 musical compositions, which have been individually indexed. The volumes mainly consist of partbooks of vocal polyphony, but also include some early printed tablatures for keyboard or plucked string instruments. They include music printed in Italy, Germany, France & England.

This collection of 9,825 musical themes (the works of over 150 composers) from the Barlow-Morgenstern original compilation can be played in any browser using Quicktime. You can search by composer, by category of music or by note (solfeggio) in key-independent fashion. Great for trying to figure out what composition a certain theme/motif comes from!

Website devoted to Brazilian composer, Nazareth. Includes digitized scores of his complete piano works.

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

Maintained by Yap Tracker. Lists various sites providing free sheet music available for downloading.

Links to digitized collections at Harvard and beyond!

From U. of Iowa, this collection of over 200 early printed and MS scores represents the work of French composer and music publisher, Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831). It consists primarily of keyboard and chamber music and includes some larger scores.

The IN Harmony Sheet Music collection was created as part of a partnership between the Indiana State Library, the University Lilly Library, the Indiana Historical Society, and the Indiana State Museum. The sheet music here includes music from 1800 to 1989, and visitors can browse these materials by name, title, year, instrumentation, genre, or subject.

The Library of Congress presents here "a database of over 18,000 shows and productions dating from the 1690s to the present, containing more than 67,000 songs. These pieces come from all over the world and cover every conceivable topic, portraying the culture and history of their time and place in unique and valuable ways."

The world’s largest reference archive of texts and translations of art songs and choral works.

Begun in 2007, the Music Manuscripts Online project creates and provides online access to high-quality images and descriptions of music manuscripts owned by The Morgan Library & Museum. More than 900 manuscripts containing approximately 42,000 pages have been digitized and described. These include works by J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Fauré, Haydn, Liszt, Mahler, Massenet, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Puccini, Schubert, and Schumann, etc.

An electronic library of classical music scores. The MuseData database is a project of the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH). The database was created by Walter Hewlett. The main holdings are for major composers of c. 1690-1830: Bach, Beethoven, Corelli, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Vivaldi.

Select "Music Collection Online" under "Category" and be led to over 70 links to online scores!

The site consists of five main features:
1. An online bibliography of music and dance bibliographies and reference sources.
2. A wiki devoted to music and dance reference information and resources.
3. A blog devoted to music and dance bibliography and reference.
4. Access to unpublished bibliographies.
5. An experimental Facebook network designed as a forum for interested librarians, scholars, and students.

The Music Treasures Consortium provides online access to the world's most valued music manuscripts and print materials, held at the most renowned music archives, in order to further research and scholarship. Researchers can search or browse materials, access metadata about each item, and view digital images of the treasure via each custodial archive's Web site.

The Naxos Music Library offers members over 45,000 free sheet music titles, powered by the largest online digital sheet music store, FreeHandMusic.com. The library service delivers digital sheet music in all classical genres, spanning music from Medieval to the 21st century and composers from Bach to Arvo Part. You can download the music easily and print using our convenient shopping cart systems.

This guide"provides a basis for beginning electronic research on a wide variety of topics in music, including historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, composition, and performance practice. It collects links to archival collections, online scores and sound recordings; article indexes, discographies and bibliographies; scholarly societies; musical reference works; and a miscellany of useful websites."

" ... a wiki-based repository of musical scores. With a goal of creating "a virtual library containing all public domain music scores, as well as scores from composers who are willing to share their music with the world without charge," the project is quite ambitious. At present, more than 26,000 works are available in more than 66,000 scores and parts. Additionally, performers have contributed a number of recordings in MP3 format to accompany the scores ..." P. Doherty, New College

Sheet music, scores, tabs, chords, accompaniments, and mp3/midi files

Brazilian cultural organization which provides online scores of Brazilian composers.

Dedicated to the preservation and distribution of classical sheet music and putting it online for public perusal and benefit.

The Sheet Music Consortium is a group of libraries working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music. this project is hosted by UCLA Digital Library Program, which provides an access service to sheet music records at the host libraries. The collection allows 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.

"Sheet Music from the Hague Collection consists of sheet music representative of a variety of musical genres. Most of the music is arranged for piano and strings. Much of the collection is comprised of popular music titles, including songs from movies and Vaudeville productions. Frank Penwell collected the music and it was donated to Ball State University Libraries by Elizabeth Hague, his daughter, in 2006."

You will need to create an account to use this database. The University of Rochester's Sibley Music Library is the largest academic music library in North America. It has been engaged in an NEH project to digitize its public-domain music scores, emphasizing scores not widely held by other libraries and not digitized elsewhere. To date the library has digitized almost 12,000 publications, including, in addition to scores, some books and a variety of handbooks, guides, and theses.

Includes aural pronunciations of terms as well as definitions!

"A web archive of electronically typeset public domain sheet music in PDF. Primarily early music, but also some contemporary works, including some jazz."

The Digital Archive makes the inventory of the Beethoven-Haus and its contents accessible for research, use and the general public. Beethoven's life and oeuvre can be experienced in a multimedia way through linked image, text and audio data.

The collection presents Chopiniana from the collections of the Poland National Library.

From U. of Iowa, this collection of over 200 early printed and MS scores represents the work of French composer and music publisher, Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831). It consists primarily of keyboard and chamber music and includes some larger scores.

From the Fryderyk Chopin Institute

Goal is to make Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's musical compositions widely and conveniently accessible to the public, for personal study and for educational and classroom use.

Links to subcategories which organize music by era, genre, voicing, and style of accompaniment.

Find scores, texts, translations, and information about composers.

A digitized collection of rare and unusual string quartets not available in modern editions, and for which, in some cases, Duke's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library holds the only copy in North America.

Over 235,000 digitized scores

In this project, about a half of the British Library’s holdings of 16th-century anthologies of printed music, as listed in RISM B/I have been downloaded. These volumes contain approximately 10,000 musical compositions, which have been individually indexed. The volumes mainly consist of partbooks of vocal polyphony, but also include some early printed tablatures for keyboard or plucked string instruments. They include music printed in Italy, Germany, France & England.

105 pieces of sheet music primarily from early 20th century Russia and Central Europe and published by now-defunct presses such as The Society for Jewish Folk Music at St. Petersburg, Juwal, Jibneh and Omanut editions. Composers include Joseph Achron, Mikhail Gnesin, Aleksandr Krein, Moses Milner and Joel Engel.
The .pdf files are free to download and open to the general public.
This digitization project was partially sponsored by The American Society for Jewish Music.

Harvard University Library's (HUL) Library Digital Initiative has created an expansible resource of scanned images of rare and unique musical scores.

The Music Treasures Consortium provides online access to the world's most valued music manuscripts and print materials, held at the most renowned music archives, in order to further research and scholarship. Researchers can search or browse materials, access metadata about each item, and view digital images of the treasure via each custodial archive's Web site.

The Mutopia Project offers sheet music editions of public domain classical music for free download. "... a volunteer-build Web-based collection of musical scores ... the content tends to derive from public domain editions of music from the Baroque, Classic, and romantic eras, along with many hymns and traditional/anonymous pieces ... a handful of more recent pieces appear, mostly contributed by the composers themselves, who tend to be under 40 and unpublished elsewhere." Works have been set using Lily Pond notation software.

You will need to create an account to use this database. The University of Rochester's Sibley Music Library is the largest academic music library in North America. It has been engaged in an NEH project to digitize its public-domain music scores, emphasizing scores not widely held by other libraries and not digitized elsewhere. To date the library has digitized almost 12,000 publications, including, in addition to scores, some books and a variety of handbooks, guides, and theses.

Collection includes digital images of manuscript musical scores dating from the 17th through 19th centuries, the majority of the collection comprising 17th- and 18th- century operas, opera excerpts, and other vocal music. The original manuscripts are held in the Music Library's Rare Book Collection and are indexed in RISM A/II. [D. Pierce]