Music & Dance Library

A new tab  — “Online Scores” — has been added to our Music & Dance Library site (go.osu.edu/mus)  to help identify scores available in digital form.  Most are free to download or read via your mobile device. Here are a few : 

Classical

Music Online: Classical Scores Library. The largest and most authoritative resource of in-copyright scores to support teaching and research in classical music. This multivolume series contains more than 53,000 titles and 1.3 million printable pages of the most important scores in classical music, ranging from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. More than 4,600 composers are included, from traditionally studied composers such as Mozart and Tchaikovsky to contemporary artists including Kaija Saariaho, Peter Maxwell-Davies, and John Tavener.

IMSLP – Petrucci Music Library — Approximately 315,000 items, including scores or parts of 94,000 works. IMSLP stands for “International Music Score Library Project.” The library is named for Ottaviano Petrucci, printer in 1501 of the first book of polyphonic music set in movable type.

Project Gutenberg Sheet Music Project — Digitized public-domain sheet music, emphasis on chamber music.

Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music — A service of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, making available 17th-century music in modern editions for scholars, performers, and students.

Public Domain Sherpa — A guide to finding and using free sheet music.

Free-scores.com — c.67,000 items. Free downloads of scores in many genres, links to vendors of scores and instruments, a music sheet music competition, links to other sites offering free sheet music downloads.

The Mutopia Project — c.1900 items. Free classical music scores based on editions in the public domain. Works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Handel, Mozart, and others. Volunteers typeset the music and create the digital files.

Sheet Music Archive — c.22,000 classical music scores, some of which are free.

Sheet Music Online  — Free Public Domain sheet music downloads.

Musopen — The site’s stated goal is to be the largest online repository of free musical scores in the public domain. Musopen is a non-profit charitable organization.

Jazz Lead Sheets and Chord Changes

Free Jazz Chord Charts That You Can Transpose — c.1300 chord charts of jazz standards that can be transposed to any key.

eJazzlines — A large selection of jazz arrangements, including combo charts, jazz studio orchestra arrangements, vocals and instrumentals. Difficulty levels of easy to professional, classics from the dixieland and swing eras to jazz arrangements of current hits. Updated daily.

The Fake Book Library — A collection of musical lead sheets intended to help a performer quickly learn new songs.

Choral and Art Song

ChoralWiki : Choral Public Domain Library — CDPL was Founded in 1998, ported to ChoralWiki in 2005, and incorporated in 2010 as a tax-exempt charitable organization. Free choral/vocal scores, texts, translations, and other useful information.

Art Song Central — Free sheet music, chiefly classical, for singers and voice teachers.

19th- and 20th-century Popular Song

Sheet Music Consortium — Tools and services that promote access to and use of online sheet music collections by scholars, students, and the general public.

Band

Chatfield Brass Band & Music Lending Library — The library is a member of the Southeast Minnesota Library System and lends music to bands and musicians from all over the world. Borrowers are charged a small handling fee to cover expenses. The library has collected and cataloged more than 30,000 pieces, many of which are no longer in print.The music collection not only includes band music (the largest portion), but also orchestra, dance band, sheet music, and numerous other categories.

BandMusic PDF Library — BandMusic PDF Library preserves and shares band music from the Golden Age of the American Town Band. If you are looking for public domain music to play with a school band, community band, or other group, you will find it here — marches, waltzes, rags, theater music, cornet solos, trombone features, and more.

Thanks to Suzanne Lovejoy, Music Librarian for Reference and Instruction,  Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University, for calling our attention to these sites! For additional sites, visit Yale University Library.

• The Morgan Library & Museum — Music Manuscripts Online

  Since the project began in 2007, 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, among many others.

• Munich Digitization Center (MDZ)

  Munich Digitization Center (MDZ) handles the digitization and online publication of the cultural heritage preserved by the Bavarian State Library and by other institutions. It provides one of the largest and fastest growing digital collections in Germany, now comprising 415,954 titles available online. Access is free of charge!

• MuseData: An Electronic Library of Classical Music Scores

  (Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities). Provides Kern and Midi files for music composed between 1700 and 1825 (Bach, Beethoven, Corelli, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Vivaldi, and more).

• Music and Theatre Library of Sweden

  100,000 digital sheets of music to download from the library’s collections, and also links to even more resources with sheet music.

• Mutopia

  Public-domain music scores in several formats; includes some audio.

• NYPL Digital Gallery

  Provides free and open access to over 700,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library’s vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.

• Smithsonian Institution — Collections Search Center

  The Collections Search Center provides easy “one-stop searching” of more than 6.4 million of the Smithsonian’s museum, archives, library and research holdings and collections. The access to more Smithsonian collections via this Search Center is increasing over time.

Since November 2016, the music encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG) has been available on line. Based on the second print edition, the online version offers roughly 19,000 entries written and published by 3,500 authors between 1994 and 2008. It includes more than 18,000 biographical articles on composers, singers, instrumentalists, theorists, musicians, instrument makers, publishers, musicologists, writers, librettists, visual artists, and non-Western composers, and more than 1,300 articles on music aesthetics and theory, periods, genres, church music, popular music, instruments, manuscripts, cities, countries, institutions, and music in relation to history, art, literature, philosophy, law, and the natural sciences. Since MGG‘s online launch, about a hundred articles per year have been revised, and new entries have been added on contemporary composers, performers and musicians, popular music, jazz, gender research, and new media. MGG is one of several dozen music-related databases available on line to OSU faculty, students, and staff. Click here for a select list of other music databases.

The Schumacher Contemporary American Music Collection is a new collection of works including scores, recordings, and literature about American classical music and jazz written in 1946 or later. The collection was established in 2018, and is funded primarily through a generous gift from Dr. Stanley E. Schumacher (Ph.D., 1976, OSU School of Music) and Susan L. Schumacher. These funds are used to purchase items for the collection. Items chosen for the collection represent a broad range of styles and instrumentation, and selection is based on merit alone. Items are selected for their excellence in enabling the professional musician or the lay listener to understand and appreciate contemporary American classical music and jazz, and for their musicological value for the future. To browse the materials in the collection, search by title “Schumacher Contemporary American Music Collection” in our library catalog.  If you would like to donate funds to the Schumacher Contemporary American Music Collection, click here (OSU fund number 316183).

Some forty Berlin Philharmonic concerts per year are transmitted by the Digital Concert Hall and can be streamed live in high-definition video. After a few days’ post-processing, the concerts can be accessed in the site’s archive. The archive consists of recent concerts, many directed by Sir Simon Rattle, together with older performances such as 1990s concerts with Claudio Abbado, and concerts from other venues. Also included are documentaries, interviews with conductors and soloists, and concerts from the 1960s and early 1970s. For more streaming video/audio resources, visit http://go.osu.edu/mus

Mr. Harish Merchant, a benefactor of the OSU Music & Dance Library, donated to the Library more than one thousand CDs that he collected, over many years, with a view to the quality of musical performance, audio engineering, and, often, rarity. You can borrow CDs from The Harish Merchant Recordings Collection in the normal way. Click here to browse a list of them alphabetized by title. 

Looking for OSU School of Music or Department of Dance dissertations or theses? Visit our guides. They are organized by category, and the entries almost always provide links to full-text PDF files. The guides are chronological, with the most recent dissertations and theses listed first.

You will find the music guide HERE. You will find the dance guide HERE.