Databases List By Subject: Music

AVON is a streaming video platform providing more than 87,000 titles spanning a wide range of subject areas, including anthropology, business, history, music, and more. The platform allows users to to organize and bookmark clips, create and share playlists, personalize folders, and manage their entire collection.

Contains all of the Audio Engineering Society papers from the journal, conventions, and conferences, providing access to over 16,000 fully searchable PDF files documenting the progression of audio research from 1953 to the present day. Includes AES Publications Convention Preprints Timely technical papers, reproduced directly from the manuscripts of presentations given at recent AES conventions. Anthologies Renowned series of collected papers of archival quality reprinted from the AES Journal including: loudspeakers, disk recording, microphones, sound reinforcement, and time delay spectrometry. Collected papers from the highly regarded AES international conferences, each devoted to a specific topic. AES Standards, Drafts, and Information Documents Internationally approved documents developed under the auspices of the AES Standards Committee and its working groups. Directory of Educational Programs A comprehensive international guide to educational programs in audio.

The American Memory project of the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program digitizes distinctive, historical Americana holdings at the Library of Congress, including photographs, full-text manuscripts and rare books, maps, recorded sound and moving pictures. To achieve its goal, this unique public-private program, also works in cooperation with members of the Digital Library Federation and other libraries and archives throughout the United States. For example, digital collections from the LC/Ameritech Digital Library Competition are included.

International coverage of more than 1,150 leading arts and humanities journals as well as selective coverage from leading science and social sciences journals.

Cambridge Companions to Music provide clear and accessible information on composers, instruments or musical topics, written with the student, the performer and the music lover in mind. Each volume provides a carefully structured series of specially-commissioned essays by leading authorities offering comprehensive coverage and indispensable reference material as well as absorbing reading matter.

DRAM is a scholarly resource providing educational communities with on-demand streaming access to CD-quality audio (192kbps Mp4), complete original liner notes and essays from independent record labels and sound archives. The collection contains over 4,000 album's worth of recordings from a distinctive set of 42 independent labels and archives. In addition, it contains a diverse catalogue of American music represented by the New World Records and CRI labels.

Ethnographic Video Online provides over 2000 hours of film, including documentaries, primary source footage, and select feature films for the visual study of human culture and behavior.

Films On Demand is a digital video streaming service that provides educational content from a wide range of subject areas with an especially good selection of foreign films. This collection contains more than 38,000 titles in dozens of subject areas, and the platform allows users to to organize and bookmark clips, create and share playlists, personalize folders, and manage their entire collection.

Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937-1942, by the Library of Congress, is an ethnographic field collection that documents Florida's cultural and ethnic diversity through audio recordings made under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration in the 1930s and 1940s. The collection includes folk songs, dance music, religious music, and interviews.

UM users have full-text access to over 6.4 million public domain works within the HathiTrust.

Hit Songs Deconstructed provides unparalleled insight into the inner-workings of a current chart-topping hit. Each song report includes a combination of commentary, charts, graphs, and notation. Among the many areas covered are song structure, energy, genres and influences, instruments and accompaniment, harmony, vocal production and melody, lyrics, rhymes, narrative, Top 10 benchmarking and more. These reports also feature a companion downloadable Logic PRO X Project with the correct meter, tempo and song arrangement displayed as empty MIDI regions for each instrument.

The Petrucci Music Library was begun in 2006 by IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project) in order to gathering all public domain music scores and the music scores of any contemporary composers who wish to release them to the public free of charge. IMSLP is governed primarily by Canadian copyright law and, therefore, some works may not be public domain in other countries.

IPA Source is a collection of literal translations and International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions developed to benefit singers, teachers, and all those interested in the correct and knowledgeable performance of vocal literature.

The Lousiana State Museum Digital Library Jazz Collection provides online access to photographs and audio recordings related to New Orleans Jazz.

The Jean-Baptiste Lully Collection is a digital collection of rare 17th and 18th-century scores of operas, ballets, and other works by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his sons, from the holdings of the University of North Texas Music Library. The collection also includes some manuscript copies, as well as libretti prints and collections of stage works by Lully's collaborators.

Songs and dance tunes from Newfoundland and Cape Breton, collected between 1949-51 by MacEdward Leach. Streaming audio and some notation available.

The Maine Music Box, a project of the University of Maine's Raymond H. Fogler Library provides access to approximately 22,600 digitized works (manuscript scores and sheet music) held at the Bagaduce Music Lending Library and the Bangor Public Library. The Maine Music Box includes items such as vocal and popular sheet music, music for two pianos, and music by Maine composers or about Maine.

The world's leading classical music channel, medici.tv broadcasts more than 150 live events are each year, in partnership with the world's most prestigious venues, opera houses, festivals and competitions. medici.tv's library features over 4,000 programs, including: concerts, operas, ballets, documentaries, artist portraits, educational programs, and master classes.

The complete works of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, originally published in the late 1800s by Breitkopf & Hartel and digitized by the Munich Digitization Center of the Bavarian State Library.

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdys Werke is the late 19th-century edition of Mendelssohn's complete works, originally published by Breitkopf Hartel and digitized by the International Music Score Library Project. Some listings include other digitized public domain scores, digitized and audio files (MIDI or recorded performances).

A publicly accessible guide to the contents of this unique archive of materials relating to South Slavic oral tradition. Selected materials (texts and audio) are available in digital format.

The Moldenhauer Archives: The Rosaleen Moldenhauer Memorial presents a selection of digitized items from the full Moldenhauer Archives, which document the history of Western music from the medieval period through the modern era. The online collection includes scores and manuscripts as well as an electronic version of the guidebook for the archive.

The European Mozart Ways presents a new approach to studying Mozart by focusing on his travels. The site includes a full text biography of the composer, descriptions of his travels with maps and itineraries, and digitized, translated, and annotated versions of the letters of Mozart and his family.

NMA Online is the digitized version of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, the complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart originally published by Barenreiter-Verlag and digitized in a cooperative effort of the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg and the Packard Humanities Institute. The site includes both music and critical commentaries.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts Werke is the 1877-1910 edition of Mozart's complete works, originally published by Breitkopf Hartel and digitized by the International Music Score Library Project. Some listings include other digitized public domain scores, digitized and audio files (MIDI or recorded performances). Note: this page is updated manually; if a score is not listed, try browsing or searching for it using the left sidebar.

The Munich Digitization Center (MDZ) digitizes the special collections of the Bavarian State Library and other German institutions, including fine arts and music, and currently comprises over 900,000 titles.

Music and Performing Arts consists of multiple music and performing arts databases, including American Song, Classical Music Library, Classical Scores Library, Dance in Video, Jazz Music Library, Popular Music Library, Contemporary World Music, and Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries.

Music for the Nation, by the Library of Congress, contains thousands of pieces of historical sheet music registered for copyright from 1820-1860. The collection includes popular songs, operatic arias, choral music, solo instrumental music, and orchestral and band music.

Music for the Nation, by the Library of Congress, contains thousands of pieces of historical sheet music registered for copyright from 1870-1885. The collection includes popular songs, operatic arias, choral music, solo instrumental music, and orchestral and band music.

This website presents fieldwork and publication materials from Mark Slobin's research in Afghanistan.... Still photography, moving picture clips, and sound clips accompany the written text.

The Music Index provides citations for 882 international scholarly, popular, and trade journals and magazines. It indexes articles, book reviews, recording reviews, and live performance reviews.

A collection of music recordings from Americans of diverse origins, from Americas past and present. The songs are by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. They touch topics as varied as Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests, and more. And the range of genres includes country, folk, bluegrass, Western, old time, American Indian, blues, gospel, shape note singing, doo-wop, Motown, R&B, soul, funk, and others.

An interdisciplinary collection of streaming audiovisual recordings organized into the following categories: American music, classical, dance, jazz, popular music, contemporary world music, and Smithsonian Global Sound. Music Online includes the Classical Scores Library, a five-volume set of online scores ranging from the Medieval period through the twenty-first century. Thousands of pages of composer biographies and program notes are also available. As of August of 2024, Music Online includes more than 14 million individual tracks of music and nearly 11,000 videos.

Contains 400,000+ pages of the most important classical scores and manuscripts, allowing for the study and analysis of more than 8,000 scores. The collection includes works spanning time periods from the Renaissance to the 21st century. Coverage of score types is comprehensive, with full scores, study scores, piano and vocal scores, and piano reductions. The database has been indexed to enable users to search on musically relevant fields, such as composer, work/opus number, key, genre, instrument, time period; as well as score-specific fields, such as score type, duration, editor, arranger, publisher. These scores are also indexed in the library catalog.

Contains the sounds of all regions from every continent, and genres such as reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz, traditional music - Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku, and more. This database is a complementary database to Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries and includes a blend of contemporary and traditional world music recordings.

Part of the larger Music Online: Listening database, the Jazz Music Library features nearly one million jazz tracks from hundreds of labels, including Audiophile, Circle Records, Concord Jazz, Contemporary Records, Fantasy, GHB Records, Good Time Jazz, GRP Records, Impulse, Jazzology, Milestone, Nessa Records, Original Jazz Classics, Pablo, Peak, Prestige, Riverside, Solo Art Records, Stretch Records, and Verve.

A multidisciplinary collection of audiovisual content that touches on the curriculum needs of virtually every department. Music Online: Listening allows students and researchers alike to analyze unique and valuable content from over 500 producers and distributors around the world.

Collection of popular music that contains a wide range of music from around the world, including hundreds of thousands of tracks from major genres in pop music, including alternative, country, Christian, electronic, hip-hop, metal, punk, new age, R&B, reggae, rock, soundtracks and many more.

A virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions. The collection provides a variety of online resources that support the creation, continuity, and preservation of diverse musical forms. The collection includes more than 35,000 individual tracks of music, spoken word, and natural and human-made sounds. Users browse, search, click, and then listen to the music over the Internet through their headphones or speakers. Controlled vocabularies will enable users to browse by musical instrument, geographic area, or cultural group, among other fields.

The Music Periodicals Database indexes journal literature in all areas of music. It provides indexing and abstracts for more than 425 international music periodicals, plus full text for around 140 journals. Coverage includes recording and performance reviews of both popular and classical music.

The Library of Congress's Music Treasures Consortium provides access to highly valued music manuscripts and print materials held in some of the world's most renowned music archives, including the British Library, Harvard University, and the Morgan Library & Museum.

Musical America is an international directory for the performing arts, used by concert facilities, classical performers, artists, managers and music festivals. Entries include narrative reviews of the past year in music and dance, along with over 700 pages of listings and tables. Also offers a prestigious annual awards program for Musician of the Year, as well as awards for the year's top composer, conductor, instrumentalist and vocalist.

MusicalTheaterSongs.com draws from 150 years of musical theater repertoire, ranging from well-known standards to rare finds to help you find the right songs quickly and easily. Its  easy-to-use interface lets you enter up to 20-plus parameters (voice type, character age, etc.) to generate a list of songs tailored to your needs from an ever-growing database. As an added feature, once you get your list of titles, we link you to various sites to make it simple to buy, rent, trade or download the sheet music and recordings (subject to availability).

The Mutopia Project provides access to classical music for free download through digital sheet music editions based on editions in the public domain. The Project also hosts modern editions from composers, editors, and arrangers who have chosen to make their works freely available to the public. MIDI files of some works are also available.

The National Library of Australia has digitized over 12,200 Australian printed music items from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The collection includes original scores of "Waltzing Matilda" and the offical Australian national anthem "Advance Australia Fair."

The Naxos Music Library has nearly three million tracks of classical music from hundreds of record labels, including Bridge Records, Cedille, Chandos, Deutsche Grammophon, Naxos, Sony Classical, Vox, and Warner Classical.

The Naxos Music Library Jazz offers a mix of hundreds of jazz and blues labels from around the world, including ACT, Blue Engine Records, Cool & Blue, Manhaton Records, Strut, TCB (the Montreux Jazz Label), and Warner Jazz. NML Jazz currently hosts nearly 300,000 individual tracks (approximately 32,000 albums).

The Nazareth Project presents an official catalog of the works of Ernesto Nazareth. It includes digital transcriptions of the scores and audio files.

The New York Public Library's Digital Gallery provides free access to over 700,000. The Digital Gallery includes nearly 12,000 of scores and manuscripts from the Music Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Now What a Time, by the Library of Congress, is a collection consisting of sound recordings of primarly blues and gospel songs made from 1938-1943 in Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama.

Omaha Indian Music, by the Library of Congress, documents traditional Omaha music from the 1890s and 1980s. The collection includes sound recordings, photographs, and related materials.

Oscar Peterson: A Jazz Sensation, created by Library and Archives Canada, is devoted to the Canadian jazz artist Oscar Peterson. The site includes a biography and discography, photo gallery, links to digitized memorabilia, the full text of selected articles and essays written by Peterson, and an audio tour of selected recordings. Note: This is an archived site and is no longer being updated.

Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) Music is an authoritative research guide designed to help find reliable sources of information within books, websites, archives, or data sets. Each entry receives multiple peer-reviews as well as editorial board approval. It is best used at the beginning of the research process to determine the breadth of scholarship available on your topic.

The Oxford History of Western Music online offers an account of the evolution of Western classical music by Richard Taruskin. The online version includes all 1.25 million words, 500 images, and 1,800 musical examples from the updated paperback edition with search and browse functionality.

Includes the Oxford Dictionary of Music, Grove Music Online, and the Oxford Companion to Music. These are key music reference sources used by performers and scholars around the world. This resource is used for answering basic questions (e.g., the definitions of music terminology), to research repertoire (Grove Music Online contains complete works lists for composers), or at the beginning of the research process.

A collection of over 1,000 pieces of public domain sheet music from and about Washington State and the Pacific Northwest, selected from the University of Washington Music Library's Ashford Sheet Music Collection.

Patriotic Melodies, by the Library of Congress, tells the stories behind many of the most well known patriotic songs of the United States. The site includes descriptions of each song along with selected sheet music and audio recordings.

The Performing Arts Encyclopedia is a guide to performing arts resources at the Library of Congress. The Encyclopedia provides access to digitized scores, sheet music, audio reordings, films, photographs, and other materials.

Auburn University's Piano Bench Digital Collection is comprised of sheet music published prior to 1923, much of it found in the benches of second-hand pianos purchased by the family of former Auburn University librarian Fred Edminston.

The resource allows users to study this exciting period using manuscript and rare printed material as well as photographs, ephemera and memorabilia. The interactive chronology, extensive visual resources and video footage provide valuable contextual background to the materials included in this collection.

The Library of Congress's collection of Presidential Campaign Songs presents a selection of sheet music composed for presidential candidates from the 1870s to the 1920s.

Ragtime, by the Library of Congress, presents a selection of sheet music, audio and video recordings, and other materials related to this uniquely American musical phenomenon.

Recent Researches in Music Online is a collection of critical performing editions of music in seven series. The series fall into two basic categories: editions that span the history of Western music, and editions with ties to specific cultural milieus. Most editions in Recent Researches in Music are devoted to works by a single composer or in a single genre.

Princeton University's Renaissance Masses, 1440-1520 is an online catalog of polyphonic masses composed in Europe in the 15th-16th centuries. The catalog can be browsed by title, composer, manuscript, or print. The catalog is continuously being updated with the addition of audio recordings for each mass.

International index of visual sources of music, dance, theatre and opera, with a main objective being the development of methods, means and research centres for the classification, cataloguing and study of iconographical sources related to music, dance, theatre and opera.

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature is a comprehensive, global bibliography of writings about music. RILM Abstracts currently indexes and abstracts scholarly music publications from 184 different countries, featuring content in 140 languages. RILM supports interdisciplinary scholarship by tracking music focused writings in anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, dance studies, dramatic arts, librarianship, literature, pedagogy, philosophy, physics, psychology, sociology, and therapy. Coverage dates from the early 20th century to the present, and includes journal articles, book chapters, books, reviews, editorials, obituaries, advertising, and news.

A full-text database of 138  jazz journals and magazines published in the United States between 1914 and 2006. Articles in RIPM Jazz Periodicals are primary sources for research on jazz. RIPM Jazz is projected to grow to include 350 to 400 additional titles.

RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals is an international, annotated database with content analysis of writings on musical history and culture between 1800 and 1950 provided by scholars and editors. RIPM currently indexes the contents of music periodicals including articles, reviews, illustrations, music examples, advertisements, and press reviews. In addition, RIPM offers English-language translations of articles from journals in other languages.

RISM (Repertoire International des Sources Musicales), the International Inventory of Musical Sources, is an international effort to comprehensively document surviving music sources (including manuscripts, prints, libretty, and writings about music) around the world. The online catalog contains around 700,000 references to music manuscripts, many of which were first cataloged in RISM's Series A/II, Music Manuscripts after 1600. The catalog also includes ongoing indexing completed since the publication of Series A/II. Each catalog entry includes thematic catalog numbers, description of the musical work, location of the manuscript, provenance, and musical incipits.

The largest online archive of music journalism, Rock's Backpages (RBP) features 50,000 articles on thousands of popular music artists. RBP covers many different genres of music, including alternative, country, hip-hop, jazz, R&B, rock, and more. The interviews and feature articles are primary source material for popular music studies.

Franz Peter Schuberts Werke is the late 19th-century edition of Schubert's complete works, originally published by Breitkopf & Hartel and digitized by the International Music Score Library Project. Some listings include other digitized public domain scores, digitized and audio files (MIDI or recorded performances).

The complete works of Robert Schumann, originally published by Breitkopf & Hartel in the late 1800s and digitized by the Munich Digitization Center of the Bavarian State Library

A selections of digitized sheet music from York University Libraries' Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections.

The Sheet Music Consortium, hosted by the UCLA Digital Library Program, is a cooperative project to build an open collection of digitized sheet music through harvesting metadata from collections around the world.

Sheet Music from Canada's Past, a project by Library and Archives Canada and published via Aurora, provides digital access to a selection of sheet music published in Canada before 1921. Selected titles also include audio examples.

The University of Mississippi Libraries' Sheldon Harris Sheet Music Collection provides digital access to popular sheet music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including jazz, blues, and minstrel songs. Note: please read collection disclaimer.

The digitized collection of music scores from Eastman School of Music's Sibley Music Library includes over 14,000 digitized manuscripts and scores in the public domain, many of which are unique to Sibley's collection.

The March King: John Philip Sousa presents selected music manuscripts, photographs, printed music, sound recordings, and more from the Sousa Collection at the Library of Congress

Southern Mosaic, by the Library of Congress, is an ethnographic field collection containing nearly 700 sound recordings and other materials documenting a 1939 trip through the southern United States. Recordings include ballas, blues, folk songs, spirituals, and work songs.

A project of Temple University, Temple Sheet Music Collections contains approximately 840 pieces of sheet music published from the early 19th to early 20th centuries.

Themefinder allows for the searching of musical works by theme or incipit. Currently, Themefinder searches three databases: Classical Instrumental Music, European Folksongs, and 16th-century Latin Motets. Users may search by pitch, interval, scale degree, or contour of the musical line. Results are displayed as a list of works that match the search, along with the theme or incipit of each work.

The US RISM/Themefinder website features data for musical manuscripts from the United States. Users may search by composer, title, genre, or other keywords, or by using the Themefinder musical incipit/theme search, which allows for searching pitch, interval, scale degree, or contour of the musical line. Results are displayed as a list of works that match the search, along with the theme or incipit of each work.

MP3s of early wax cylinders recorded by Thomas Edison's recording engineer Theo Wangemann during a trip to Europe in 1889-1890.

The Digital Archive of Popular American Music consists of a selection of materials from UCLA Music Library's Archive of Popular American Music. The Digital Archive includes sheet music and performances of the songs now in the public domain.

The University of Colorado Digital Sheet Music Collection provides digital access to sheet music published between 1890 and 1922. The collection is divided into four separate sub-collections: the Colorado Collection (music about the state of Colorado), the Ingram Collection (music published by the Tolbert R. Ingram Music Company from 1900-1915), the Ragtime Collection (ragtime songs and piano rags), and the Western Trails Collection (music inspired by westward migration).

A collection of manuscript musical scores dating from the 17th through 19th centuries, digitized from the University of Washington Music Library's Rare Book Collection.

Library and Archives Canada's Virtual Gramophone contains information for more than 15,000 78-rmp and cylinder recordings released in Canada or featuring Canadian artists and/or compositions. The database contains images, biographical and historical information, and digital audio reproductions of selected recordings.

The University of North Texas Music Library's Virtual Music Rare Book Room presents digitized materials from the Edna mae Sandborn Music Rare Book Room, as well as items that were borrowed from private collectors and scanned with permission. A primary focus of the collection is 18th-century French opera, including scores and libretti.

Voices from the Dust Bowl, by the Library of Congress, is an ethnographic field collection documenting the everyday life of residents of central Californian migrant work camps in 1940-41. The collection includes audio recordings, photographs, manuscript materials, and related documentation.

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary source materials from countries and cultures around the world.