Links for Digital Musicology

This wiki provides links to substantial open-access projects of use to musicians and musicologists. For curated digital editions, see EVE: Electronic and Virtual Editions. For older projects that are not readily accessible online see ADAM: Archive of Digital Applications in Musicology.

Digital Music Reprints

By Composer

Ludwig van Beethoven

Website: Ludwig van Beethovens Werke

The first collected edition of Beethoven's music was published by Breitkopf & Härtel, in Leipzig, between 1862 and 1888. This set contains 269 titles--symphonies, concertos, chamber music, Lieder, folksong arrangements, and much more.

Frédéric Chopin

Frideric Chopin: "Adieu a Varsovie", London, 1840, from Special Collections, University of Chicago.

Chopin Editions in Poland

Website: Jagiellonian Digital Library: Chopin holdings

Website: Polish National Library: Chopin holdings

These identical websites, one under the rubric of the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow, the other under the Polish National Library (Warsaw) banner, currently featuring 17 volumes of Chopin's piano music. The sites are under development.

Chopin Early Editions

Website: Chopin Early Editions

For an easy-to-consult listing of printed music by Chopin in the University of Chicago library, it is hard to surpass the Chopin Online Chopin Online Catalog. Citations are based on the library's shelfmarks, but since the music is digitized, users will have no difficulty in locating what they seek.

Online Chopin Variorum Editions

Website: Online Chopin Variorum Editions

Not so much a single project as a whole constellation of Chopin-related research projects, John Rink's Chopin Variorum investigates such things as the work concept in Chopin's time and provides an annotated catalogue of first editions. Both are coordinated with The Complete Chopin: A New Critical Edition, printed in London (2004).

Georg Frideric Handel

Website: Georg Friedrich Händels Werke

The Handel Gesellschaft edition of the composer's works (105 titles) was published by Breitkopf & Härtel between 1885 and 1902. It contains all but a few of the major works known today, sometimes with variants of arias or choruses that were excluded in later editions. [For earlier sources see "Lully" below.]

Altenburg, Franz Liszt's residence in Weimar, 1848-1861. Photograph 2006 by Magnus Manske. Used under GNU Free Documentation License.

Franz Liszt

Website: Franz Liszt Musikalische Werke

This collected edition of Franz Liszt's works (35 volumes) was published by Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig. Although the first volume appeared in 1870, the others appeared between 1900 and 1936. Symphonies, symphonic poems, works for piano and orchestra, Liszt's music criticism, and little-known arrangements are included. The picture at the left shows Liszt's residence from 1848 to 1861, while he was director of court music. Today the Liszt Haus serves as a museum.

Jean-Baptiste Lully

Website: Jean-Baptiste Lully Collection

Twenty-six scores of Lully's best-known dramatic settings are preserved in the music collection of the University of North Texas (Denton TX). Together with arrangements and variants of works by Lully in the 182 holdings of the Virtual Rare Book Room a broad basis for study of Lully's milieu is available here. Dates of works in the broader collection extend to late in the nineteenth century. Among holdings that fall outside this description are a 1743 print of Handel's Alexander's Feast, the first printed edition (1767) of Handel's Messiah, the first version of George Grove's 4-volume Dictionary of Music and Musicians, London, 1879-90, and Girolamo Gigli's original libretto (1689) for an opera called La fede ne' tradimenti, which enjoyed many settings in Italy.

Felix Mendelssohn

Website: Felix Mendelssohn Bartoldys Werke

This collected edition (162 titles) of Mendelssohn's music was issued by Breitkopf & Härtel. String quartets, quintets, chamber music for clarinet and basset horn, piano trios, works for piano and cello, a fantasy on the Irish song "The last rose of summer" (Op. 15) and many other little-known pieces of chamber music can be found here together with more familiar fare.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Website: Neue Mozart Ausgabe

A fully digitized version of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe has been available online since 2006. Series and volumes follow exactly the Bärenreiter print. All elements of the printed exemplars (table of contents, score, critical report) are present. Letters, documents, and libretti will be added by the Digital Mozart Edition at the Mozarteum, Salzburg, in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute. This is the only recent collected edition of the works by a major composer currently offered online.

First Violin from Pleyel's second collection of Douze Nouveaux Quatours, Quartetto [sic] No. 2, published between 1787 and 1794, from http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/pleyel/id/11840/rec/4.]

Ignaz Pleyel Early Editions

Website: Ignaz Pleyel Early Editions

The late musicologist Rita Benton made an exhaustive study of Pleyel's editions (c. 1800) of the early string quartet literature. In the library named after her more than 200 early editions and manuscripts give some sense of the scope of Pleyel's career as both a composer and a music publisher in the era of Haydn, Boccherini, and other notable composers of chamber music. In editions of chamber music for strings Pleyel also brought out piano pedagogy books and piano trios.

Franz Schubert

Website: Franz Schuberts Werke

The collected works of Franz Schubert, as published by Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig, 1884-1892. 53 volumes, including symphonic and piano works, choral works, theater pieces, piano four-hands arrangements, and song cycles.

Robert Schumann: "Die Minnesaenger," Sechs Leider, No. 2.

Robert Schumann

Website: Robert Schumanns Werke

The works as edited by Clara Schumann and others. This series was published in Leipzig by Breitkoft & Härtrel between 1881 and 1893. The illustration shows the start of "Die Minnesänger" for four male voices, No. 2 from Schumann's Sechs Leider.

By Collection

Denkmäler Deutscher Tonkunst, 1st series

Website: Monuments of German Music, Series 1

This 53-volume anthology of German music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries greatly increased familiarity with the music of Buxtehude, Telemann, J. Ch. F. Bach, Franck, Hasse, Scheidt, Stolzler, and many others.

Denkmäler Deutscher Tonkunst, 2nd series (Bavaria)

Website: Monuments of German Music, Series 2

The second series of this well known anthology, focused on Bavaria, emphasizes music associated with the Bavarian courts resident in Munich and (through composers such as Dell'Abaco) in exile in Brussels. Also represented are Stamitz, Haßler, Pachelbel, Pez, Steffani, Toeschi, and others. Published in 36 volumes (1901-1926).

The famous prima donna Maria Malibran (fl. 1830-38) in a lithograph by G. Cenestrelli published in c. 1840. Museo Internationale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna No. 2296.

Gaspari Online (Bologna Conservatory)

Website: Gaspari Online (Bologna Conservatory)

The Gaspari Catalogue of holdings in the Bologna Conservatory is a resource well known to students of Italian music. It describes the heterogeneous holdings of what is now formally called the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna (the International Museum and Music Library of Bologna). Composed of multiple underlying libraries and collections, its holdings range from early liturgical sources to music of the twentieth century, from correspondence to musical instruments form earlier centuries. This website, which includes several projects still in progress, touches on all of them.

Printed Music in the Bavarian State Library

Website: Printed Music in the Bavarian State Library

This collection of 3251 titles includes a large number of works from te eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Krebs, Türk, Korkel, Danzi, Mendelssohn, and others). It also holds impressive early printed music, including Pierre Attaignant's seminal collection of Trente chansons musicales, use of which is restricted to study. Clemens non Papa, Croce, Lassus, Rore, Vecchi, Wert, and Willaert are much in evidence, as are the publications of Pierre Phalèse.

Sheet Music Collections

"Lützow's Wild Hunt", A "Celebrated Glee" for four voices and piano (Philadelphia, n.d.) based on music by Carl Maria von Weber and verse by Theodor Körner, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Sheet music denotes single pieces that were published prolifically in the US in parallel with the rise of the recording industry. Many large collections survive in university libraries, and among them several are fully digitized. Redundancies in single-title listings are common, but in general each collection represents nearby publishers disproportionately.

19th-Century California Sheet Music

Website: 19th-Century California Sheet Music

The original holdings consisted of 2,700 pieces published in California between 1852 and 1900. A further collection of 700 pieces was added in 2007. The project is maintained at the University of California, Berkeley. The pieces represent a wide range of Western US and native American traditions. Some sound, video, and MIDI files are also available.

African American Sheet Music

Website: African American Sheet Music

The browsing facility for Brown University's online collection (1454 titles) is very easy to use. Some of the material (e.g. "Music Theater, 1865-1910) is also accessible at the Library of Congress American Memory website. Some uses are restricted.

Chapel Hill, NC: Nineteenth-Century American Sheet Music

Website: Nineteenth-Century American Sheet Music (NcASM)

This University of North Carolina website holds more than 3,500 digitized pieces from the 1830s through the end of the nineteenth century. Accompanying catalogue records support searches by topic as well as composer. Holdings range from piano pieces and songs with piano accompaniment to duets, trios, and four-part glees. Miscellaneous material that forms part of the collection includes letters.

"Alexander's Ragtime Band", Historic American Sheet Music, Duke University, Item a5378.

Durham, NC: Historic American Sheet Music

Website: Historic American Sheet Music (HASM)

Duke University's Historic American Sheet Music collection (3,000+ titles) spans the time-period 1850-1920. It includes a song-lyrics index, has tabbed browsing, and provides helpful background on the sheet-music printing industry in the US. HASM is also linked to the Library of Congress's American Memory project. It has particular value for matching references in early film music, ragtime, and piano-rolls, that is for repertories that were known principally by ear. Searchable by subject, instrumentation, and illustrator as well as more usual parameters.

American Vernacular Music Manuscripts

Manuscript addendum to the "Norfolk collection of sacred harmony", Middle Tennessee University.

Website: American Vernacular Music Manuscripts

Murfreesboro, TN, the home of what is now called Middle Tennessee University, was a nexus of popular music-making before jazz established itself in Nashville. This collection of manuscript resources (c. 1730-1910) is full of miscellany but also offers documentation not available anywhere else. For most users the archive.org link given above will be more accessible than the university's Center for Popular Music server. To date 333 shelfmarks (many of them collections) have been uploaded. George Allen's ]"Reels, Clogs, Hornpipes, and Jigs" is representative.

Digitized Music Manuscripts

By Composer

Ludwig van Beethoven: Beethoven-Haus, Bonn

Website: Beethoven Haus, Bonn

The digital archives at the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn, contains manuscripts, sketches, letters, pictures, sample sound recordings, and much else. Beethoven lived here, and the physical museum also houses his instrument collection. A recently funded project involving the Beethoven-Haus and the Musikhochschule in Detmold will develop an ambitious "Beethoven Werkstaat" project taking viewers through the development of individual works by way of sketches and editions.

Federica Rovelli and Bernhard Apel examine a digitized Beethoven sketch at the Beethoven-Haus on Nov. 30, 2014). Image from the Forschung in Bonn column of Nachrichten und Bilder aus Bonn.

Beethovens Werkstatt (Beethoven's Workshop)

Website: Beethovens Werkstatt

The ambitious Beethovens Werkstatt project, officially launched in 2014, will between now and 2030 reconstruct (with images and critical notes) the path of development of Beethoven's works from inception to completion. This project is based on the composer's sketch books, which in the digital version are to be carefully annotated with the help of MEI (the Music Encoding Initiative), a markup language for the encoding of musical sources facilitating their citation in critical editions. Bernard Apel (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn) and Joachim Veit (Musikwissenschaftliches Insdtitut, Detmold/Padlerborn) are the project directors. Johannes Kepper (Edirom project) is centrally involved in the technical development of both Werkstatt and MEI. The link above shows a prototype browser for viewing both manuscript iterations and modern notation for variants in the first movement of Beethoven's C-Minor Piano Sonata Op. 111 in Variants 14-17 (Beethoven-Haus BH 71).

Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" (1942): Sketch of opening bars ((electronic resource) Library of Congress).

Aaron Copland

Website: The Aaron Copland Collection

The Aaron Copland Collection, available at the Library of Congress, is an exceedingly rich one that contains every imaginable kind of evidence of the composer's long life (1900-1990)--manuscripts, sketches, typescripts for talks, personal photographs (roughly 5,000 of them), childhood mementos, and letters. Apart from photos, 981 other items can be found here.

Handel's Messiah

Website: Handel's Messiah

The British Library's Virtual Book website contains a number of important manuscripts, the folios of which can be "turned" by the user. In addition to the autograph score of Handel's Messiah, "Sumer is icumen in", the Old Hall manuscript, the manuscript for Book II of J. S. Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, a Purcell coronation anthem for James II, sketches for Beethoven's Sixth ("Pastoral") Symphony, Elgar's "Enigma" Variations, and Mozart's manuscript thematic catalogue (Zweig MS 63) are set up in similar fashion. A listing can be found here.

Michael Haydn

Website: Michael Haydn Manuscripts

181 comprehensive titles from the Bavarian State Library. The heavy emphasis on liturgical music reflects Haydn's lifetime involvement in church music, mainly in Salzburg and Vienna.

Gustav Mahler

Website: Mahler Autograph Manuscripts

30 volumes of autograph manuscripts by Gustav Mahler are housed in the Bavarian State Library (Munich). Offerings include Das Knaben Wunderhorn, sketches for three symphonies, and Mahler's correspondence with Emil Hertzka.

Carl Orff

Website: Orff Autograph Manuscripts

This collection of manuscript materials (91 titles) documents the musical career of Carl Orff (1895-1982). It includes, Leider, stage works, modern arrangements of Monteverdi operas, and other materials. Because of continuing copyright restrictions, many items can be consulted only on site in the Bavarian State Library. Nonetheless the detailed listing is valuable in documenting the range of Orff's interests and activities.

Max Reger

Opening bars of Max Reger's four-hand arrangement of Bach's Prelude in Eb Major BWV 552 (1896) from the Bavarian State Library, Mus. Coll. 4.323, f. 5.

Website: Reger Autograph Manuscripts

The music of Max Reger (1873-1916) occupies a unique place in the keyboard repertory of its time. His organ works are better known than his other music--concertos, Lieder, choral works, and a clarinet quintet. Forty titles are viewable here.

Arnold Schönberg

Website: Arnold Schönberg

The Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, which holds a cornucopia of Schönberg memorabilia that extends to film footage of the composer's real-world experiences such as being briefly employed as an auto salesman, his "contacts" list, and personal photographs, provides an online list of works, biographical sources, information on performing rites, and much else.

Strauss Online

Website: Strauss Online

The music of three Johanns (father, son, uncle), one Josef, and one Eduard is represented at this website based at the city library of Vienna. More than 300 works are available here. Almost 200 of them are by Joh., Strauss the younger, who was the waltz king. A few sketches, operettas, marches et al. are included. The minor Strausses composed polkas as well as other short instrumental pieces. Eduard's Theorie der Musik from c. 1845-50 can be downloaded here. An online catalogue of the library's printed works is available here.

Richard Strauss

Website: Richard Strauss: Musical Autographs

Among these 84 titles are numerous sketches, fragmentary compositions, and Lieder. The originals are held in the Bavarian State Library.

Georg Josef Vogler

Website: Vogler Music Manuscripts

Abbe Vogler (1749-1814) left a substantial collection of manuscripts (75 titles) that include chamber and sacred music, concertos and symphonies, plus several items that relate to his opera Castor et Pollux.

Richard Wagner

Website: Richard Wagner: Notebooks, music manuscripts, and correspondence

This collection of unpublished materials from the archive of the Bavarian State Opera brings Wagner's goals and working habits into our midst. Under 170 rubrics it documents the composer's movements, collaborators, and evolving ideas about music and role of music in society. They also give a more rounded view of his range of interests than many published accounts.

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari

Website: Manuscripts of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948) followed the path of aspiring students of his time in examining the details of earlier composers' practices. This collection of his manuscripts (175 titles) includes transcriptions of keyboard works by J. S. Bach, sketches of operas, concertos, symphonies, comic operas, a passion, sonatas, string quartets, and other chamber music.

By Collection

e-codices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland

Website: e-codices

In many ways e-codices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, is an unsurpassed example of maximal access to fundamental but rarely seen sources. Currently serving 1,190 source, it was started in 2007. Its value to musicology owes partly to a tight coupling between early histories of music and the sources on which these accounts were often based. Access to color images of the materials long known only from running-text summaries of them enables users to pose new questions of interpretation. Users can construct new juxtapositions and concatenations of source details in relationships that could not previously be explored. An http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/info/annotation_tool annotation tool] enables users to highlight pertinent findings. e-codices is based on like-named software, which holds the distinction of running equally well on mobile and non-mobile platforms. Several calls for collaboration are posted at the website. An author list is available here.

Among the many riches to be found are these rare items:

• Writings of Hucbaldus (840-930) from Einsiedeln.

• The Ars copntrapunctus of Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361) from Einsiedeln.

• Fragment (in Latin) of a writing by Moses Maimonides (1135-1204).

Recent software enhancements and links for the e-codices newsletter are available.

Juilliard Manuscript Collection

A sketch for the first movement of Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony, from the Juilliard Manuscript Collection.

Website: Juilliard Manuscript Collection

Among its 221 music manuscripts posted online, the Juilliard School possesses many unexpected items and substantial coverage of twentieth-century British and American composers (Samuel Barber, Frank Bridge) and many European composers whose music was popular in the US. Other collections represented at Juilliard include the collections of pianist Arthur Rubinstein and the popular composer of musicals Meredith Wilson (1902-1984).

Music Gifts for the Russian Emperors

Website: Music Gifts for the Russian Emperors

The National Library of Russia has made available this carefully curated collection of music given to Romanov emperors by visitors from France, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. Many holdings come from Russia, where Western European music was introduced early in the eighteenth century. Holdings come from the 18th-20th centuries. Some of the music was brought by foreign teachers (e.g., Vincenzo Manfredini) for the royal progeny. Many works were provided with dedications to the emperors. Czech and Austrian music flowed copiously into Moscow at the end of the eighteenth century. A "Festival Song" by Felix Mendelssohn has a particularly interesting history, which is related here. The digitized pieces are linked to a database containing information about the social context and pertinent musical detail. The list of manuscripts (using Cyrillic script) can be found here, while a search engine (Roman script) is here. Drop-down lists contain listing in both Cyrillic and Roman, as appropriate, while the popup keyboard facilitates Cyrillic input. Source descriptions are in Russian.

Music Manuscripts in the Bavarian State Library

Website: Music Manuscripts in the Bavarian State Library

This rich collection of 2228 digitized manuscripts is well endowed with music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sample holdings include Alessandro Scarlatti's Missa Clementina, Antonio Caldara's sacred cantata "Gesu Cristo condannato", sacred vocal music by Michaelk Haydn, Handel's Deidamia, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Dallapiccola, stage works by Richard Strauss, manuscripts of Carl Orff, and much other music.

Start of Scene XII (Giasone, Medea) of Francesco Cavalli's Giasone, Venice, 1649, from the Marciana National Library autograph MS Internet Culturale, I-Vnm, 0160414, f. 103r.

Music Manuscripts in the Marciana Library

Website: Music Manuscripts in the Marciana Library

The "library of St. Mark" (i.e. the Biblioteca Nazionale "Marciana" in Venice) holds acquisitions that have been accumulating since the sixteenth century. Following guidelines widely shared across music libraries in Italy, it has digitized music manuscripts that are most closely tied to Venice's musical history. These include many important sources for seventeenth-century Venetian opera (Francesco Cavalli, Domenico Freschi, Giovanni Legrenzi, Carlo Pallavicino, P.A. and M.A. Ziani, and many others); 66 volumes containing cantatas of the eighteenth century by Benedetto Marcello (445 titles) and his nemisis Antonio Lotti, minuets by Baldassare Galuppi, and all the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (357 titles; his familiarity with Venice was minimal). Operas can be accessed by act.

Saxon State Library (SLUB), Dresden: Royal Private Music Collection

Website: Royal Private Music Collection, Dresden

This rich collection of the Wettin court, starting from the time of August the Strong and continuing to 1896, when it was donated to the Royal Library, is rich in holdings of sacred vocal music and Italian opera. Today it resides in the Saxon State and University Library (SLUB in the German ordering).

The online holdings have been subdivided into these components:

The Opera Archive, which includes libretti, scores, and extracts, is currently being digitized. This collection contains works roughly 650 operas and opera extracts from the years 1764 to 1900. The private collections of court and church music include 750 manuscripts from the years 1697-1763.

Saxon State Library (SLUB), Dresden: Schrank II

Website: Court Music in Dresden

The current familiar name of this collection (Schrank II) owes to the designation for the cabinet in which it was long stored. It is a rich collection of instrumental music, mainly from the eighteenth century. Much of it is in the hand of Johann Georg Pisendel, an intrepid collector of Italian instrumental pieces, particularly from Venice. It contains 1795 listings in 1750 physical manuscripts. For the complete listing click here.

By Repertory

Cantigas Medievais Galegos-Portuguesas

Website: Medieval Cantigas

This website provides links to collections of manuscripts containing cantigas of Gallic and Portuguese origin. Many are preserved in the Vatican Library. The contents of each source is indexed, with full texts given in many cases. A sample folio is shown for each source.

Cambridge Lute Books

Website: Cambridge Lute Books

This link takes you to the second volume of Mathew Holmes's four-volume Lute Book in the Cambridge University Library. Its companions are the Cosens Lute Book and a volume of fragments of Elizabethan music for lute. Holmes was a singer at Christ Church, Oxford, and at Westminster Abbey. Cosens was a nineteenth-century owner of this collection of sixteenth-century music.

Musica restaurata

Website: Musica restaurata

Illuminated manuscripts associated with the Low Countries in the Vatican Library can be viewed in high resolution owing to the generous support of the Alamire Foundation (Leuven, Belgium). The contents at the end of 2012 totaled 13,500 images.

Repertory- and Genre-Based Digitization Projects

Chant

Liber Usualis

Website: Liber Usualis

The Liber Usualis is the practical guide to chants for the Christian liturgical year. Although often considered to be ancient, it was first published in its present form in the middle of the nineteenth century. Some further accretions have occurred in recent decades. The Liber contains two cycles for the Christian year: one for the Ordinary (feasts whose liturgical needs are held in common) and one for the Proper of the Saints (feasts that are individualized in their liturgical requirements). Texts (in Latin) and music were widely paraphrased in liturgical music of the Renaissance. This version is searchable. [Fig = f. 113 of CU Add 03056: two bars from the Cosens Lute Book.]

Part-books and Choir Books

Early Music [Anthologies] Online

Website: Early Music Online

These 327 printed anthologies, held in the British Library (London), were originally microfilmed for the RISM AI project. Because of its heavy coverage of sixteenth-century prints (a high proportion of which were anthologies), it contains many real treasures--large numbers of madrigals, much of the early printed music for lute, and numerous prints in which almost all the works are by an important composer (Buus, Croce, Rore, Willaert. Seventy-seven volumes contains chansons. A smattering of treatises (Diruta's Il Transilvano, for example) can also be found here.

Bologna Partbooks (secular music)

Website: Bologna Partbooks

The holdings of the Biblioteca della Musica of Bologna are particularly rich in partbooks of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the 339 prints found here (served by the same library but originating in the Dipartimento di Musica e Spettacolo of the University of Bologna) many secular items and some sacred vocal music can be found.

German chant and choir books

Webstie: German chant and choir books

This website serves mainly south German liturgical resources from the fifteenth century. It currently holds more than 200 items.

Munich Choir Books (mainly 16th century)

Website: Munich Choir Books

Under the musical direction of Orlando the Bavarian court (Munich) reached a peak of activity much of which resulted in the development of a substantial collection of choir books. The layout of parts in a large-format choir book enables singers to see their parts while standing around the book. The origins of this tradition can be traced to c. 1400. The 199 choir books in this digitized collection contain sacred (Isaac, Josquin, Senfl) and secular music as well as fragmentary works and an anonymous Tractatus de musica. Holdings from local monasteries and private collections have been included.

The Trent Codices (Fifteenth-Century Polyphony)

Website: The Trent Codices

Tenor part for an anonymous Kyrie a 3 for the Proper of St. Anthony, c. 1450-55, Sopraintendenza Beni Librari e Archivisti Provincia Autonomo - Trento, Tr93. f. 103v.

This important collection of anonymous music of the fifteenth century is quite uniform in presentation, with most works employing a choir-book layout. Paper texture is well captured in the digitizations, which are highly consistent graphically. The number of titles is 1863. Few titles are attributed. Those that are come mainly from Guillaume Dufay (105 titles), Gilles Binchois (52), and John Dunstaple (30). The originals are preserved in the Castello di Buonconsiglio, Trent (IT).

Printed Polyphonic Works of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Website: Printed Polyphony of the 16th-17th Centuries

Similar to Early Music Online, but representing printed music in the Bavarian State Library and not limited to anthologies. It emphasizes music for voices. 1371 publication titles can be found. These include numerous early collections of chansons, madrigals, psalms, masses, motets, hymns, sacred songs, and early instrumental music (sonatas, balletti et al.). Titles in Latin, German, French, Italian, Spanish et al. Some items are of foreign origin (e.g. Purcell's Orpheus Brittanicus (London, 1698), Schmelzer's Arie per il balletto a cavallo (a horse ballet given for the wedding of emperor Leopold I and Princess Margherita of Spain, Vienna, 1667).

Opera

Opera in Italy, Austria, and Germany (1770-1830)

Website: Opera in Italy and Germany (1770-1830)

This site contains an array of resources for the study of operas (most unavailable in modern editions) that were contemporaneous with the life of Beethoven (1770-1827), who was notoriously frustrated in his attempts to succeed in the world of opera. Its holdings include 483 manuscripts, reproductions of printed libretti for every work listed, and an extensive metadata apparatus for basic information on composers, performances, and sources. Its reach is broader than the title suggests, for works performed in France, Austria, and elsewhere beyond Italy and Germany are found. In cases in which an included opera has an anterior antecedent, metadata is also given for the pre-existing opera, even when its predates the new work by as much as a century. This enables a reader to trace some of the long tendrils of gestation that might otherwise be found only in a critical edition. The manuscript sources used in Opera come from libraries in Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Vienna, and Weimar. Wolf-Dieter (romance languages) and Wolfram Steinbeck (musicology) are the project leaders.

Databases (structured)

By Repertory

Secular Vocal and Folksong Repertories

Bodleian Library Broadside Ballad Catalogue

Website: Bodleian Broadside Ballad Project

The Bodleian broadside ballad project, which was developed mainly from 1995 to 2000, spans the history of the genre. A search form enables users to access the allegro Catalogue of Ballads by sheet or ballad title, first line, and tune name as well as publisher, date, and other parameters.

César: French Theatrical Database

Website: César

The Calendrier électronique des spectacles sour l'ancien régime et sous la revolution, originally developed at Oxford Brookes University by Barry Russell and in Toronto by David Trott but expanded to include other collaborators after their deaths, offers a searchable database of personnel (broadly defined), titles, dates, venues, and pertinent treatises on the French theater of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among its most unusual holdings are its calendar of police reports from the revolutionary period.

CLORI: Archive of the Italian Cantata

Website: http://www.cantataitaliana.it/

CLORI, which hosts cantata texts, manuscript source citations, and images that show characteristics of handwriting, has a number of sponsors and collaborators including the Italian Musicological Society (SIM in Italian), the University of Rome (Tor Vergata), the Italian Institute for Music History (IISM), and RISM. The project is headed by Teresa M. Gialdroni. Click the "ricerca" button to go to the search form.

Deutsches Volksliedarchiv (German Folksong Archive)

Website: Deutsches Volksliedarchiv

The German Folk Music Archive (in German) has evolved over a century (to 2014) as a central clearing house for folk songs from German-speaking lands. It contains several component parts including (1) a Lieder Lexicon in which folksong texts are listed alphabetically; (2) a listing of specific projects, mainly those with a critical dimension; and (3) a popular Song Lexicon.

EASMUS: Early American Secular Music and its European Sources

Website: EASMUS

This extensive canvas of secular music in the American colonies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries consists of a series of indices (titles, first lines, musical incipits [by scale degree], stressed notes, et al.). It was developed over the 1970s and 80s by Kate Van Winkle Keller, Robert Keller, Carolyn Rabson, Raoul F. Camus, and Susan Cifaldi. The contents include ballad operas, band music, song sheets, theater works, and the names of tunes played by musical clocks.

English Broadside Ballad Archive

Website: English Broadside Ballad Archive

Six thousand English broadside ballads, mainly from the seventeenth century, are included in this comprehensive project extending to related artistic and cultural phenomena. It development continues through 2016.

Pepusch's aria "In vain is complaining" from Thomyris, London, 1707, image 0115 at the University of Kentucky Athena website.

Goldberg Stiftung: Loire Valley Chanson Sources

Website: Chansonniers of the Loire Valley

The Goldberg Foundation has set up a system of hyperlinks to digitized resources for this subsector of the chanson repertory. As a collaborative project, it is somewhat uneven in its offerings. In compensation, comments can be appended to listings.

HUAPALA: Hawaiian Lyrics and Hula Archives

Website: HUAPALA

Under development since 1997, HUAPALA is a website consisting mainly of texts derived from recordings of Hawaiian traditional music. Its aim is to preserve the musical culture of the Hawaiian Islands through not only the lyrics but also associated artifacts. Some musical overlaps with Samoa and Tahiti allow for comparison of lyrics from the broader Polynesian world.

Old English Songs

Website: Old English Songs

This collection, housed at the University of Kentucky, was once owned by the double-bass player Domenico Dragonetti. The contents mainly consist of opera arias (Handel, Bononcini, Purcell) and cantatas (rather than folksongs or sea shanties) in scanned images.

Recercar (Chanson Database)

Website: Catalogue de la Chanson Francaise à la Renaissance

A search site with extensive metadata and musical incipits for a repertory of 10,000 works from the sixteenth century. Multiple settings of the same text have individual listings (e.g. "Susanne un jour" currently has 26 listings). Works can be searched by title, scoring, composer, source, location, and text. Instrumental arrangements are originally texted pieces are included.Cross-referenced to comprehensive secondary sources and modern editions.

VolksLiedWerke (Austrian Folksong Database)

Website: VolksLiebWerke

The VolksLiedWerke is assembled from collections originating in Austria's states. Search by title, personal name, or corporate name. Supported by the Austrian National Library (Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek) and other entities. Some regions have separate websites, such as this one for the Tyrol: http://www.volkslied.at/lieder/volksmusik-db.php, where scores and recordings may also be found.

Sacred and Liturgical Music

CANTUS: A Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant

Website: CANTUS

Content: CANTUS is a large, steadily growing umbrella site for indices of Latin ecclesiastical chant. Originally a project of the Cantus Planus study group of the International Musicological Society, its original home was the Catholic University of America (Washington, DC) under Ruth Steiner. Debra Lacoste (University of Waterloo) is its current project manager. Jan Kolacek (Charles University, Prague) is its current developer. Users can search by textual incipit, keyword, saints’ name, liturgical occasion, and chant identification number. Tools for browsing, analysis, and data-entry are provided. Slides for Alison Altstatt's talk on Vespers of 2014 and a YouTube video by Lacoste (also 2014) give a sense of the diverse uses to which CANTUS is put.

Roman Gradual published in 1614. Trento, Castello di Bonconsiglio, Biblioteca Feininger, FSG 19. This was the first volume (1614) in the Medicea [reformed] series edited by Felice Anerio and Francesco Suriano.

Cantus Fractus Database (Projetto Raphael)

Website: Cantus Fractus

An abiding problem in chant research is the evaluation of rhythm and proportion. This website (in Italian) by Marco Gozzi explores interpretative methods for repertories that are viewable online in early prints and manuscripts. A search form facilitates the retrieval of examples by source location. Excellent leaf-by-leaf viewing tools are provided.

ChantDigger

Website: ChantDigger

The online implementation of Max Haas's lengthy investigation of chant variants is recent. After loading the data one can search either by text or by melody. A "canvas" offers a graph to map chant movement.

Conductus: Online catalogue of poetry and musical settings

Website: Conductus

Content: Mark Everist's conductus cataogue, officially called CPI (Cantus pulcriorem invenire, contains 835 works found in 547 sources. It facilitates search by title, source, form, style of setting, stanza, poet, language, poetic structure (several subfields), and terminal accent. Sources listed are digitized and viewable online. Cross-listed to DIAMM and RISM.

Fontes Cantus Bohemiae

Website: Fontes Cantus Bohemiae

This collaboration aims to inventory chant sources in Czech regions of Central Europe. Data representing 7,200 chants from the 12th-14th centuries have been uploaded to date in CANTUS-compatible formats.

Gradualia: Hungarian Chant Database

Website: Gradualia

This CANTUS-related project stems from the earlier CAO-ECE (Corpus Antiphonalium Officii - Ecclesiarum Centralis Europae) work, which was designed to inventory and compare medieval Central European Office repertories. This undertaking aims to apply similar kinds of studies to variations in elements of the Mass. To that end a series of 14th-16th-century sources from Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia have recently been entered. Search may be made by text string, CANTUS number, and other parameters.

Mass Database

Website: http://www.mdb.uni-mainz.de/

Content: Records for c.40,000 settings of the Ordinary of the Mass from 1400 to the present day. In process of migration (March 2014).

Motet Database

Website: Motet Database

Guide to motets and Mass Propers in manuscript and printed sources from the period 1475-1600. 33,000 items, indexed section by section. Excludes Magnificats, Lamentation, canticle and strophic hymns. Extensive scribal and source detail.

Illumination from an early Portuguese cancional.

Portuguese Early Music (PEM) Database

Website: Portuguese Early Music Database (PEM)

The Portuguese Early Music Database (PEM) is a model website in that it links Portuguese music manuscript listings with both RISM entries and the CANTUS database. PEM is searchable by genre, feast, and composer. The digital holdings of the Centro de Estudios de Sociologia e Estética Musical consist overwhelming of short sacred vocal works found sources that are extremely fragile and therefore well served by digitization. Manuscripts come mainly from the 14th-16th centuries. All sources are reproduced in color. A full listing is here. PEM also maintains a list of links for early sacred-music projects.

Printed Sacred Music Database

Website: Printed Sacred Music Database

This collection of metadata and musical incipits (1500-1800) has been developed over decades under the direction of David Bryant at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini Onlus, Venice, with significant contributions by many individual scholars, and is now served at the Institute of Musicology, University of Fribourg (CH) and implemented by the Swiss RISM office. Search by composers, publishers, musical incipits, and much else. The musical incipits are encoded in DARMS and are rendered in mensural notation.

Medieval Music Database (MMD)

Website:Medieval Music Database

An antiphon for the Feast of St Martin from the Medieval Music Database. First antiphon for the feast of St. Martin ("O beatum ponteficem" ( from Perugia, Biblioteca Comunale MS 2796, f. 97v). Note the original neume types above the modern transcription.

The original database, a model of integrated presentation combined with independent search of text and music fields, was developed by John Stinson and John Griffiths at LaTrobe University (Australia) between 1987 and 1999, when the university's music department was closed. It was maintained over the next five years by the University Library and is still accessible (2014) at the above link. Plans to bring it under the umbrella of DIAMM are under discussion.

One of MMD's great strength, for students of liturgy, is the ability to scroll bilaterally through the temporal and sanctoral cycles, that is by feasts of the Ordinary and those of the Proper. Many other search fields are supported including text, composer, genre, manuscript, and melody. MMD is cross-reference to the CAO database.

The musical examples in MMD were produced with Scribe software, also developed by Stinson and Griffiths (c. 1990). It encoded neumes and ligatures (mainly for fourteenth-century music) for printing on a color deskjet printer. It was designed the DOS operating system and could export to the SCORE music-notation program.

RELICS (Renaissance Liturgical Imprints)

Website: RELICS: A Census

This database, hosted at the University of Michigan, contains entries on c. 14,000 sources of liturgical music printed through the year 1600. Started by David Crawford (1995) and continued by James Borders, the database is contains entries from publications in Grance, Germany, and many other European countries. Coverage extends to multiple Roman Catholic rites and to Protestant and Jewish liturgies.

Instrumental Music

Classical String Quartets

Website: Classical String Quartets

Content: Duke University's Classical String Quartets website may not represent the largest collection of this repertory, but it is the largest collection of digitized prints currently accessible online. Its contents are characterized as "rare and unusual" rather than mainstream. If you are looking for variety, consider Förster, Gassmann, Pixis, or Wranitsky (a small sampling of composers represented).

A violin by Gio. Paolo Maggini, Brescia, c.1610. Liuteria Bresciana.

Instrument Makers

Liuteria Bresciana

Website: Brescian Instrument Makers

Brescia was the first home of violin-making. So many of the early makers died in the plague of 1630-31 that Brescia was unable to regain its former glory. It exerted considerable influence on instrument-making in nearby Cremona, which flourished after 1650. Ugo Ravasio's website (Liuteria Bresciana, which covers the period from 1550 into until the eighteenth century, mainly emphasizes the pre-1630 period.

National Music Museum

Website: National Music Museum

The rear of a viola by Gasparo Bertolotti da Salò made before 1609. National Music Museum No. 3368.

The National Music Museum (Vermilion, South Dakota, US) possesses a highly diverse collection of instruments. It also houses a program on instrument conservation. The main components of the collections are (1) the Witten-Rawlins collection of Northern Italian (Brescian-Cremonese) strings from the seventeenth century, (2) an extensive group of instruments manufactured in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and (3) a substantial collection of instruments from other parts of the world. The NMM provides links to many other little-known collections.

The first music folio from J. S. Bach's unaccompanied suite for cello BWV 1001 in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek Mus. ms. P 268. (Three other manuscript sources for this work are available at the site).

Composer/Theorist Documentation

Bach Digital

Website: Bach Digital

Bach Digital, based in Leipzig, is a one-stop shop for a catalogue of work by J.S. Bach (BWV); of scanned manuscripts; and of a database of manuscripts associated with the Bach family. When complete, it is intended to serve a wide variety of needs of scholars and interests of a wider music audience.

An earlier Datenbank der Bach-Quellen (Database of Bach Sources) operates under the auspices of Göttingen's Johann-Sebastian-Bach Institute here.

Beethoven Digital

Website: Beethoven Digital

The Staatsbibliothek in Berlin makes available close-up views of numerous details of the Beethoven's autograph for the Ninth Symphony. This view shows one of the best known passages of the work: Bars 921-922 of the Maestoso movement with the text "Tochter aus Elysium, Freude, schöner Götterfunken!" (Artaria 204(4), f. 124.) A general commentary on the nine symphonies can be found here.

Handel Reference Database

Website: Handel Reference Database

The Handel Reference Database (HRD) provides a continuously updated version of the documentation that accompanied the Stanford doctoral thesis on the reception of the music of G. Fr. Handel by Ilias Chryssochoidis.

Mozart: New Documents

Website: Mozart: New Documents

The aim of this collaborative project, managed by Dexter Edge and David Black, is to bring documentation not reported in musicological literature to public attention. Some items have been retrieved from large repositories of digitized text. A chornological list of posted documents can be found here.

Schenker Documents Online

Website: Schenker Documents Online

Schenker Documents Online (Southampton University) provides a scholarly edition of Heinrich Schenker's correspondence, teaching notes, translations of materials in German, and to show the gestation and development of his ideas. It concentrates on the period 1925-1930.

Franz Schubert

Website: Schubert Online

Schubert Online offers combined access to a total of 555 autograph scores, letters, and other documentation on Schubert. Much of the work was facilitated by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund [WWTF or Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds]. The holdings covered come from Vienna's City Hall [Rathaus], the Austrian National Library, the State Library of Berlin, and the National Library of Norway, with intellectual contributions from the Music and Psychology program in Cologne and the Musicology Institute at the University of Vienna. Full-text search is supported for the letters. Deutsch Numbers are used for the music manuscripts. In most cases copies of manuscripts must be ordered from the holding library.

Ludwig Senfl: Works

Website: Senfl Online

The most important composer in Bavaria in the first half of the sixteenth century, Ludwig Senfl (c. 1490-1543) spent almost all his life in the Munich court chapel, first as choirboy, then as musician and composer. Polyphonic incipits in mensural notation are among the items that can be retrieved by genre, voicing, and so forth. Cross-linked to DIAMM.

Giuseppe Verdi: Correspondence

Website: Verdi Correspondence (Braidense Library)

This collection of letters (1838-1883) especially concerns the countess Clara Maffei and Verdi's wife, Giuseppina Strepponi. It was placed online for the Verdi centenary in 2013 by the Braidense National Library in Milan.

Ricordi Historical Archives

Website: Ricordi Archives: Verdi Correspondence and Memorabilia

This great bulk of items in this miscellany (1786 of 2092), which includes corrspondence, scenary designs, pertains to Verdi and his dealings with Giovanni, Tito, and Giulio Ricordi, deals with librettists, casting, staging, and other production details, 1849-1893. One letter (1897) is from Giacomo Puccini.

Digitized Manuscripts and Early Printed Music

Danish National Sheet Music Archive

Website: Danish National Sheet Music Archive

The Danish National Sheet Music Archive is a model operation. Note the frame at the left, which identifies all digitized music; a special collection for flute; another for guitar; and the entire Carl Nielsen Edition available for download. Although Danish music is well served, the site includes a great deal more, including eighteenth-century manuscript, standard repertory in high-quality late nineteenth-century prints, and a special theater collection (libretti et al.).

Early Music Online

Website: Early Music Online

Early Music Online is a digital repository of music in printed anthologies principally from the sixteenth century. Based on holdings in the British Library and related to one series of RISM listings, the digitized volumes OF EMO include madrigals, sacred songs, music "concerted by voices and instruments," and pedagogical works.

National Library of Scotland

Website: National Library of Scotland

These digitized sources consist of diverse materials--memoirs, lyrics to Scottish folksongs, musical magazines, and Scottish keyboard music in multiple collections and viewing modes.

Singakademie Music Archives

Website: Singakademie Music Archives

The collection of mainly eighteenth-century vocal music belonging to Berlin's Singakademie since the time of Karl Friedrich Zelter was long dislodged by twentieth-century wars and politics. The institution's history is the focus of a project to digitize letters, documents, and materials on which prospective applications were tested. The Singakademie is also a participant in the Bach Digital and other projects related to music and musical culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Online Thematic Catalogues and Indices

The Bizet Catalogue

Listing for "Le Matin" in the Bizet Catalogue. See the complete work entry here.

Website: The Bizet Catalogue

Every repertory has idiosyncracies that make the adoption of a standard template ill-advised. Hugh Macdonald's Bizet Catalogue shows one of Bizet's idiosyncracies through a listing of the composer's transcriptions of works by others (Gounod, Mozart, Saint-Saëns, et al.). The primary listing of works gives folio-by-folio detail of manuscripts for longer works with texts of underlying verses and notes on their authors, citations of self-borrowings, and much else.

Benjamin Britten Thematic Catalogue

Morse code is imitated in this early (1935) incidental music by Benjamin Britten for the film "6d telegram". The text for choral numbers may have been by W. H. Auden. Further on the music see the full listing.

Website: Benjamin Britten Thematic Catalogue

The Britten Thematic Catalogue, an online only project based at the Britten-Pears Foundation, provides multiple access points for searching. Britten's career was extremely wide-ranging. His arrangements of music by Henry Purcell (54 titles) and of British folksongs (74 titles) filled much of his time in the 1940s and early 50s. The full gamut stretches from chamber music (134 items) mainly from the 1920s to his stage work Death in Venice (1973). Each work contains a detailed index with a graphical display and sound files.

Frescobaldi Online Thematic Catalogue

Website: Frescobaldi Online Thematic Catalogue

This database has a multi-faceted search interface. It is cross-linked to RISM IDs and has detailed source listings. (Content tends to vary slightly by source.) The general time-frame indicator gives a sense of the long tradition of recopying that followed the composer's works. Links to printed commentaries and modern editions are provided. Currently 906 works are included.

Carl Nielsen Works Catalogue

Website: Carl Nielsen Works Catalogue

The Danish National Library has prepared this online catalogue of 414 pieces, including operas, symphonies, and concertos plus vocal, choral, and chamber pieces. Each entry includes musical incipits, lists of sources and sketches, citations for textual sources, and lists of performances.

The incipit for the overture of Carl Nielsen's Maskarade, a comic opera composed in 1905 Carl Nielsen Works Catalogue.

In association with the Nielsen Catalogue, implemented by Axel Teich Geertinger, an editing tool for metadata used in similar projects has been developed by Sigfrid Lundberg and can be downloaded from Github. Based on MEI, the foundation of MerMeid was laid by Kristine Richts and Maya Hartwig. Further details about MerMEId and a sample implementation can be found at this site.

Ethnomusicology

Old Persian system of musical notation of the Farabi School.

Images, sound files, and videos on the internet offer great scope for ethnomusicological study, but much of the material is limited to poorly documented materials with arbitrary labels. Only selected sites can be included here.

UNC Middle Eastern Music

Modern transcription of the above Persian notation. from the Farabi School.

Website: Middle Eastern Music

The University of North Carolina offers top-down collections of selected repertories from Egyptian, Turkish, Iraqi, and classical Persian music. Each site varies from the others. Explanatory material concerning composers, instruments, styles, and cultural emphases are general to most. The Farabi site also discusses theoretical concepts in Persian classical music. The Turkish one contains many sound examples.

Digital Image Archives

Digital Image Archives of Medieval Music

Website: DIAMM

Originally a site for viewing images of rare manuscripts at various levels of resolution, DIAMM is increasingly an umbrella site for diverse projects in medieval music. The core textual database is organized by source location. Registered users may add their own comments about individual works. List and faceted search capabilities are currently being added. Now includes an online teaching resource for musicians wishing to learn more about the notation of medieval music. Register at http://diamm.nsms.ox.ac.uk/moodle/.

Emblematica Online

Website: Emblematica Online

This umbrella project serves a growing number of library-based projects, which are here cited individually. Emblem books are rich resources for those interested in decoding visual information in early printed materials. The collective site currently (April 2014) lists 636 emblem books. Searches by title, text, and image are supported.

Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB)

Website: Herzog August Bibliothek Emblem Books

This website makes available 636 emblems books, principally from the 17th and 18th centuries. It represents only a tiny fraction of the rich holdings of the Herzog August Bibliothek, which is particularly rich in seventeenth-century materials. August the Younger developed a three-tiered description system still in use today. Its librarians later included the polymath G. W. Leibniz (1691-1716) and the poet and dramatist G. E. Lessing (1770-1781).

University of Illinois

Website: University of Illinois Emblem Books

Germans sources figure prominently among the 351 books at the University of Illinois site, which is cross-linked to one at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolffenbüttel.

French Emblems at Glasgow

Website: French Emblems at Glascow

This site hosts 27 browsable emblem books associated with 16th-century France. Eack book islinked to an alphabetical listing by author that enables rapid exploration. Some sources are bilaterally in Latin. A smaller collection of Italian emblem books is also held.

Rare Music Manuscripts in the British Library

Website: Rare Music Manuscripts in the British Library

Content: See the Old Hall manuscript, Purcell's coronation anthem for James II, an excerpt from Handel's Messiah, Bach's autograph for Book Two of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Mozart's thematic catalogue of his composition, Beethoven's sketches for the Sixth Symphony ("Pastoral"), and much else. (Music manscripts make up just one part of the holdings viewable at this portal.)

Musica Sacra

Website: Musica Sacra

Content: notable collection of scanned chant books at http://musicasacra.com/music/ and http://musicasacra.com/resource-lists/. Includes the Liber Usualis and many other resources for modern use in traditional settings.

Resources for Chronology

Full bibliographical entry for the typescript catalogue of music-related works published in the German Democratic Republic in 1975.

Music Bibliography in the German Democratic Republic

Website: Annual Music Bibliographies in the German Democratic Republic

Music Bibliography in the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR, 1949-1990) is an idiosyncratic subject but one which those engaged in music history of the second half of the twentieth century may find compelling. The illustration accompanying this entry shows the full title of a typescript catalogue of new works (scores, writings on music theory, books, articles, and much miscellany) for the year 1975. This item can be found here.

Hofmeister XIX

Website: Hofmeister XIX

Content: Database of 330,000 records from the Hofmeister Monatsberichte, 1829-1900, listing music publications of the period. Compiled by Friedrich Hofmeister and published in Leipzig by Breitkopf & Härtel. Well indexed for quick searches.

Libretto Portals

Title-page of Rinuccini's Arianna, set to music by Monteverdi (Venice, 1639). Braidense National Library, Milan, Corniani-Algarotti No. 0497.

Corniani-Algarotti Collection

Website: Corniani-Algarotti Libretto Collection

Although the search form shows only four fields, the name field (nome) will accept almost any proper noun (surname of composer, librettist, scenographer, city, theater, etc.). Most sources are digitized and downloadable. This collection holds 9,000 libretti (in Italian) from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Some were published and used outside Italy. Most texts were for operas, but oratorio, cantata, and serenata texts can also be found.

VifaMusik Libretto Portal

Website: http://libretti.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/start/static.html ViFaMusik Libretto Portal

The new (2014) VifaMusik Libretto Portal searches across component collections held in the Bavarian State Library (5600 items), the Frankfurt University Library, and the Library of the German Institute in Rome (1500 titles). One can search by composer, librettist, and so forth. Since the term libretto referred to any small book, texts for oratorios, cantatas, serenatas, ballets, and so forth occur in some of the constituent collections.

Index to Opera and Ballet Sources Online

Website: Index to Opera and Ballet Sources Online

This title index for individual works relies on aggregators (the Braidense Raccolta Drammatica, ViFaMusik, the Internet Culturale, et al.) for most of its contents. Since it does not distinguish between different versions of single titles, those with an acute interest in a defined topic may still wish to consult the aggregations. It relies on five data fields: title, composer, genre, format, and date. Its principal holdings are libretti. Some links to scores can also be found. The advance search tool at atom.lib.byu.edu/opbs/advanced allows one to search with individual aggregations.

Digitized Music Bibliographies

Eitner's Quellen-Lexikon

Website: Eitner's Quellen-Lexikon

Robert Eitner's Quellen-Lexikon, published by Breitkopf & Härtel between 1900 nand 1904, was the Bible for generations of scholars seeking to determine which libraries held surviving manuscripts of music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although a portion of these sources are gradually finding their way online, Eitner remains an invaluable record of what sources existed before 1914. The scanned material was proofreading and corrected prior to posting. This site is hosted by the Musicology Institute of the University of Zurich.

Portals and Search Engines for Music

Leaf from an anonymous manuscript introduction to the recorder preserved in the Basel University Library and available through e-manuscripta.ch in source F_X-3.].

e-manuscripta

Webite: e-manuscripta

This comprehensive portal for materials in Swiss libraries serves scores, photographs, letters, pedagogical materials, and much else. The five-leaf recorder tutor (from a sixteenth-century manuscript) shown at the side represents its heterogeneity, which also extends to sixteenth-century part-books, organ tablatures, correspondence by Martin Luther, photographs of Ferruccio Busoni, and a thousand maps.

Europeana: Search Engine for European (Music) Sources

Website: Europeana

This umbrella site for European digitization projects covers a great deal besides music. To start, limit the search by an obvious word for music (musique, musica, Musik, etc.). This will give you an idea of how to further limit the search. Europeana is updated often. Among the items that should be visible are music prints, manuscripts, newspapers dedicated to music, sheet-music, audio files, etc. Since Europeana is an aggregation, it provides links back to the sponsoring libraries that hold the original sources. The site can be searched in many languages.

Gallica

Website: Gallica

Gallica provides access to an enormous array of digitized materials from all periods of French history and many aspects of French musical life in addition to great quantities of non-musical material. Among its highlights are illuminated manuscripts contained the poetry (much of it set to music) by Guillaume Machaut), manuscripts of the operas Francesco Cavalli composed for the wedding of Louis XIV, a very large amount of music printed in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and important documentation for theatrical history.

The Internet Culturale

Website: Internet Culturale

An umbrella site for digitized materials in Italian libraries. The riches of Italy's collective Internet Culturale (cultural internet) are difficult to overstate. A vast span of different kinds of graphically reproduced material will be found here. All of it is accompanied by generous supplies of metadata from cataloguing records. While one may be able to find a specific item such as an , one may also discover on a different spoke a long list of all the works in which the singer of aria appeared. Users can create accounts to keep previous discoveries collected in one place.

Munich Digital Manuscript Collection

Website: Munich Digital Library Manuscripts

The collection of digital materials grows so rapidly that any listing of individual collections within it is doomed to be inadequate. Several project are cooperative. The historical emphasis is on Middle Ages and Renaissance, with much emphasis on religious figures and documents (e.g. at Europeana Regia). A combined search engine (http://www.digital.collections.de) for all the digitized materials in the Bavarian State Library is currently under development.

Peachnote Music n-Gram Viewer

Website: Peachnote n-Gram Viewer

MIDI-based search by string.

RISM Music Manuscript Inventory

Website: RISM Music Manuscript Inventory

This inventory of musical manuscripts in the libraries of roughly 60 countries was begun in 1952. It is still growing (under the management of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales). The online implementation occurs in the Bavarian State Library. RISM's numerous virtues are easily discovered through this search engine, which came online in 2011 and undergoes continuous development. A RISM blog keeps registered users informed of current activities. RISM has working groups on most continents. Much material that is currently contained in RISM books will (with updating) likely find its way online over the coming years. Those interested in contributing to RISM's efforts can find a local representative by consulting this list.

Music-search categories in Themefinder.

Themefinder: Music-Incipit Search

Website: Themefinder

Related literature: "Search-Effectiveness Measures for Symbolic Music Queries in Very Large Databases" (Craig Stuart Sapp, Yi-Wen Liu, and Eleanor Selfridge-Field)]

The Themefinder search engine was prototyped at CCARH in 1996 by David Huron, Andreas Kornstädt, and Walter B. Hewlett. A large number of Stanford University students including Unjung Kim and Leigh VanHandel plus visiting students including Bret Aarden participated in its early development. The search engine was originally developed to study user behavior. Over the intervening years it has been used for a large statistical study of search-efficiency. The current search engine is by Craig Stuart Sapp.

Themefinder contains several repertories, most of which are publicly viewable and searchable. The principal repertories are Folk, Classical, and Renaissance. Although more than 100,000 incipits and associated metadata are present in the database, users may select just one. "Hits" satisfying search-criteria can be collected on the Themefinder Clipboard and can be exported.

Incipits can be searched at five points on a continuing from the most specific to the fuzziest. Filter for meter, mode, and key may be used. MIDI files are available for each entry. Help menus area available at the website. Those interested in contributing an encoded repertory to Themefinder should describe the existing repertory and format in a query letter.

Music Theory Resources

Illustration of the Sixth Rule from De imperfectionum notarum musicalium of Tinctoris.

Additional materials can be found on the homepage of the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature at Indiana University, available at CHTML, the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature.

Early Music Theory

Website: Early Music Theory

Early Music Theory subsumes the new digital edition of the works of Johannes Tinctoris. Twelve treatises are listed on the earlier Stoa site, and three are viewable.

German writings on music theory and musical institutions

Website: Writings on Music Theory

This digitized collection (176 titles) from the Bavarian State Library emphasizes works printed between 1516 (Glareanus, Basel) and 1900. It includes a number of books related to individual theaters (mainly German).

Lexicon musicum Latinum

Website: Lexicon musicum Latinum

This lexicon of musical terminology up to c. 1600 extends to evidence of speech, literary references, music-theory manuscripts, and first lines of tracts.

Monuments of Partimenti

Website: Monuments of Partimenti

Robert Gjerdingen's online website for partimenti introduces the basic approach to improvisation and composition based on suggestive figured-bass sketches that survive, according to the seminal work of Giorgio Sanguinetti's The Art of Partimento (2012), in abundance from the eighteenth century. The website is still under development, but between the materials available here and the companion site linked to the book (above), users can form an elementary notion of the practice.

Saggi Musicali Italiani

Website: Saggi Musicali Italiani (SMI)

A collection of encoded music-theory treatises modeled on the original TML design. Now headed by Andreas Giger. Sources from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries are currently available.

Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum

Website: Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML)

The TLG, based at Indiana University School of Music, was begun in 1990 and extensively developed by Thomas Mathiesen, with the collaboration of many scholars in the US and abroad. TML was one of the earliest databases (and likely to earliest in musicology) to be fully searchable in a single pass.

While this database is exclusively devoted to writings in Latin from antiquity to the seventeenth century, the rise of parallel efforts for digitizing the texts of music-theoretical writings in modern languages spawned several parallel efforts, which are now subsumed under the title CHTML (the Center for the History and Theory of Music Literature). Giuliano Di Bacco, who now heads the project, is at work on new digital approaches to structuring and searching the material.

Thesaurus Musicarum Italicarum

Website: Thesaurus Musicarum Italicarum (TMI)

Frans Wiering's Thesaurus Musicarum Italicarum, which is entirely separate from the TLG, representeda second incarnation of his CD-ROM encodings of all the treatises of Gioseffe Zarlino (1995). The CD offered all the musical examples as MIDI and DARMS files as well as modern notation. Its viability was undermined by the evolution of operating systems in the early 2000s. Other works of Italian music theory from the decades following Zarlino were encoded subsequentlyby students at Utrecht University.

Traités français sur la musique

Website: Traités français sur la musique

This website, based on the model of the TML, offers encoded texts of French music theory principally postdating the year 1600. Peter Slemon is the originator and director. To subscribe, please visit the website.

Historical Audio and Video (Film)

The history of performed music is a compelling interest of a growing sector of musicology. Incremental changes in the retrospective reach of copyright in the several countries that were most active in early recording activities inhibit public access to exemplars. Work proceeds nonetheless. Only sites with accessible material are listed here.

The Edison Recorded Sound Archive

Website: Edison Recorded Sound Archive

This collection, administered by the US National Park Service (Thomas Edison's lab is classified as a national historic park), holds 11,000 cylinder recordings and 38,000 disc recordings from the years 1898-1929. Some recordings have been reissued on CDs. In general users may request the copying of one recording at the time. No online access is currently provided from this site, but some materials can be found at other sites. The Archive is rich is related holdings, including black-and-white photographs of early performers (c. 5,000) and correspondence.

Three hundred forty-one silent films made by the Edison company between 1898 and 1912 can be found at the Library of Congress's Inventing Entertainment website.

The Emile Berliner Collection

Website: The Emile Berliner Collection

The inventor of the microphone and the disc recording, Emile Berliner (1847-1929) is survived by 400 documents and 118 sound recordings in the Library of Congress. Like Edison, he experimented with film as well. Digitization of the collection is in progress.

Internet Archive 78RPMs

Website: Internet Archive 78 PRMs

Recordings mastered for 78 rpms (revolutions per minute) were produced prolifically from the 1920s into the 1950s. The Internet Archive collection includes cylinder recordings and 78s. It is searchable in several ways. The download statistics shows that the most popular holdings are songs sung by Enrico Caruso, Bill Murray, Edith Piaf, and Al Jolson. Current holdings number 13,200.

The National Jukebox (US)

Website: The National Jukebox

The National Jukebox, serving selected holding of the Library of Congress in Washington DC, certainly give the flavor of recording. Much of their material comes from the Victor Company (later RCA Victor) and the Berliner Company. It currently (2014) serves more than 10,000 works but remains a work in progress. A substantial range of popular and folk songs from c. 1900 reflects the great ethnic diversity of the U.S. in that era. Yet more than half the materials were recorded in Camden NJ (the home of the Victor Company). Users add the works they want to hear to a playlist and hear streamed examples (the best current workable solution to rites issues). Most available holdings are from the years 1900-1930.

New Zealand Pianola Site

Website: New Zealand Pianola Site

The New Zealand Pianola website is well-known to honky-tonk enthusiasts. Through painstaking research over many years, many hundreds of piano-roll performances have been captured in MIDI files of high quality. The user interface makes searches and launching sound files simple. The music comes mainly from the years 1900-1930. Zipped packages of files can be downloaded. At last reckoning 1040 files were available.

Historical Maps

British Historical Maps

Website: British Historical Maps

The National Archives (UK) hosts a large collection of maps and also has links to parallel materials with similar content.

David Rumsey Map Collection

Website: http://www.davidrumsey.com

Contents: 18th and19th century maps of the Americas. All maps are geo-encoded to facilitate geo-spatial and past-time applications.

Perry-Castañeda Historical Maps

Website: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/index.html

Notable for its spatial and historical spread and the detail with which the maps are specified chronologically. Many sources are scanned from maps printed in then nineteenth (or earlier) century.

Newspapers

ANNO

Wesbite: Historical Austrian Periodicals and Newspapers

Newspapers were published in Austria on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Readers will be grateful for the calendars that introduce each year of the collection (e.g. for 1705) and also for the thumbnails of each page of every issue. Almost a century (1606-1703) remains to be added. The overall range is from 1568 to today.

"Chracas" Digitale: Il Diario di Roma

Website: Chracas Digitale

This "diary" of news flowing into Rome from all over Europe was introduced as the Diario d'Ungheria [the Diary of Hungary] in 1716. It followed the earlier pattern of weekly avvisi that reported military news. That model was soon replaced (1718) by the more culturally oriented Diario ordinario. Under this title it rapidly gained readership. By 1721 it was publishing three issues a week. Most contain 12 pages. In 1799 the title changed to the Diario di Roma. Chracas remained its publisher until 1894. At present issues from 1716 to 1760 have been digitized by the Biblioteca Casasnatense, Rome.

The Gazzette Bolognese

Website: Gazzette Bolognesi

The Gazzette Bolognesi have intended parallels with the Diario di Roma. Bologna was historically a papal state. It gathered the same news and valued it similarly, though occasionally with less emphasis on the affairs of cardinals. Because of larger page size the Gazzette could convey more news from more places. (The Gazzette had only four pages per issue.) This fully digitized series runs from 1645 through 1796.

Le Mercure galant

Website: Le Mercure galant

Many issues of Le Mercure and its analogues under variant titles (Le Mercure de France et al.) can be found be searching the Bibiliothéque National's Gallica website (as above). Single installments accrue steadily but some holes remain. User must be aware of the periodical's complex history of changes in title and differences of character that each portends.

Music Magazines

Musical Magazines

Start site: Musical Gazzettes

Almost 25,000 musical magazines published in Italy before the first world war have been digitized by the Centro internazionale di ricerca sui periodici musicali (The International Center for Research on Musical Periodicals) in Parma. Among there holdings the most prolific were Milan's Gazzetta Musicale di Milano, London's Musical Standard, and Paris's Revue et gazette musicale. The best way to find them from this start site is to use the filters for language and date of publication at the left.

The Phonographic Newspaper

Website: Phonographische Zeitschrift

The Photographische Zeitschrift (Phonographic Newspaper) was published on poor-quality paper from 1900 to 1938. It was subtitled "a fact sheet for the music- and speech-making industry". This site is under development (2014).

Large Text Corpora

Deutsches Text Archiv

Website: Deutsches Text Archiv

This carefully executed project aims to put the classic printed literature in German online. Its holdings are far better curated that the same titles in Google Books and other aggregation gateways. Optically recognized text is shown side-by-side with the original image. Books are categorized by century (according to date of publication). Contains dramas (Goethe), treatises (Karl Marx), autobiographies (Otto von Bismark), lyrics (Brockes, Klopstock), novels (Jean Paul), legal writings, local history, travel literature, theology, satire, and a long list of short-run early newspapers. The great strengths of the DTA include its internal search, its side-by-side view original and recognized text, and its tiered metadata structures.

Digital Libraries Gateway

Website: Collaborative Digital Libraries Gateway

This Library of Congress gateway for international projects gives an overview of collaborative projects with an American component and currently including Brazil, France, the Netherlands, and Siberia.

Medieval Nordic Text Archive

Website: Medieval Nordic Text Archive (MNTA)

The MNTA is a TEI-complaint collection of writings in old Scandinavian languages. It offers users an appropriate text font and an encoding manual for those who wish to collaborate.

Oxford Text Archive

Website: Oxford Text Archive (OTA)

The OTA was begun on mainframe computers with the curated encoding of texts important for the study of the languages and literatures both early and modern. Its website contains numerous links to tools and related projects.

Perseus

Website: Perseus

Perseus was originally developed by Gregory Crane at Tufts University with the aim of enabling students to focus on small portions of the classical literature encoded by PHI and the TLG. It subsequently expanded to incorporate many other aspects of classical civilization, including graphical explanations of textual references, as for example here. Its catalogue is online. It is now expanding into other cultures and later periods. For each of these a digital lexicon is available. This one is for Arabic-English translation.

PHI Latin Texts

Website: PHI Latin Texts

These classical Latin texts (200-c. 600 CE) encoded by the Packard Humanities Institute are easy to search. The search engine (also developed in-house) is focused on letter combinations and word proximity (see the and/or/near operators).

Rousseau Online

Website: Rousseau Online: Contents

Rousseau's writings contain countless items of interest. Here you can find the text of Pygmalion, Rousseau's Essay on Modern Music, his letters to Charles Burney and Messieur Raynal, the Dictionnaire de la Musique, and a host of miscellaneous writings from all periods of his life. The script is modern. ePub and PDF formats are both supported.

Thesaurus Linguae Graecae

Website: Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG)

The TLG issues from a pioneering effort to develop tools for the computerized study of ancient Greek. This effort preceded the advent of personal computer by a decade. Because of the need for special fonts, the collection is still mainly distributed on CD-ROM. An abridged version of the TLG is now online. It requires the advance download of a viewing font. The TLG website is now linked to a searchable online version of the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon.

Image Resources

Digital Scriptorium

Website:Digital Scriptorium

Image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts. Based at the University of California, Berkeley, it includes holdings from many US libraries, with extensive folio-specific information about each source.

Index of Christian Art

Website: Index of Christian Art

One hundred twenty thousand (120,000) images from public and private collections in the English-speaking world plus additional indicies; roughly 100,000 are available to public via fee-sbased institutional subscriptions. Holdings from early centuries of Christianity to 1550.

Songs of the Niebelungen

File:NiebelungenLied WieGvntherSifridenzvo der hohzit bat bsb00035316...png

Opening stanzas of the song "Wie Gvnther Sifriden zvo der hohzit bat" from Das Niebelungenlied, Bavarian State Library 00035316, Hss Cgm 34.

Website: Das Niebelungenlied

These poetic texts, considered to date from before 1280, display settings of the legends that inspired Richard Wagner. As is characteristic of those resources preserved for posterity in this period, the script is very carefully prepared, the vellum on which it is preserved obviously sturdy. Each Lied is illuminated by a carmine letter. The texts mention Sifriden (Siegfried), Prvnhilde (Brunhilde), Gvnther (Gunther), and others. The illustration shows the first three stanzas of "Wie Gvnther Sifriden zvo der hohzit bat" (No. 12 of 39). Later portions of the source contain religious songs (Klage).

Watermark Databases

Watermark examination provides a fundamental (analogue) method of sorting and ordering materials that are undated or lack a provenance. They are especially useful for clustering manuscripts by paper type. The combination of digital photography and tools for photographic editing can be combined with extensive existing research on paper-makers to shed new light on musical sources. The sites listed here include watermarks associated specifically with music manuscripts.

WZIS: Watermark Information System

Website: Wasserzeichen Informationssystem Deutschland

The WZIS is a project of extensive scope. Its goal is to compile a graphical database of watermarks used throughout Europe. The project is based at the Landesarchiv of Baden-Württemburg. A graphical watermark lexicon called Piccard is under development at the Stuttgart Hauptstaatsarchiv. Related lexicons of makers and mills have also been developed. A textual search form is also available. Although we are aware of many other digital collections of watermarks, this one stands out for its tight coupling with music manuscripts, particularly in the large collections of the Berlin and Dresden state libraries, which are in turn linked to the RISM OPAC.

Credits

2014 Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, an affiliate of the Packard Humanities Institute, at Stanford University. Compilation and brief explanations by Eleanor Selfridge-Field (with contributions by many colleagues), technical implementation by Craig Stuart Sapp, and assistance by Ilias Chrissochoidis. Persistent URLs have been used where available. For contact information please use this link.