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University of York Library
Library Subject Guides

Music (School of Arts & Creative Technologies)

Useful Free Websites

Welcome to your online guide to finding resources for Music!

Music Search Engines

Deezer: Discover more than 150.000 tracks, create your Playlists, upload your entire song library and lets you play any song in full track without having to download anything.

Musicovery: Discover new music based on your mood, this free webradio let you browse music styles and epochs.

SongzaAllows you to search for and listen to music on the Web. Find a song and listen immediately, in one place. Users can choose exactly the song or artist they want to hear, and does not require them to subscribe or pay for its services.

StreamzyStreamzy is a media search utility that allows users to search for media, stream it, and create and save playlists.

Online Scores

Aaron Copland Collection -- this remarkable website provides digital images of primary source materials from this collection at the Library of Congress, including sketch materials.

African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920 -- from the collections of Brown University, this collection consists of 1,305 pieces of African-American sheet music dating from 1850 through 1920, including many songs from the heyday of antebellum black face minstrelsy in the 1850s and from the abolitionist movement of the same period.

Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads -- The Bodleian Library has over 30,000 ballads, the original printed materials ranging from the 16th- to the 20th-century. The Broadside Ballads project makes the digitised copies of the sheets and ballads available to the research community.

DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music) is a leading resource for the study of medieval manuscripts. We present images and metadata for thousands of manuscripts on this website. We also provide a home for scholarly resources and editions, undertake digital restoration of damaged manuscripts and documents, publish high-quality facsimiles, and offer our expertise as consultants.

Elliot Carter sketches -- The Library of Congress has made available digitized images of sketches for Carter's Sonata for Cello and Piano and for the String Quartet No. 1. The site also offers a digitized version of the 1984 book, The Musical Languages of Elliott Carter, containing essays by Charles Rosen, 'The Musical Languages of Elliott Carter' and 'One Easy Piece', as well as "An Interview with Elliott Carter".

Indiana University Sheet Music Collection -- this web site allows you to search some of the holdings from the Lilly Library's approximately 150,000 pieces of sheet music, including those for which there are digitized images available.

Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920 -- this collection presents 3,042 pieces of sheet music drawn from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, which holds an important, representative, and comprehensive collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century American sheet music.

International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) -- this project is attempting to create a virtual library containing all public domain musical scores, as well as scores from composers who are willing to share their music with the world without charge.

Neue Mozart Ausgabe -- this website offer offers in a digitized version the musical text and the critical commentaries of the entire Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, edited by the Internationale Stiftung Mozart in cooperation with the Mozart cities of Augsburg, Salzburg, and Vienna.

Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870-1885 -- this website gives access as digital images to over 47,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the years 1870 to 1885. Included are popular songs, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra.

Sheet Music Consortium -- this website results from a group of libraries (UCLA's Digital Archive of Popular American Music, Indiana University's Sheet Music Collection, The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music of Johns Hopkins University and Duke University's Historic American Sheet Music Collection) working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music.

Sibley Music Library 
has a project to provide free online access to approximately 10,000-12,000 public domain scores, from the Library's general collections, held by not more than two other libraries in the world. Over the course of the two-year project (2009-2011), Sibley Music Library will digitize these materials and make them freely available from the University of Rochester's Digital Repository "UR Research". Sibley Music Library is the largest academic music library in North America, with total holdings of some 750,000 items. During the course of its first century the Library amassed large and noteworthy holdings of rare books as well as strong collections of circulating music scores, recordings, books, and journals.  Given the date of the Library's founding, Sibley is particularly rich in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century (i.e., public domain) scores, including solo, chamber, orchestral, vocal, and operatic music.

VARIATIONS Prototype: Online Musical Scores -- Indiana University has issued these experimental prototypes as a way of investigating the ways in which musical scores and recording liner notes might be used in conjunction with sound recordings, available online through VARIATIONS.

Free Online Music Indexes

Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums: The Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums online (Bibliography of Music Literature on-line) is an international and interactive bibliography of literature on music. This bibliographic reference tool is edited by the » Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, and may be used free of charge. Currently, BMS online has more than 300,000 records of literature on music. 

CeciliaThe Cecilia database currently lists over 1,800 collections of music materials from over 550 institutions, including libraries, museums, archives, private and public institutions and amateur societies. Collections include manuscripts, printed materials, recordings, artefacts and artworks, instruments, electronic resources, private papers, and archives. A link to the live catalogue allows for searching or browsing by century (time), name, subject, location, tradition or institution. Cecilia is adminitered by the United Kingdom & Ireland Branch of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres

Concert ProgrammesThis database is the result of a three-year project (2004–07), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and hosted by Cardiff University and the Royal College of Music.  It provides descriptions of concert programme collections held by leading libraries, archives and museums in the UK and Ireland, thereby improving access to a vital source of information about musical life from the eighteenth century to the present day.

COPAC Home Page : University Research Library CatalogueCOPAC is a union catalogue, giving free access to the merged online catalogues of over 20 members of the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) in the UK and Ireland, including the British Library catalogue and the catalogues of the National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales. It covers all academic disciplines and subjects, including the physical sciences. The service is funded by JISC and hosted by MIMAS.

Ears : electroacoustic resource siteThe ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS) project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), "has been established to provide resources for those wishing to conduct research in the area of electroacoustic music studies". The project aims to develop a structured Internet portal, providing citations and/or direct links to texts, titles, abstracts, images, audio and audio-visual files, and other relevant resources. The current EARS website presents the results of the project's preliminary phase - a dynamic e-Glossary and Subject Index to electroacoustic music. The glossary provides an alphabetical list of terms. The subject index allows thematic access to terms, via six high-level subject headings: Disciplines of Study (DoS), Genres and Categories (G&C), Musicology of Electroacoustic Music (MEM), Performance Practice and Presentation (PPP), Sound Production and Manipulation (SPM), and Structure (Str). Each term within the glossary and subject index links through to a definition, with cross references to other terms and links to sub-sections. The project is co-ordinated at De Montfort University's Music, Technology and Innovation Research Group. The site describes electroacoustic music as an "an interdiscipline that has developed as a symbiotic interaction of disciplines including music composition, acoustics, psychoacoustics, theory of perception, cognitive science, phenomenology, computing, signal processing, amongst many others".

EncoreCreated by the United Kingdom and Ireland Branch of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML UK & Irl), with the support of the British Library, Encore! is an online union catalogue of sets of performance music (both vocal and orchestral) in British libraries. A simple or advanced search can be performed. The results list includes the number of copies per set that the participating library or libraries hold(s).

Folk Song Finder: A search engine for folk tunes. You can search by entering the musical notation or by singing into your device's microphone. This enjoyable resource lists many thousands of folk tunes so it can be invaluable if you know the melody of a song but not the name (or vice versa). It does not list the texts of the songs.

Hofmeister XIXHofmeister XIX is an AHRC-funded project that seeks to digitise a complete run of the Hofmeister Monatsberichte and make it freely available to scholars as a fully searchable online database. The Hofmeister Monatsberichte began in 1829 as a monthly catalogue of printed music and constitutes the single most important bibliographical source for the publication of music in the 19th century, with some 400,000 records, permitting any printed music's dating to within eight weeks of publication. Difficulties exist in using it in scholarship, due to the lack of a single complete run in any one location, and the historic format of the publication. This project aims to remedy this through encoding it as XML, with a flexible range of search and display features. As well as a detailed discussion of the project, the website includes an analysis the Monatsberichte's content, a bibliography and a project team list.