Research Guides: Primary Sources in Music: Manuscript and Printed Music

Digitized Manuscript and Printed Music

Copenhagen Chansonnier — Det Kongelige Bibliotek
A 15th-century collection of 33 three-voiced French-Burgundian chansons.
Digital Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM)
A project that started as a collaboration between scholars at the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London, now based in Oxford in collaboration with the University Music Faculty and the Bodleian Library. DIAMM has created an electronic archive of more than 14,000 images, to assure their permanent preservation, and is able to present a significant number of them through this website to facilitate detailed study of this music and its sources.
Digitized music at the Library of Congress
Searchable collection of all the music from the Library of Congress collections that has been digitized.
Early Music Online — British Library
Provides access to over 300 volumes of 16th-century printed music from the British Library collection.
Musical Scores — Sibley Music Library
Over 20,000 digitized scores and books from the Eastman School of Music's Sibley Music Library, including items unique to that collection.
Music manuscripts at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek — Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden
About 3,000 mostly manuscript works, many originally collected for the Dresdner Hofkapelle. Principally 18th and 19th century materiel.
Music Manuscripts Online — The Morgan Library and Museum
Over 900 digitized manuscripts from the Morgan Library collection, including works by J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Fauré, Haydn, Liszt, Mahler, Massenet, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Puccini, Schubert, and Schumann.
Music Treasures Consortium — Library of Congress
Searchable index of digitized music manuscripts from the Library of Congress, the British Library, the Morgan Library & Museum, the New York Public Library, Harvard University's Loeb Music Library, and the Julliard School's Wallace Library.
Opera & Ballet Primary Sources
Indexes over 13,000 publicly available digital scores, manuscripts, libretti, sets of parts, mises en scènes, and other opera artifacts.
Virtual Music Rare Book Room - University of North Texas
The UNT Music Library's Virtual Music Rare Book Room is composed primarily of digitized materials held in the Edna Mae Sandborn Music Rare Book Room. The collection is particularly strong in eighteenth-century French opera.

Catalogs of Manuscripts, Publications, or Collections

Alphabetischer Katalog der Musikquellen bis 1983 (SLUB)
A digitized version of the alphabetical shelf list of music sources at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek –
Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden acquired before 1983.
Catalogo Numerico Ricordi
Database of publication information from the records of Italian publisher Ricordi. Contains over 40,000 entries between 1808 and 1870.
Catalogue des manuscrits notés du Moyen Age conservés dans les bibliothèques publiques de France
Includes much material documenting medieval music manuscripts in France, most notably a city-by-city list of manuscripts in public libraries.
National catalogue of music manuscripts to 1900 - Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense
Searchable database of catalog cards for music manuscripts in public and private Italian libraries.
Manuscripta Medievalia
Contains some digitized manuscripts as well as digitized descriptions and catalogs of approximately 75,000 manuscripts in German libraries. Not limited to music.
RISM Series A/II: Music Manuscripts After 1600
An effort to comprehensively document the world's musical sources of manuscripts or printed music, works on music theory, and libretti stored in libraries, archives, monasteries, schools and private collections. Among the different series of RISM, only series A/II: "Music manuscripts after 1600" is currently available online. See the Print Resources page for more information.

Printed Music Collection Catalogs

Descriptive catalogs of specialized collections or of collections in major libraries are sometimes published in book format. Such catalogs are shelved under ML136, mostly in the reference section.

In some case these books have been superceded by online catalogs, but in others the print catalog remains the easiest (or sometimes only) access to all or part of the collection.

Examples:

Catalogue of Printed Music In the British Library to 1980 — Reference ML136 .L8 B62
Dictionary Catalog of the Music Collection (New York Public Library) — Oversize Reference ML136 .N5 N573*

Popular Sheet Music and Ballad Sheets

Sheet Music Consortium
The Sheet Music Consortium brings together collections from over 20 university and national libraries.
American Song Sheets
Approximately 1,800 broadsides and song sheets (without music) from nineteenth-century America.
Bodleian Library Broadside Ballands
Over 30,000 ballad sheets (without music) from the 16th to the 20th century.