Research by Subject: Music: Scores, Sound Recordings, and Archival Collections

Databases of Music Recordings

Classical Music Library This link opens in a new window
A collection of streaming classical music. Coverage includes music written from the earliest times (e.g. Gregorian Chant) to the present, including many contemporary composers. Repertoire from vocal and choral music to chamber, orchestral, solo instrumental, and opera.
Contemporary World Music This link opens in a new window
A collection of streaming music from around the world, including genres such as reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing, Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku, and more.
Jazz Music Library This link opens in a new window
A collection of streaming jazz, representing thousands of jazz artists, ensembles, albums, and genres.
Smithsonian Global Sound This link opens in a new window
This collection of streaming music is “a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions,” including published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and other archival and field collections of world music.
Popular Music Library This link opens in a new window
A collection of streaming popular music. Includes genres such as rock, R&B, reggae, hip-hop, electronic and more, by artists from around the world.
American Song This link opens in a new window
A collection of streaming music from the American past and present, including genres such as country, folk, bluegrass, Western, old time, American Indian, blues, gospel, shape note singing, doo-wop, Motown, R&B, soul, funk, and others.

Archival Collections of Historic Recordings, Documents, and Scores

This is only a sampling of online collections containing historic sound recordings, documents, and scores. If you are interested in finding other online resources, take a look at this more comprehensive guide from Harvard College Library:

Online Resources for Music Scholars - Harvard College Library

Association for Cultural Equity Online Archive (Alan Lomax Archive)
An extensive collection of sound recordings, video, photographs, interviews, and other documentation created by Alan Lomax, an ethnomusicologist and field collector of folk music. The recordings are international in scope, documenting music from the American South, the Caribbean, Europe, Northern Africa, and Russia and Central Asia.
Library of Congress National Juke Box
Historical recordings from the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives. The recordings in the Jukebox were originally issued on the Victor Talking Machine Company record label. It will eventually include recordings issued on other record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, such as Columbia and OKeh.
English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA)
A project of the Early Modern Center at the University of California-Santa Barbara, EBBA provides access to high-quality facsimiles of English broadside ballads from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century as well as facsimile transcriptions and recordings.
In Mozart's Words
This website provides access to the annotated correspondence of Mozart and his family, translated into several languages (including English), and organized to facilitate searching and browsing.
The Juilliard Manuscript Collection
A collection of digitized historic manuscript scores and sketches housed at Juilliard, easily browsed by composer.
Digital Scores and Libretti Collection - Loeb Music Library, Harvard University
Digitized scores and libretti from Harvard's Loeb Music Library, including first and early editions and manuscript copies of works by J.S. Bach, Mozart, Schubert and others.
African American Sheet Music - Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship
This collection of digitized sheet music from the John Hay Library at Brown University features work by and relating to African Americans from 1820s through the 20th Century.
Early Music Online
Early Music Online offers free access to digitized copies of the British Library's 16th-century anthologies of printed music.

What's in the Library?

Although Bertrand Library does collect CDs, DVDs, and a limited number of musical scores, most scores and sound recordings are kept in the Music Library located in the Sigfried Weis Music Building, Room 120.

You can find scores and recordings available in both Bertrand and the Music Library by searching the WorldCat Library Catalog. In the Advanced Search, limit the item format to “music” or “musical score.” Or, after typing a search term into the catalog, limit your results by format using the menu on the left side of the screen (you can select “musical score,” “music,” “CD,” “LP,” etc.).

Online Music Scores

International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) / Petrucci Music Library
A community-built library of public domain sheet music.
Sheet Music Consortium
An open collection of digitized sheet music from a consortium of libraries, hosted by the UCLA Digital Library Program.

Song Indexes

UT Song Index
Index to songs in about 1,500 published song anthologies in the George F. DeVine Music Library at the University of Tennessee. You can use this index to find out what anthology a song is in and can then search WorldCat by anthology title to find out if we have it at Bucknell,

Song Lyrics

Genius
A database of over 2 million songs crowdsourced by musicians, contributors, and editors. The database includes lyrics as well as interviews and annotations for each song.