MUSIC RESEARCH GUIDE

Online access to the archives of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

All available program data for concerts given by the Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam) from its 1888 inception to the current concert season.

RILM editors share their observations on things of practical interest to music librarians and researchers.

Thoughts on classical music from the folks at NPR

Alex Ross's acclaimed music blog

Some links only work for Harvard students

The main agency for obtaining mechanical licenses that permit the recording of copyrighted music.

Music industry news (mostly classical) and a variety of trade directories

A repository that facilitates research on arts and culture by acquiring data, particularly those funded by federal agencies and other organizations, and sharing those data with researchers, policymakers, people in the arts and culture field, and the general public.

Includes a daily list of important events in music history

A database of music by composers other than straight, white, cisgender males, searchable by a wide variety of fields.

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine's extensive collection of resources to spread awareness of and access to music by Black composers

Presents the works of living and historical African American composers in concert, shares video of these live concerts online, and commissions new compositions.

Information about the music of our time, verified by the composers themselves

Biographical, bibliographical and media information concerning composers whose music was banned during the years of Nazi oppression in Europe.

Lots of information, including audio, about African, African-American and Afro-European classical musicians.

The NY Public Library's "John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive" is an online record of John Cage's work and its evolving impact on music and performance.

Catalogs and digitizes every item in Indiana University's collections pertaining to the life and career of songwriter "Hoagy" Carmichael.

Combines three major resources: the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions, Chopin's First Editions Online, and the Online Chopin Variorum Edition

This site was developed by Library and Archives Canada, which is the official repository for the archives of the late concert pianist, Glenn Gould.

An open-access companion site to the First Book of Masses by Cristóbal de Morales (ca. 1550-1553).

Digitized version of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe, the critical edition of Mozart's works.

Full text of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's correspondence, in a searchable database.

Website of the Richmond-area composer

The U.S. Marine Band offers free downloads of audio recordings, full scores, complete sets of instrumental parts, and more

From Iowa Public Radio

From the American Musicological Society

Free music lessons (via QuickTime video, MP3 audio, and .pdf text/music notation) by faculty members at the Berklee College of Music.

From the University of Washington

Features the latest world music news, CD and concert reviews, articles, an events calendar, and other resources.

Alan Lomax's dream project: listen to and learn about more than 6,000 songs from 1,000 cultures

Images, audio, and video files from the musical instrument collection at the University of Washington's Ethnomusicology Division.

A comprehensive site with the goal of cataloging the rich and nuanced art and technicalities of Hindustani Classical Music with video demonstrations.

Located at Rutgers University, this is the largest and most comprehensive library and archive of jazz materials in the world.

A unit of Columbia University that offers classes, exhibitions, lectures, performances, and scholarly resources in jazz studies.

Home to the Duke Ellington Archive, Jazz Appreciation Month, the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, and an online youth education curriculum.

Its NYC venue houses performance space and the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame. Sponsors "Jazz in the Schools" and other educational activities.

A University of Chicago site focusing on a variety of local jazz musicians and styles.

A Canadian site that offers free video samples of international and Montréal / Québec jazz artists, with the consent of the artist or producer.

A comprehensive index of all the songs in 26 volumes of Real Books (as of March 2016)

The digital portal of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Digitized materials from the national libraries of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Panama and Portugal

Huge catalog of print and manuscript materials held in libraries and archives throughout Italy. Includes digital images and multimedia.

Provides online access to the world's most valued music manuscripts and print materials, held at the most renowned music archives, in order to further research and scholarship.

A portal to digitized rare books and manuscripts at a variety of sites. Enter MUSIC in the search box.

The Bavarian State Library's central portal for music and musicology, allows you to access an extensive digital library containing the latest scholarly research and online resources.

Over 2,000 pre-1801 publications about music held by the Library of Congress.

Use this website to view digitized copies of manuscripts and archives in the British Library’s collections, with descriptions of their contents.

From the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway University of London. Registration (free of charge) is required for access to the images.

Over 50 Roman Catholic chant manuscripts (e.g., antiphonaries, graduals, processionals, etc.) belonging to the Library of Congress

Over 300 of the world’s earliest surviving volumes of printed music, held in the British Library, have been digitised by the Royal Holloway University of London.

The University of California's online collection of 17th-century broadside ballads.

From the University of Iowa

Website for an exhibit of illuminated choir books at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Digital scans of an 18th-century bound manuscript now owned by the University of Kentucky.

Rare medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, plus early printed books, from the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

Online access to the archives of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. One of the longest running, highly detailed collections documenting all the activities of a single cultural institution.

An on-line, searchable version of the Hofmeister Monatsberichte (1829-1900), establishing what was published where and when during that period.

Searchable guides to selected archival and manuscript collections in the Music Division of The New York Public Library.

1904 catalog of all musical editions known by its authors to be in print at that time.

Provides information about 17th- and 18th-century music manuscripts in libraries and archives across the U.S. Users can search by musical incipit as well as other criteria.

Provides information about 17th- and 18th-century music manuscripts in libraries and archives across the UK and in Ireland.

The RIdIM database is designed to facilitate discovery of music, dance and theatre iconography images by registered researchers, and the description of such images by registered cataloguers.

From the Library of Congress comes an online collection of about 120 prints, mostly of wind instruments, but also keyboard, string, percussion, and exotic instruments.

A guide to the history of music printing, from Rosendo Reyna, a music theory and performance instructor who also works as an independent music engraver.

A helpful guide to reading neumes, the original notation of plainsong (liturgical chant).

An on-line, searchable version of the Hofmeister Monatsberichte (1829-1900), establishing what was published where and when during that period.

Online music writing application that lets you create, view, print and hear music notation in your web browser. Work on a score from any computer on the Internet, share with other users, or embed into your own pages.

Interactive pdf generator lets users select the paper size, staff count, and line weight.

A variety of predetermined sizes and formats

Provides links to hundreds of online opera libretti. Many do not include English translations.

BYU's ongoing project aimed at indexing free online primary sources related to various forms of dramatic music in a wide variety of formats.

A searchable database of casts, composers, operas, and other performance information related to the history of the Metropolitan Opera.

Offers schedules of opera companies and performers, news and reviews, and links to other opera sites.

A guide to all aspects of musical theater, from John Kenrick, author and Communications Director of the York Theatre Company

An enormous site that includes biographies and discographies of musicians in all genres.

Dedicated to the crucial role played by artists from East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and the southern Appalachian region in country, bluegrass, and other musical avenues.

Online guide featuring Southwest Virginia's bluegrass, Old Time, and traditional country music, as well as Appalachian culture.

Citations of print and recorded sources for folk music.

Search for folk tunes by title, melody (using an onscreen "piano" keyboard), or contour. You can also browse its 200,000+ entries.

Preserves more than 250,000 items across dozens of archives documenting the origins of Hip Hop culture and its spread around the globe.

Facilitates and encourages the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture, and responsible leadership through Hiphop.

A crowdsourced website that breaks down text with line-by-line annotations, added and edited by anyone in the world (consider yourself warned).

Founded in 1997, this is the home of interchange between performers and scholars interested in art song by African-American composers.

Black Grooves is a music review site hosted by the Archives of African American Music & Culture (AAAMC) at Indiana University.

Founded in 1983, the CBMR documents and preserves information and materials related to the Black music experience throughout the world.

Established in 1985 as an archive and research center devoted to the study of American popular music from the pre-revolutionary era to the present.

Established in 1998, CHMTL brings together various activities, publications (both electronic and conventional), and projects centered at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.

IRCAM is one of the world’s largest public research center dedicated to both musical expression and scientific research.

Founded in 1986, IAMIC is a world-wide network of organizations that document and promote the music of our time.

Princeton University's digital thematic research collection of art, music and literary periodicals published between 1848-1923

An independent, peer-reviewed musicological journal run by postgraduates for postgraduates.

Focuses on improvisation, community, and social practice.

An interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal created and edited by graduate musicology students at UCLA.

A bi-annual, peer-reviewed, open-access, on-line journal dedicated to the publication of original articles and reviews related to teaching music history of all levels (undergraduate, graduate, or general studies) and disciplines (western, non-western, concert and popular musics).

Published by the Society for 17th-Century Music

The electronic journal of the Society for Music Theory

A hospitable space for texts which, in one way or another, might feel somewhat marginal — or too ‘under construction’ — for other, kindred publications.

a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of Western musical performance practices of all periods.

A refereed academic journal with an international advisory panel of leading popular musicologists.

Produced by the International Centre for Music Studies at Newcastle University (UK) to provide a forum for progressive thinking across the whole field of musical studies.

Voices seeks to nurture an inclusive international profile of music therapy and will encourage contributions from every continent.

Founded in 1934, the AMS advances research in the various fields of music as a branch of learning and scholarship.

Founded in 1981, IASPM is an international organization established to promote inquiry, scholarship and analysis in the area of popular music.

Facilitates communication between professional performance librarians, educates and assists them in providing service to their organizations, provides support and resources to the performing arts, and works with publishers to achieve the highest standards in music performance materials.

Founded in 1931, MLA is the professional organization in the United States devoted to music librarianship and all aspects of music materials in libraries.

Stimulate the appreciation, performance, creation and study of American musics of all eras and in all their diversity, including the full range of activities and institutions associated with these musics throughout the world.

SEM was founded in 1955 to promote the research, study, and performance of music in all historical periods and cultural contexts

SMT was founded in 1977 to encourage scholarly excellence, work to increase the diversity of our discipline, and to promote fruitful exchanges between music theorists, musicologists, performers, and scholars in other fields.

Tobias Broeker's editions of unpublished 20th-century violin concertos (created with permission of the copyright holders, where necessary).

Critical editions of 17th-century Italian madrigals and arias, together with introductions to the editions in Italian, German and English, and translations of the texts into English and German

A complete scholarly edition of Carl Maria von Weber’s compositions, letters, diaries, and writings up to his 200th birthday in 2026, from the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur (Mainz).

A digitized version (musical text and the critical commentaries) of the entire Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, from the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum and the Packard Humanities Institute.

Public-domain scores from the International Harp Archives at Brigham Young University (offered through the Internet Archive).

Editions and sound files of selected polyphonic settings of the Mass and Mass fragments composed during the early Renaissance.

Digitized, public-domain sheet music from a consortium of libraries.

Features an audio-visual recreation of the 15th-century St. Donatian Mass, with plainsong and Obrecht's polyphony, plus contextual essays, images, and an annotated copy of the score.

The Society for 17th-century Music offers new editions of 17th-century compositions that are unpublished or commercially unavailable

Free printable staff paper in all sizes and clefs.

This online catalog is a continuing project to bring together all repertoire that exists for the clarinet quintet. The project seeks to offer complete, authoritative data relative to each composition and to demonstrate the totality of the genre.

Provides descriptions of concert program collections (18th century to the present) held by leading libraries, archives and museums in the UK and Ireland

An indexed listing of upcoming meetings, seminars, congresses, workshops, etc. (mostly outside the U.S.)

The UK’s largest online collection of historical musical instruments

a “Who’s Who” of early sound recorders

Offers searchable access to recorded track information for over 2,700 Negro Spiritual settings performed by solo Classical vocalists.

A comprehensive database of wind literature, expanded by contributions of band directors/conductors, students, and wind band enthusiasts worldwide.