Broadside Ballads Online (Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University)Features the Bodleian's digital collections of ballads, with links to the English Broadside Ballad Archive’s digital presentations of pre-1800 ballads from other libraries, and to the folk song scholarship of the Roud Broadside Index, hosted by the English Folk Dance and Song Society.
CANTUS : A Database for Latin Ecclesiastical ChantDatabase of the Latin chants found in manuscripts and early printed books, primarily from medieval Europe. Searchable archive holds inventories of antiphoners, breviaries, graduals, and other sources for music of the Mass.
Cantus Index : Online Catalogue for Mass & Office ChantsCataloge of chant texts and melodies for Office and Mass. Multiple online medieval music databases have been connected together through unique "Cantus ID numbers". Chant texts and melodies can be searched on this Cantus Index website, and matches in any of the partner databases will be returned.
Cantus PlanusFrom the IMS study group Cantus Planus, downloadable files and interactive databases described as a "data pool for research on Gregorian chant."
Coptic Orthodox Liturgical Chant and Hymnody (Library of Congress)Drawing on the Ragheb Moftah Collection, this collection explores some of the earliest music transcriptions by explorers, missionaries, and scholars in Egypt, highlighting Moftah's efforts to notate, record, and preserve all Coptic Orthodox hymns.
Global Chant DatabaseSearchable database of plainchant melodies and texts included in medieval sources and new editions. Contains almost 25,000 chant incipits providing information about text, melody, genre, modus and concordances. Some records include links to facsimiles where a particular chant can be found.
Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR)The DAHR is a database of master recordings made by American record companies during the 78rpm era. Companies incude: recordings made by Columbia Records, the Berliner Gramophone Co., OKeh Records, Zonophone Records, Leeds & Catlin Records, and Decca.
National Recording Preservation Board--Recording RegistryEach year, the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress chooses 25 recordings showcasing the range and diversity of American recorded sound heritage in order to increase preservation awareness. The diversity of nominations received highlights the richness of the nation's audio legacy and underscores the importance of assuring the long-term preservation of that legacy for future generations. Currently, there are 600 works/titles on the National Recording Registry.
Institute for Composer Diversity DatabaseThe Institute for Composer Diversity, housed at the State University of New York at Fredonia, is dedicated to the celebration, education, and advocacy of music created by composers from historically underrepresented groups through database resources and programming analysis.
Music by Black ComposersMBC's mission is (a) To inspire Black students to begin and continue instrumental training by showing them that they are an integral part of classical music’s past as well as its future; (b) To make the music of Black composers available to all people regardless of background or ethnicity; (c) To help bring greater diversity to the ranks of performers, composers, and audiences, and help change the face of classical music and its canon.
Forms & Genres
CPI Conductus : Thirteenth-Century Music & PoetrySearchable catalogue of 12th- and 13th-century Latin conductus (liturgical poems not based on preexisting chants and set to music for one, two, or three voices). Links to manuscript images are given when available.
RefrainSearchable database of medieval refrains, or fragments of music or text that circulated between songs of various types during the thirteenth century.
Handwriting
DigiPalResource for the study of medieval handwriting, particularly that produced in England during the years 1000–1100. Designed to allow you to see samples of handwriting from the period and to compare them with each other quickly and easily.
Hymns
Amazing Grace (Library of Congress)This collection highlights the history of the hymn “Amazing Grace” from the earliest printing of the song to selected performances of it on published and field recordings.
Analecta Hymnica Medii AeviThis 55 volume series, oirginally published from 1886 to 1922, provides the most extensive collection and history of medieval Latin hymns of the Catholic Church, 500-1400.
Cyber HymnalOver 14,200 Christian hymns and Gospel songs from many denominations & languages: Lyrics, sheet music, audio, pictures, biographies, history and more.
Hymnary.orgComprehensive index of hymns and hymnals.
Hymn Tune IndexREF ML128 .H8 T26 1998 A census of English-language hymn tunes in printed sources from 1535 to 1820 by Nicholas Temperley
Hymn Tune Index OnlineThe HTI database contains all hymn tunes printed anywhere in the world with English-language texts up to 1820, and their publication history up to that date.
Renaissance Liturgical Imprints : A Census (RELICS)RELICS contains liturgical titles printed in Europe between 1450 and 1600 and is designed for musicologists studying organ and choral music, art historians searching for named engravers and artists, general historians studying aristocratic patronage, scholars of poetry, and specialists in church history and early printed books.
USUARIUMDigital Library and Database for the Study of Latin Liturgical History in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, the long-term goal of USUARIUM is to provide a representative sample of the medieval variants of Western liturgy extending to every type of ceremony from cathedrals, abbeys, and religious orders.
Manuscripts
Fragmentarium Digital Library (FDL)Fragmentarium’s primary objective is to develop a digital library for medieval manuscript fragment research, with an international orientation. FDL is conceived as a social platform for libraries, scholars and students to do scholarly work on fragments.
Hofmeister XIXHofmeister XIX is an on-line, searchable version of the Hofmeister Monatsberichte for the years 1829-1900. Containing some 330,000 records of music publications, it is the most extensive resource for establishing what was published where and when during that period. Records are linked to facsimile images of the Monatsberichte on the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek website.
Ottaviano Petrucci : catalogue raisonné / Stanley BoormanThis book is a bibliographic study of the output of the Petrucci presses, laying emphasis on the professional career of Petrucci. It includes a detailed study of technique and house-style, examining the market forces that drove Petrucci's publishing decisions, and provides a detailed catalogue of editions and copies.
Printed Sacred Music Database (Swiss RISM Office)The scope of the present database is to cover all sacred music printed in Europe, 1500-1800. Search by name, works, printers/publishers, library sigla, standard titles, musical incipits, and selected bibliographic catalogs.
Musical Instrument Museums
Bate Collection (University of Oxford)The Bate Collection is the most comprehensive collection of European woodwind, brass and percussion instruments in Britain. The Bate has over 2000 instruments from the Western orchestral music traditions from the Renaissance, through the Baroque, Classical, Romantic and up to modern times.
MIMO (Musical Instruments Online)Freely accessible database for information on musical instruments held in public collections. Our database now contains the records of 64165 instruments.
Musikinstrumentenmuseum der Universität LeipzigThe Museum of Musical Instruments in the University of Leipzig is one of the largest musical instrument museums in Europe, housing around around 10,000 objects.
Musée de la Musique (Paris)Museum of Music collection has more than 8,000 instruments and art objects, plus a piano belonging to Chopin and a guitar belonging to Brassens.
Royal College of Music Museum (London)The collection includes c1,000 musical instruments from the late 15th to the mid-20th century. Among them is the earliest dated guitar (Belchior Dias, Lisbon, 1581), the earliest known stringed keyboard instrument (clavicytherium, Ulm, c1480), a harpsichord by Alessandro Trasuntino (Venice, 1531) and a remarkable collection of English viols (John Rose, c1590, Henry Jaye, 1619, Richard Meares c1680, and Barak Norman 1692 and 1694).
A.P. Schmidt CompanyArthur Paul Schmidt (1846-1921) was a German-born music publisher who pioneered the development and dissemination of American music. The A.P. Schmidt Company Archives documents his firm's publishing activities in Boston, Leipzig and New York, beginning with his tenure, through his successors, and until the firm was absorbed by Summy-Birchard in 1960.
Archivio storico Ricordi Collezione DigitaleArchivio Storico Ricordi Collezione Digitale
The Casa di Ricordi Archives includes title pages and first pages of manuscript scores, correspondence (with transcriptions), iconography, catalogues, and administrative documents.
Stationers' Register OnlineContains the entries for the literary, musical and artistic works made in the Registers of the Stationers’ Company of London between 1557 and 1640.
Folk Song IndexCollaboration between Oberlin College Libraries and Sing Out! Index to traditional folk songs with an emphasis on English-language songs.
The Lomax Kentucky RecordingsA collaborative project from the Association for Cultural Equity, Berea College; the Library of Congress; and The University of Kentucky.
Traditional Tune ArchiveA wiki-site dedicated to instrumental music of the past 300 years traditionally used fo rdancing in Ireland, Great Britain, and North America.
Theme Identification
Folk Tune FinderFind folk tunes by melody, time, key, mode, melody shape, and similar tunes.
musiconn scoresearchSearch works of Beethoven, Handel, Liszt, Mendessohn, Schubert, Schumann, and the first and second series of Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst.
Themefinder (CCARH Stanford University)From Stanford University's Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH) & Ohio State University's Cognitive & Systematic Musicology Laboratory. Searches music of the Renaissance & Classical periods and folksong.
Themefinder (RISM A/II)Search 55,491 incipits from music manuscripts after 1600 contained in libraries of the United States of America.
Les Sources manuscrites de la théorie de la musique (S. IX-XVI)Contains summary information relating to manuscript sources of music theory in the Middle Ages. More detailed descriptions of these manuscripts are in the volumes of series B III of the International Repertory of Musical Sources, The Theory of Music. Manuscripts from the Carolingian Era up to c. 1500. Descriptive Catalog, 6 vol. (München: G. Henle Verlag, 1961-2003)
Musical Borrowing & ReworkingHoused at the Center for the History of Music Theory & Literature, Indiana University, the Musical Borrowing & Reworking bibliography includes scholarly work on embracing borrowing, transcription, variations, quotation, paraphrase, parody, modeling, allusion, sampling, and more.
Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML)TML aims to give free access to and make searchable every known Latin text on music from the late antiquity to the seventeenth century in multiple editions and in transcriptions from original sources.
TmiWeb (Thesaurus musicarum italicarum)TmiWeb is an electronic corpus of Italian music treatises from the Renaissance and early Baroque. It contains nearly 30 works, including the works of two of Italy’s most important authors on music theory, Pietro Aaron and Gioseffo Zarlino , as well as a number of writings by their contemporaries.
Terminology, Language
Lexicon musicum Latinum medii aevi (LmL)LmL, a project of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, is dedicated to the scholarly inventory of Latin musical terminology of the Middle Ages.
Watermarks & Paper Studies
Bohemian Watermark DatabaseBohemian Watermark Database of the musical sources registered in Union Music Catalogue of the National Library of the Czech Republic includes watermarks from manuscripts and prints of the 18th & 19th centuries.
The Memory of Paper : Watermark CatalogThe catalog of watermarks of the Dommusikarchiv, gives an overview of the staff paper used in Salzburg during the 18th and 19th centuries, and has been published in the database of Bernstein–The Memory of paper.
Piccard Watermark CollectionDigitized version of the watermark collection compiled by Gerhard Piccard; contains watermarks in paper manuscripts of the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
Wasserzeichen-Informationssystem (WZIS)Project of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; contains over 100,000 images of watermarks from collections in Europe.