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Music: Find Scores
This guide will introduce music resources available to Pepperdine University students.
The Petrucci Music Library is 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.
CANTUS is a database of Latin ecclesiastical chant, the earliest written musical repertory of any significant size. The texts are almost all in Latin, and the majority of them are drawn from the Bible, very often from the book of Psalms.
The Neue Mozart - Ausgabe is a comprehensive collection of Mozart's music, both facsimiles of his original scores and newly edited, modern versions. Also included are other writings by Mozart, his musical notebooks, and composition studies by his students.
The Bach Archiv's Library in Leipzig provides access to online music, manuscripts, and catalogs of Johann Sebastian Bach and other composers in the Bach family.
The Contemporary Music Score Collection is published by the UCLA Music Library. The collection includes the digital, open access scores from the Contemporary Score Edition series, the first open access edition of new music published by a library, and scores from the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library. The Contemporary Score Edition is made possible because of the Hugo Davise Fund for Contemporary Music.
Access to more than 62,500 pieces of historical sheet music registered for copyright: more than 15,000 registered during the years 1820-1860 and more than 47,000 registered during the years 1870-1885. Included are popular songs, operatic arias, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra.
The Bodleian Library has unparalleled holdings of over 30,000 ballads in several major collections. Broadside ballads are important source material for popular literary history, music history, social history, art history, and printing history.
This particular digital sheet music collection pays tribute to Sheldon Harris' work, and it was created by The University of Mississippi Department of Archives and Special Collections. Visitors can browse the sheet music at their leisure, and the holdings are particularly strong in the blues and early minstrel numbers.
Harvard College Library's extensive list of links to archival collections; online scores and sound recordings; article indexes, discographies and bibliographies; scholarly societies; musical reference works; and a miscellany of useful websites.
Specializes in choral music and has over 10,000 different works; in addition to scores, includes lyrics, translations, and information about composers. Most scores are available as downloadable PDF files
2021 pieces of music – free to download, modify, print, copy, distribute, perform, and record – all in the Public Domain or under Creative Commons licenses, in PDF, MIDI, and editable LilyPond file formats
Almost 15,000 free sheet music scores available for download as PDF files; search by instruments, composers, etc. While most of the sheet music on the site is classical and in public domain, some contemporary composers have added their own music to this site for sharing.
Selected sheet music published during the 19th and 20th century in the following genres: Ragtime, Blues, Movie tunes, Foxtrots, Popular music, Minstrel music, Show tunes, Irving Berlin, War songs, and Specialty.
A large portion of these pieces are in the public domain (not copyrighted) and are available for download directly from the site.
Brown University's digital collection of music ranging from antebellum blackface minstrelsy to the abolitionists movement. This collection provides "a window into the daily concerns, preoccupations, and pastimes of Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries."
Library of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and literal translations of opera arias and art song texts, containing over 3700 texts including 500 opera-aria texts. Download PDFs of songs and arias with phonetic pronunciation guides, literal word-by-word translations into English, and line-by-line English translations.
