Music-Related Databases Guide

Founded in 1997, this is the home of interchange between performers and scholars interested in art song by African-American composers. Here you will find information and links to assist with your discovery of our contribution to song. The mission of this resource is to promote and Uplift the contributions made by African-Americans to art song, be they composers, performers or scholars; serve the needs of scholars, teachers, and performers seeking information about African-American art song; share information and repertoire between teachers, scholars, and performers; and encourage performance and scholarship related to African-American art song.

Hymn tunes were one of European classical music’s chief conduits to American audiences through the mid-19th century. Hymnnodic adaptations of the work of Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and others appeared by the hundreds, all but a few forgotten today. 278 of these tunes—unearthed, identified, and edited for modern use—are gathered in this Anthology of scores and piano recordings.

AmericanClassicalHymns.com was developed in tandem with the book Gems of Exquisite Beauty: How Hymnody Carried Classical Music to America (Oxford University Press, 2020), the first in-depth historical exploration of this repertoire and its creators.

The American Viola Society presents a small volunteer research effort to document works by underrepresented composers that involve the viola as a significant voice. This project was inspired by a collective effort towards diversity, equity, and inclusion in the world of viola repertoire, and users can submit works for inclusion in the database.

From the resource's landing page: "Listen free-of-charge to a growing collection of rare and delightful art songs. Each composition has been lovingly resurrected from the depths of art song history, with most of them from previously unknown composers. The songs are performed in one take to give them a 'live' feeling - by soprano Hélène Lindqvist and pianist Philipp Vogler. All art work also by the duo.'

Annotation from Laurie J. Samsel's Music Research: A Handbook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 159: "A free, online bibliography currently including over 35,000 records. Complied by Tomita and a group of around 80 contributors, including some major Bach scholars. The entries are not annotated, but review citations are included. When an online review is available (most are written by Tomita), a link is provided. The Complex Search is recommended over the Simple Search." Visit this online scholarship hub to start your search for Bach-related sources.

The Beethoven Gateway is system of online databases developed by the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies designed to help in the discovery of resources on the composer Ludwig van Beethoven. It currently includes the following components: Images: Beethoven Digital Collections; Beethoven Center catalog; Beethoven Bibliography Database; Beethoven Thesaurus; Beethoven Auction Database

Looking for a dissertation that was not published in the US or Canada? Search for it in the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) Global Resources Network. Not finding the dissertation you're looking for? Contact Jessica Abbazio, Music Librarian, at jabbazio@umn.edu to learn about options.

Published by the UCLA Music Library in eScholarship, the Contemporary Music Score 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.

Access to over 800,00 open access research theses from 617 Universities in 28 European countries.

A Project of the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg and The Packard Humanities Institute, this database include high quality PDFs of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe.

The University of Pennsylvania Libraries provides digital access to more than 2,500 items from the collection of Marian Anderson, one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. The body of primary sources in the collection — including letters, diaries, journals, interviews, recital programs, and private recordings — spans the Philadelphia-born contralto’s six-decade career as a concert singer and advocate for social justice. This website simplifies the discovery of the digital content through finding aids and browseable listings of scrapbooks, notebooks, diaries, photographs, interviews, and recordings.

Open repository of German-language dissertations from Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. Some publications from other European countries are included. Documents date from 1998 and later.

The American Musicological Society's Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology (DDM) is an international database of bibliographic records for completed dissertations and new dissertation topics in the fields of musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology, as well as in related musical, scientific, and humanistic disciplines. The fully searchable database containing over 16,400 records, including the corrected and updated contents of all earlier printed editions of Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology and supplements contributed from musicological centers throughout the world. Records include normal bibliographic information as well as publication details and internet availability (if available). DDM does not include the dissertations themselves.

The English Heritage Music Series has been created to ensure that previously unpublished pieces from the “renaissance” in English music (generally agreed to have started in the late Victorian period, beginning roughly in 1880) are preserved, are accessible for scholarly research and, most importantly, are available for performance by future generations. Its mission is to source non-engraved/out-of-print English composer compositions that are in the U.S. public domain; preserve these compositions through the preparation of performance scores using notation software; and provide open Internet access to the scores to facilitate study, performance and sharing of performance material (program notes, audio, reviews, etc.)

The HathiTrust Women Composers Collection consists of digitized sheet music for approximately 3,000 musical works by more than 700 women composers. Most date from the 19th- and early 20th-centuries, with a few pieces from the 18th century. Some of the published scores include annotations by the composer, while there are also several hundred in manuscript form. The originals are from the University of Michigan Music Library, which purchased most of the collection in 1980 from a British antiquarian. Visitors can sort the materials by author name, date, or title using the drop-down "Sort by" feature above the listings. Most of the musical compositions featured in the collection are songs and solo piano pieces, although choral, orchestral, dramatic, and chamber music are also present in the collection. About 80 percent of the collection is available full-text through HathiTrust, which means that the music can be downloaded and printed. In addition to being of interest to musicians and music scholars, the covers of many of the pieces are illustrated and some include ornate text, providing examples of 19th- and 20th-century graphic design.

A comprehensive index of over 1 million hymn texts, hymn tunes, and hymnals, with information on authors, composers, lyrics, and scores. Search or browse hymns by title, tune, meter, key, scripture reference, and more; find hymns that relate to a particular lectionary week, topic, or part of worship, and hymnals that have been published by particular denominations; and search, view, and visualize Hymnary data in creative ways.

This annotated database includes correspondence by Mozart and his family, and has been translated into several languages. The publisher of this resource is progressively adding new letters from the approximately 1,400 letter written by Mozart and his family. In Mozart's Words provides easy access to information about people, places, and musical works referenced in the letters, as well as references to background materials like reviews, newspapers, documents, objects, paintings, engravings, and books that will help the researcher gain context. Each record links out to a digitized version of the manuscript item.

Interlibrary Loan (ILL) & Digital Delivery offers access to materials needed for courses and research, including materials not currently available within the University of Minnesota Libraries, AND digital copies of articles and book chapters from our print and microform collections. Free for currently-affiliated University students, faculty, and staff.

The Institute for Composer Diversity, winner of the 2018 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Media/Internet Award and 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. Their award-winning Composer Diversity Database allows users to discover over 4000 composers of historically underrepresented genders, racial, ethnic, and cultural heritages, and sexual orientations. You can search by composer name, living or deceased, common large and small ensemble genres, racial, ethnic, or cultural demographics, and by location (city, state, and country).

This digital collection features over fifty of the Library of Congress's chant manuscripts (e.g., antiphonaries, graduals, processionals, etc.) containing music intended for use during the rituals of the Roman Catholic Mass and Divine Office. Chronologically, these rare primary sources span a period of great paleographical change from the tenth through seventeenth centuries: from poorly executed fragments to exquisitely crafted codices, these materials range in format and size from single leaves to entire books – both pocket-sized and immense choirbooks measuring over three feet tall. Their musical contents document the creation and development of the modern-day staff from one to five staff lines, the introduction of clefs, the use of staffless (chironomic) and heightened (diastemic) neumes and eventually black square notation, and so much more. Most visually alluring are the skillfully crafted bindings of leather, brass and wood used to encase the gatherings of thick vellum leaves that periodically reveal breathtaking illuminated initials. These unique treasures present a valuable cross-section of liturgical chants copied in diverse regions throughout Europe – from a 10th-century Swiss monastery in St. Gall to a 12th-century Cistercian abbey in Lower Austria to a 16th century Spanish Cathedral.

This Library of Congress digital collection provides access to approximately 2,000 books on music published before 1800.

Description from resource's landing page: "The LiederNet Archive is the world’s largest reference archive of texts and translations of art songs and choral works. We have been online since May 24, 1995 . . . The collection has frequent additions and updates."

To access, click the "Resource available at: Marx & Engels collected works." in the catalog record.

"The Marx/Engels Collected Works is the largest collection of translations of the complete works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels covering the period 1835-1895. The 50 volumes contain all the written works of Marx and Engels including formerly unpublished manuscripts and letters. The early volumes contain correspondence between Marx and his father, Marx's poetry and letters from Engels to his sister. Latter volumes include the important theoretical works written by Marx: The Communist Manifesto, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Capital. This digital collection gives scholars access to the complete oeuvre in a fully searchable format"--Publisher's description, viewed February 10, 2016.

Opinion archives available from 1955 via EBSCO.

A free catalog of over 5 million electronic theses and dissertations published by an international group of around 175 institutions.

Available from 1914 via EBSCO.

Collection of monographs covering a broad range of music scholarship, including musicology and music history, ethnomusicology, and music theory. Includes classic works, fundamental texts, and recently published titles.

Check out streaming recordings of the Philadelphia Orchestra, free of charge. The growing Listen On Demand collection does not duplicate Philadelphia Orchestra
content found on physical media or downloadable content.

The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) is an international, non-profit organization with the aim of comprehensively documenting extant musical sources anywhere in the world. Independent national working groups at libraries and archives in many countries worldwide catalog historical musical sources: music prints, music manuscripts, libretti, and theoretical writings about music. The results are edited and published by RISM. RISM documents what exists and where it is kept, offering the most comprehensive documentation available for music manuscripts and printed music for the time between 1600 and 1800. It continues to grow through monthly updates and averages around 30,000 new records annually.

The Sheet Music Consortium provides tools and services that promote access to and use of online sheet music collections by scholars, students, and the general public. The Sheet Music Consortium is a group of libraries working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Harvested metadata about sheet music in participating collections is hosted by UCLA Digital Library Program, which provides an access service via this metadata to sheet music records at the host libraries. Data providers have chosen to catalog their sheet music in different ways, but a large proportion of the original sheets in participating collections has been digitized, allowing users direct access to the music itself and in many cases covers and advertisements that offer evidence of the cultural context in which the songs were published. This project has been generously supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Made available by the University fo Utah. From the resource's "About" page: "There has never been a simple way to search through the vast number of art songs by poet, date of composition, thematic links, keywords, or utility. SongHelix brings this ever-evolving information available into one searchable location. It is an online tool that enables users to search through the vast repertoire of art songs in order to find just the right piece. The website’s immediate purpose is to give singers and teachers the primary online tool for finding related repertoire. A secondary, and broader purpose will be to help to revitalize the form of voice recital by allowing for creative programming through novel associations. The website makes it possible for the user to search song repertoire by terms customarily found in print reference, but SongHelix’s real power is the ability to search by “Feature” as well. When searching within the “Feature” category the user will be able to discover aspects of the songs such as: dreams, stages of life, moving water, Greek mythology, particular metaphors, etc."

Visit the SPCO's free online Concert Library to watch past performances. As always, you can enjoy SPCO concerts via high-definition video in our online Concert Library anytime, anywhere, completely free of charge.
If you haven’t used the Concert Library in the past, simply create a free account with your email address or sign in via Facebook and you’ll have access to on-demand videos of 17 full concerts and nearly 50 individual pieces. You may also download their free Concert Library mobile apps for Apple and Android devices via the App Store or Google Play.

Free database of over 500,000 Canadian theses dating from 1965 and later. Theses Canada is a collaborative program between Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and nearly 70 universities accredited by Universities Canada. Documents completed in 1998 and later are available in full text; earlier publications are available in microform through interlibrary loan.

UMedia searches digitized collections from the University of Minnesota Libraries, Archives and Special Collections.

The University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy (UDC) is a venue for faculty to deposit open access copies of their scholarly work, a showcase for select student works, such as dissertations and honors theses, a home to the Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (DRUM), and centralized, searchable access to institutional digital records including those of the University of Minnesota Archives.

Search with the Library Catalog to find books, journals, etc. owned by the library. Search by keyword, subject, title, or author for materials on your topic.

A developing project, the Vocal Music Instrumentation Index currently includes 1,699 movements from J. S. Bach cantatas and allows users browse by instrumentation and text. This database includes multi-lingual full-text search so users can search by text in English, French, German, and Italian. Coming soon are more works by J.S. Bach, and pieces by Mozart, Handel, Telemann, Rossini, and more.

This online database of wind literature includes contributions and information from band directors/conductors, students, and wind band enthusiasts. This resource could be helpful for searching for new repertoire!