We are living in a great age for sheet music research. After a long period of scholarly apathy, in the last few decades the world has awoken at last to the great historical value that sheet music holds, from its topical texts, to its extraordinary illustrations. Researchers today can discover online sheet music-based exhibits on a huge variety of subjects, from the blockbuster Music for the Nation exhibits and digital collections on the Library of Congress website, which embed detailed articles and essays into curated collections of sheet music resources, to exhibits created by specialized institutions like the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, which brings together songs from the North and South concerning enslaved persons, pacifists and carpetbaggers, complete with historical context and analysis.Footnote 1 Many blogs tie sheet music illustrations in with current events: McGill's Marvin Duchow Music Library current exhibit, for instance, Women, Work, and Song, in Nineteenth-Century France (Fig. 1), provides impressive historical context and brief essays in both English and French. Accessed entirely through the lens of sheet music, the McGill exhibit neatly demonstrates the power of the Wayback Machine that sheet music can provide us.Footnote 2 All things ‘culture’ can be explored: the economy, religion, gender, LGBTQ issues, consumerism, elements of popular culture such as the figure of the diva, sociological topics, and so on. Sheet music is invaluable for research of all kinds, as it documents trends as they happen in a specific time and place. McGill's music library curators have harnessed just this type of documentary evidence to build an excellent exhibit. But how do researchers find the music for this kind of detailed analysis? This round-up will explore the current landscape of historical sheet music, centred around how we access it online, news about the Sheet Music Consortium (where it has been, and where it is going) and, finally, a brief listing of digitized sheet music collections which are not included in the Consortium.
Fig. 1 Marvin Duchow Music Library's online exhibit, Women, Work, and Song, in Nineteenth-Century France http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/fsm/index.php?lang=en-CA (accessed 20 September 2019).
McGill is lucky enough to have its own superb nineteenth-century French sheet music collection from which to create such informative exhibits, and many online exhibits and interpretive material highlight scores from a home institution as this one does. But what if one does not have any interesting sheet music immediately available? What if one wants to research and/or create an exhibit, or a digital humanities project, but nearby libraries do not collect sheet music? Attempting to search ‘sheet music’ on the internet will bring the unsophisticated user a huge number of results in no useful order. A first test netted over a billion results, in a confusing jumble of sheet music for sale, references to sheet music which do not include actual sheet music, unrelated sites and eventually, some institutional sheet music collections and digital access sites. Trying WorldCat, or COPAC in its new Library Hub Discover incarnation, is even worse.Footnote 3 Two of the top three hits in this WorldCat search (Fig. 2) were genre fiction novels, yet there they are at the top of a list of 223,000+ results! One would need to browse through hundreds of records before finding appropriate resources, if then. While faceting can help to remove extraneous results, searching for sheet music in WorldCat continues to be challenging for the novice for a wide variety of reasons. As with internet searching, many researchers come to grief here, simply because of the way librarians catalogue popular sheet music: often the words ‘sheet music’ do not even appear on a library record. If users persist, the confusion factor remains high.Footnote 4 Advocacy groups like the Sheet Music Interest Group of the Music Library Association spend a lot of time anguishing amongst themselves over such problems of access.Footnote 5
Fig. 2 Worldcat search for ‘sheet music’ (accessed 12 July 2019).
Fortunately, there is relief at hand in the Sheet Music Consortium, an online, open collection of sheet music resources, administered by the UCLA Digital Library Program.Footnote 6 Some search engines rank the site highly. Many librarians have added the Consortium to high-profile libguides, recommended it to researchers, and generally encourage users to treat the Consortium as their first stop for all sheet music needs. And for good reason: the Sheet Music Consortium has built a sizeable aggregated content of digitized scores; well over 400,000 at this writing (some of which, it must be said, are duplicated material from different institutions). The Consortium also includes metadata records without scans, but their main goal is to build an open collection of digitized sheet music using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. According to the website:
Harvested metadata about sheet music in participating collections is hosted by UCLA's 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 scores in participating collections have been digitized.Footnote 7
Based on non-scientific browsing, about 75 per cent of the records allow users direct access to the music itself, if the links are still good. Because there is no expectation of data conformity, names, titles and subjects can appear in a wide variety of forms. While this allows for participation by collections using differing cataloguing guidelines (just as it should) we'll see later how this can impact the user experience.Footnote 8
In looking more closely at how the Sheet Music Consortium has evolved, let's be clear from the start that this is an aged interface. Work began on the Consortium in 2001, and the website went live in 2003. It was a marvel of its kind at that time, but 16 years is a long time in tech years. In 2009, the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded a National Leadership Grant to the Consortium, which funded several updates to the site's functionality, as well as to the user interface. But consulting the website in November 2018 (Fig. 3) showed no activity since 2013. The Consortium's keyword search is not Boolean, but provides what we would understand to be an ‘OR’ search, so if one tries to search anything other than a title word, or a single composer name, one retrieves exponentially extraneous results. Additionally, the use of quotation marks to create phrase searches is inactive, and again, to the seasoned searcher, result sets can be confounding.
Fig. 3 Home page of the Sheet Music Consortium, accessed 8 November 2018.
The option exists to perform several species of browse searches, including title, subject, name and date range, and in some cases these searches can be quite precise. One-shot wonders, for instance, will show up exactly as anticipated. If all of the music sought has been fully processed by a university library, or the Library of Congress, one is likely to find neatly collocated links. With a specific composer or title in mind, one would simply click on the link to select a list of associated records. But not all universities have submitted fully processed records: those records submitted to the Consortium without scans are at least searchable via their cataloging metadata, but those submitted as scans with limited or no metadata are partially or completely invisible to searching.
And remember that lack of data conformity mentioned earlier? This is where things can get complicated from a retrieval standpoint. What if the institution holding the desired music lists their composers’ names in direct order, rather than last name first? Or includes initial articles with their title metadata? Or they simply do not follow library conventions of standardizing names? On their own, none of these concepts are wrong: many collections and/or collectors follow their own guidelines; to exclude them would be short sighted, and would shut out many unique and important resources. But browsing the entries under ‘Strauss, J’. in the name index (Fig. 4) shows how such a simple decision has created complex repercussions as the Consortium has grown.Footnote 9 While it would not solve the problem of collocating composers’ browse entries, introducing Boolean keyword searching would allow users to search the composer's name along with a word or phrase from a title, a great help with more common genre titles like ‘song’ or ‘sonata’. The current system allows for an advanced keyword search, which overcomes some of the problems with the current ‘OR’ search, but this can still prove to be highly idiosyncratic.
Fig. 4 A browse search for ‘Strauss, J’. in the Sheet Music Consortium's Name Index (accessed 12 July 2019).
At the 2018 Portland meeting of the Music Library Association, these and other problems with the Sheet Music Consortium were discussed at length at the Sheet Music Interest Group meeting, including the search woes, and the additional, sometimes critical institutional challenges to ingesting new material. The group contacted the UCLA Digital Library Program, and inquired about their current situation regarding the Consortium. Were they interested, and/or in a position to upgrade the system, and perhaps solve a few of the above-mentioned searching issues? The librarians at UCLA responded immediately: they were indeed dedicated to the Consortium and interested in making changes to the user interface. Their first step was to produce detailed searching instructions as a stopgap between now and when they might realistically attend to additional upgrades (Fig. 5). This new libguide can be accessed from the ‘guide’ menu on the top right-hand side of the Consortium's newly updated homepage. Now that the homepage has been somewhat streamlined, it is to be hoped that the Consortium will highlight this critical guide more prominently. Some of UCLA's other plans will require a lot of money to implement, and additional staff time which they do not currently have. But in the last year, the UCLA Digital Library has already made some simple but welcome changes to the website aesthetics, in addition to adding the libguide. They are aware of the searching problems and are plotting to incorporate Boolean logic and faceting capability to the site. They want to bring the entire website's look and functionality closer to current UCLA standards, and have other plans including an investigation of the applicability of Music Character Recognition, but time and money present a constant challenge as in so many institutions today. UCLA also recognizes the vital importance of the Consortium in the current searching environment. There is a lot of excellent sheet music metadata in Worldcat, but just try searching for it (see above for details): with an upgraded interface and improved user functionality, the Consortium would indeed become a true first stop for sheet music researchers everywhere.
Fig. 5 Sheet Music Consortium Guide, http://guides.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusicconsortium (accessed 12 July 2019).
A brief detour here, as a grim reminder of reality: without the Consortium or something like it, sheet music researchers would have a rough time of it indeed. In preparation for this round-up, the writer searched and assembled sheet music resources across the internet, including collection material (both digitized and not), helpful links and extensive interpretive material. Legendary music librarian Don Krummel, retired professor at the University of Illinois and of the American music printing and publishing course at Rare Book School (inter alia), kindly provided many helpful links early on. Krummel had checked his RBS course links in 2006, and in the last 13 years, virtually every one of the 200+ links he shared had changed. The Consortium has also been plagued with the problem of broken links as repositories change their library database user interfaces. The digital world is a constantly changing landscape, and even venerable institutions change their websites regularly.
But not all digitized sheet music collections are represented in the Sheet Music Consortium, so they provide a handy list with which users will know precisely which collections are represented, and can follow the link back to the original institution and collection.Footnote 10 In fact, there are significant resources to be found in non-participating institutions. To provide some balance to this examination of the current sheet music scene, and by way of conclusion, the following annotated list introduces some other intriguing, under-utilized collections. In future, if printed websites are found to have changed, searching the institution and the name of the collection will eventually bring the determined searcher to the right place. The listing below is particularly timely, as it arrives just in time to include the 1923 imprints which have been newly released by copyright law.Footnote 11 All listed sites comply with copyright regulations, so regardless of the date range listed for the full collection materials, those available online will be limited to printing dates prior to 1924 (during the year 2019). As much as possible, descriptive information provided on the institutional websites has been used, only filled in where information was deemed insufficient to describe the materials. Employing a dizzying variety of digital platforms, the 30-odd sites present a huge range of searching formats. Most are self-evident and even occur automatically as part of the main link, but where the search interface seemed confusing, extra details have been included to help guide researchers to their goals. The more sheet music that is rendered accessible for study and analysis (using both traditional and computational methodologies), the more we will all learn about our world, yesterday and today. There are still glories out there yet to be found, as can be seen in this ravishing illustration for Mavis (Fig. 6), which presents a perfect intersection of the art deco style of the time, with the ‘irresistible’ allure of the perfume which it advertises.
Fig. 6 Peter De Rose, Mavis (New York: Vivaudou, ©1920), cover.
APPENDIX: Annotated List
American Antiquarian Society. Sheet music.
www.americanantiquarian.org/sheetmusic.htm
About 900 titles are catalogued, with more to come. Searching link provided on website: 230+ pre-1801 imprints are digitized and available through Evans Digital Edition, a subscription Readex database: http://bit.ly/AAS_pre1801_sheet_music; about 300 after 1800 that have been scanned by the AAS are freely available: http://bit.ly/AAS_scanned_sheet_music.
Includes instrumental, vocal, secular and religious music by both American and foreign composers that was printed through 1880 (more than 4,100 compositions were printed in the United States before 1826). The full collection comprises about 60,000 titles. Although Boston imprints are in the majority, the collection also embraces works published in many other parts of the country, notably New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, New Orleans and San Francisco. Special categories include illustrated music and a ‘Worcester Collection’ of works composed by, published in, or celebrating a Worcester (Massachusetts) subject.
Arizona State University library. Digital repository. ASU Sheet Music Collection.
https://repository.asu.edu/collections/125
Comprises ca. 5,400 titles. Link includes search.
Full collection consists of approximately 30,000 pieces of uncatalogued sheet music, ranging from the late 1800s through the 1980s.
Brown University Library. Brown Digital Repository. African American sheet music.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/collections/id_555/
Comprises ca. 1,455 titles. Link includes search.
Selected from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University. Chiefly consists of minstrel music and has little to do with actual African-American composers or performers; drawn from the 1820s to the present day and contains approximately 6,000 items. Of that number, 1,700 items are fully catalogued, from which the digitized titles have been drawn.
Brown University Library. Brown Digital Repository. Lincoln sheet music.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/collections/id_574/
Comprises ca. 250 titles. Link includes search.
Contains sheet music from the McLellan Lincoln Collection at the Hay Library, written between 1859 and 1923. Music about Lincoln ranges from popular song to compositions for orchestral performance. Popular music about Abraham Lincoln proliferated between 1859 and 1865, and Lincoln songs are an important source for understanding attitudes of the day towards the Illinois candidate, later the sixteenth President, and his policy agenda. Lincoln appeared in a wide variety of music, including campaign pieces, patriotic war and memorial numbers, emancipation songs and minstrel music. Music written about Lincoln since 1865 has tended to emphasize the epic character of Lincoln's presidency during the national crisis of a civil war, American folk mythology surrounding Lincoln, and the use of Lincoln's image in contemporary popular culture. Some pieces set Lincoln's own writings to music, while others memorialize the events of his life or offer a reinterpretation for recent times.
Brown University Library. Brown Digital Repository. World War I sheet music collection.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/collections/id_582/
Comprises ca. 1,830 titles. Link includes search.
Drawn from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library that relate in some way to the events of World War One, and the impact of that war on American society. There are patriotic songs, songs relating to specific military units, romantic songs of love and loss, comic songs and songs that look to the war's end.
Brown University Library. Brown Digital Repository. Yiddish sheet music.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/collections/id_583/
Comprises ca. 330 titles. Link includes search.
The Yiddish language sheet music in this digital collection is part of the large Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library. Most of the Yiddish sheet music in the collection came from the collection of Menache Vaxer and was acquired by the Library in 1968, including over 850 pieces of piano-vocal or instrumental music and dating from the 1890s through the 1940s. This core collection has been added to by purchase and gift since that time and the entire Yiddish sheet music collection now totals approximately 2,000 items. The Collection's focus is on the Yiddish-language musical stage, and includes many photographs of performers (often in costume), composers and scenes from theatrical productions. Also included in the collection are art songs, Hebrew and Yiddish language folk songs and religious music, notably from the cantorial repertoire.
City of Lincoln Nebraska Libraries. Music of Old Nebraska: A Selection from the Polley Music Library.
http://lincolnlibraries.org/polley-music-library/music-of-old-nebraska/
Comprises ca. 110 titles. Searching link provided on website.
This project was designed to share some of the Nebraska-made music that was written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the Polley Music Library in Lincoln. These pieces represent a broad sampling of the output of Nebraska musicians who range from out-and-out amateurs to professional teachers, performers and composers. The quality of the pieces varies widely, but all of them share the common thread of their Nebraska provenance. Polley Music Library has over 8,600 titles in its collection. The music has been set in historical context through extensive annotations within the catalog records.
Detroit Public Library. Digital collections. Hackley Sheet Music Collection of African American Themes.
http://bit.ly/Hackley_sheet_music
Comprises ca. 630 titles. Link includes search.
The E. Azalia Hackley Collection of African Americans in the Performing Arts was established in 1943 when original materials were presented to the Detroit Public Library by the Detroit Musicians Association. Titles are predominantly for piano, some for voice and piano; a mix of respectful material related to and by African Americans, with some minstrel music.
Furman University. Birgit Krohn Albums: nineteenth-century Scandinavian music.
https://scholarexchange.furman.edu/krohn-music/
Comprises ca. 100 titles. Searching link provided on website.
The Birgit Krohn Albums comprise print and manuscript scores collected and bound into three volumes by amateur musician Birgit Krohn (1881–1972). The material was likely compiled while Krohn was a student at Nikka Vonen's school for girls in Dale, Norway; the collection thus reflects the pedagogical, social and cultural role that music occupied in student life. Both print and manuscript scores are marked with a variety of annotations and marginalia, including names, dates, inscriptions and even geographic locations. Most of the writing is in Danish and dates from the late 1890s to about 1905. In total, the albums contain 82 printed works and 15 manuscripts; most of these works are art songs for high voice and piano or for solo piano. Most of the compositions were purchased in Bergen, Norway and many of the works are by Scandinavian composers.
Gonzaga University Digital Archives. Howard W. Wildin Sheet Music Collection.
https://digital.gonzaga.edu/digital/collection/p15486coll3
Comprises ca. 17,000+ titles; some appear available but are restricted due to date of copyright. Searching link provided on website.
Chiefly original American popular sheet music dating back to the mid-nineteenth century including several hundred published musical and film song folios, musical artist folios, musical genre folios and dance folios. Some pieces from different countries are also part of the collection.
Indiana State University. Cunningham Memorial Library. Kirk Collection.
https://library.indstate.edu/about/units/rbsc/kirk/sh-group.html
Comprises ca. 2,000 titles. Searching link provided on website.
Of the approximately 14,000 items in the Kirk Collection, 7,500 are popular songs published for the most part from ca. 1900–1970. This grouping of commercial sheet music contains songs ranging in publication date from 1865 to 1968.
Libraries and Archives of Canada. Sheet Music Collection.
http://bit.ly/Library_Archives_Canada_sheet_music
Comprises ca. 9,000+ titles. Searching link provided on website, follow instructions under sheet music link: then find ‘search Aurora’ button for active search interface; once you identify a score of interest, open the record and ‘view description’ to find links to cover and score.
Includes patriotic and parlour songs, piano pieces, sacred music and novelty numbers, some dating back to the 1700s. Besides Canadian imprints, it also includes music by Canadians or about Canada published anywhere in the world. Many of the cover illustrations are of particular interest.
Margaret Herrick Library Digital Collections. Sheet Music Collection.
http://digitalcollections.oscars.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15759coll6
Comprises ca. 500 titles. Searching link provided on website.
All items are from the Robert Cushman collection of sheet music; Cushman was an avid collector of silent film sheet music, which he mostly obtained from East Coast sheet music dealers. The music in the collection is often from, related to, or inspired by a film, and many covers contain images of film stars, often tied to a film company or specific production. The earliest piece is ‘Let's Go in to a Picture Show’, copyright 1909.
McGill Music Library. Nineteenth-Century French Sheet Music Collection.
https://www.mcgill.ca/library/find/subjects/music/special/19th-century-french
Comprises ca. 110 titles. Available through the ‘browse sheet music’ link in the ‘Women, Work & Song’ exhibit, or directly through the Internet Archive: http://bit.ly/McGill_French_sheet_music
The McGill Music Library's collection of nineteenth-century French sheet music ranges from the 1820s to the early 1900s. Comprising genres from the romance to the mélodie, as well as chansonnettes and chansons from the earliest café-concerts in the 1840s–50s to those pieces sung in the music-halls beginning in the 1860s and even in the cabarets artistiques in the 1880s, the collection provides an exceptional opportunity to trace the origins and development of these popular music genres and sub-genres. The Library is planning further digitization soon of the 19,000+ remaining titles.
MIT Music Library. Inventions of Note.
https://libraries.mit.edu/music/sheetmusic/index.html
Comprises ca. 50 titles. Searching link provided on website.
Chiefly spanning 1890–1920, only music published in the United States is included. The Inventions of Note Sheet Music Collection was established in 1997 by the Lewis Music Library, and consists of popular songs and piano compositions that portray technologies (old and new alike) as revealed through song texts and/or cover art. A small but fascinating collection.
Museum of the City of New York. George M. Cohan Collection.
http://bit.ly/Museum_City_NY_Cohan
Comprises ca. 450 titles. Link includes search.
The Edward B. Marks Music Co. Collection on George M. Cohan documents the career of one of the twentieth century's most prolific theatrical artists. Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for Humanities Collections and Reference Resources, the Museum is engaged in digitizing over 70 of Cohan's plays, musicals, sketches and printed excerpts. Includes manuscript material.
New York Public Library Music Division. American Popular songs: *ZB-768.
http://bit.ly/NYPL_American_popular_songs
Comprises ca. 4800+ titles. Link includes search.
The Music Division of the New York Public Library holds several significant sheet music collections. This digital collection presents the first decades (1890–1909) of a comprehensive holding of popular American sheet music. Totaling more than 400,000 titles, the full collection came to the Library in 1966 from the estate of George Goodwin (1900–1966), a radio station director who developed the Tune-Dex, a comprehensive index of popular songs.
New York Public Library Music Division. P.I. Marches.
Comprises ca. 455 titles. Link includes search.
Another of the NYPL Music Division's excellent collections of sheet music: published between 1873 and 1949, ca. 2,250 in total, chiefly for piano, some for voice and piano.
New York Public Library Digital Collections. Sheet music of songs from various musicals, plays, movies and television.
http://bit.ly/NYPL_Musicals_etc.
Comprises ca. 400 titles. Link includes search.
Musicals, plays, movies and television, starting in 1892.
Newberry Library. James Francis Driscoll Collection of American sheet music.
https://mms.newberry.org/xml/xml_files/Driscoll.xml
Comprises ca. 3,000 titles. Enter Digital Newberry (http://digcoll.newberry.org/#/) and keyword search DRISCOLL. You may then search within the results.
The Driscoll Collection of American Sheet Music, amassed by engineer and organist J. Francis Driscoll (1875–1959), is one of the largest and most representative collections of its kind. Some of the music is arranged according to imprint information (that is, American imprints, publishers’ imprints, illustrated imprints, etc.); other sections in the collection are arranged by subjects, such as History and Politics, United States regions and states, Ethnic and Religious, Dance Styles, etc.
Princeton University Digital Library. Early Soviet sheet music collection.
http://bit.ly/Princeton_Slavic_sheet_music
Comprises almost 200 titles. Link includes search.
A collection of early Soviet music scores published from 1920 to 1937. Numerous composers and lyricists (primarily Russian but also European and American) are represented. Most scores were published in Moscow or Leningrad. Other imprints include Rostov-na-Donu, Kiev, Khar'kov, and Tiflis. Most scores are popular music, jazz or dance music. The covers are of particular design significance.
San Diego State University Library. Digital Collections. Vince Meades Popular American Sheet Music Collection, a Visual Index.
http://bit.ly/San_Diego_State_Vince_Meades_collection
Comprises ca. 7,400 titles. Link includes search.
Published between 1835–1998, the bulk of the collection dates from 1935–1998. It consists of popular American sheet music encompassing all genres and themes including music from Broadway musicals, television and radio and the movies.
University of Alabama. University Libraries. Wade Hall Collection of Southern History and Culture: Sheet Music.
http://acumen.lib.ua.edu/u0004/0000002
Comprises ca. 2,340 titles. Link includes search.
A continuing gift of Union Springs, Alabama native Dr Wade Hall, this collection portrays Southern history and American culture in word, picture and song. It includes sheet music from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century representing all styles, including ballads, popular and patriotic music, show tunes, country, western and music relating to American wars; complementing the blues, jazz, gospel, popular sound recordings from the early 1920s to the late twentieth century.
University of Alabama. University Libraries. Confederate Imprints Collection: Sheet Music.
http://acumen.lib.ua.edu/u0004/0000001
Comprises ca. 50 titles. Link includes search.
Includes songbooks, sheet music and broadside ballads produced in states not held by Union forces (Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia). Confederate publishers put out more songsters (inexpensive collections of secular song lyrics) during the four years of war than they had during the preceding four decades. The lyrics held within the songsters, many of which were patriotic, helped to keep up southern morale.
University of Alabama. University Libraries. Alabama sheet music.
http://acumen.lib.ua.edu/u0004/0000003
Comprises ca. 70 titles. Link includes search.
Sheet music by Alabamians, about Alabama, and/or published in the state of Alabama.
University of California, Berkeley. California Sheet Music project.
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MUSI/sheetmusic/music.html
Comprises ca. 2,700 titles. Searching link provided on website.
Published in California between 1852 and 1900; chiefly for voice and piano with some piano solo, and occasional guitar, violin, or mandolin titles.
University of Colorado Boulder. Digital sheet music collection.
http://bit.ly/UCo_Boulder_sheet_music
Comprises ca. 2,035 titles. Searching link provided on website.
Examples from the sheet music collection of over 150,000 scores from the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.
University of Illinois University Library. Digital collections. James Edward Myers World War I Sheet Music Collection.
Comprises ca. 934 titles. Searching link provided on website.
Music for and about The Great War was created by all sorts of Americans: professional songwriters, acclaimed composers, church musicians, well- and little-known performers, and uncounted singing teachers, small-town bandmasters and amateurs. Their melodies and lyrics intersected with the War as propaganda, memorial and commentary, and reflected various public perceptions of and responses to America's evolving relationship with this international military conflict between 1914 and 1918. Much of this music resonated local themes, specific to communities, ethnic groups or organizations. This collection not only documents what was produced by Midwestern publishers but also offers a compelling cross-section of popular musical practices and tastes across the Midwestern US during the War. The music, lyrics and graphic art illustrations in this collection are intended to provide insights into American life during and after the War. Multiple copies of the same song title are included in this collection to document how publishers marketed and repurposed their sheet music for different regional consumers over time.
University of Pittsburgh ULS digital collections. Stephen Foster Collection.
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/collection/stephen-foster-collection
Comprises ca. 1,535 titles. Searching link provided on website: filter type of resource by ‘notated music’.
Sheet music related to Stephen Foster and his family.
University of South Carolina Libraries. Digital collections. Sheet music catalog.
http://sheetmusic.library.sc.edu/
Comprises ca. 6,000 titles, not all digitized. Searching link provided on website.
Predominantly popular sheet music from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; includes many smaller collections like the Tin Pan Alley collection highlighted separately below, as well as the Hemrick Salley Collection, which is included in the Sheet Music Consortium.
University of South Carolina Libraries. Digital collections. Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Collection, Sheet Music.
Comprises ca. 1,250 titles. Searching link provided on website: ‘view collection’.
Features sheet music from and concerning World War One, from the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.
University of South Carolina Libraries. Digital collections. Tin Pan Alley Sheet Music Collection.
http://digital.library.sc.edu/collections/tin-pan-alley/
Comprises ca. 450 titles. Searching link provided on website: ‘view collection’.
This collection documents the rise of popular sheet music, the growth of Broadway and vaudeville, and the golden age of illustration in New York, beginning ca. 1890.
University of South Florida Libraries. Digital Collections. Sheet music collection.
http://digital.lib.usf.edu/sheet-music
Comprises ca. 50 titles. Searching link provided on website: clicking on ‘collection items’ will bring up all titles.
The Special Collections Department at the University of South Florida has over 8,000 pieces of sheet music from the mid-nineteenth century onward mostly organized into the Tampa General Music Collection and the Tampa African American Sheet Music Collection, with some pieces included in the Suchoff Bartokiana Collection, the Florida Sheet Music Collection and the Nineteenth-Century American Literature Collection. The Florida Sheet Music Collection includes nearly 300 titles from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century that highlight Florida themes, composers and publishers. It is significant to researchers of music, art and Florida history. The covers and lyrics provide historical perspective of Florida culture, revealing social attitudes and perspectives.
University of Washington. University Libraries. Ashford sheet music collection.
http://content.lib.washington.edu/smweb/index.html
Comprises ca. 130 titles. Searching link provided on website; an additional database is available, but still in progress as of August 2019: http://db.lib.washington.edu/sheetmusic/
Given to the University of Washington in 1959; originally collected by Paul Ashford but has been augmented considerably since its donation. The collection largely contains music from and about Washington State and the Pacific Northwest.
Virginia Tech. Special Collections. Sheet Music Collection, Ms2003–021.
http://bit.ly/VA_Tech_sheet_music
Comprises ca. 400 covers. Link includes search.
Covers only, no music included.
