We hope that the following selection of links will be of interest to colleagues following our network. The list will grow over time.
If you have suggestions for suitable links, please let us know.
General
The Music Treasures Consortium 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. Researchers can search or browse materials, access metadata about each item, and view digital images of the treasure via each custodial archive’s Web site.
Exploring the American experience through the transformative power of jazz.
Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazz. The William P. Gottlieb Collection at the Library of Congress
The William P. Gottlieb Collection, comprising over sixteen hundred photographs of celebrated jazz artists, documents the jazz scene from 1938 to 1948, primarily in New York City and Washington, D.C. During the course of his career, Gottlieb took portraits of prominent jazz musicians and personalities, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Hines, Thelonious Monk, Stan Kenton, Ray McKinley, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Ella Fitzgerald, and Benny Carter.
Library of Congress: Voices from the Dust Bowl: the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940 to 1941
Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin took disc recording equipment supplied by the Archive of American Folk Song to Arvin, Bakersfield, El Rio, Firebaugh, Porterville, Shafter, Thornton, Visalia, Westley, and Yuba City, California. In these locales, they documented dance tunes, cowboy songs, traditional ballads, play party and square dance calls, camp council meetings, camp court proceedings, conversations, storytelling sessions, and personal experience narratives of the Dust Bowl refugees who inhabited the camps.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History: History Now 32 (Summer 2012): The Music and History of Our Times
In this issue of History Now, leading scholars of history and music take us through our recent past, moving through the decades from the 1940s to the present day. Each essay analyzes the relationship of a musical genre to a key historical event or movement.
Library of Congress: The Joe Smith Collection
More than 25 years ago, retired music executive Joe Smith got more than 200 celebrated singers, musicians and industry icons to talk about their lives, music, experiences and contemporaries. In 2012 Smith donated this treasure trove of unedited sound recordings to the nation’s library. The Joe Smith Collection is a veritable who’s who in the music industry. All types of popular music are represented—from rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, rhythm & blues and pop to big-band, heavy metal, folk and country-western.
Marcyliena Morgan et al., The Hiphop Archive
While the Archive is a record of all specific-to-Hiphop activity, ranging from local to international, it also incorporates all of the activities that have developed within and in response to Hiphop. These include academic courses, arts and community organizations, underground performances and venues, spoken word, political organizations, religious programs and much more.
Medieval/Early Modern
Elam Rotem and Jörg-Andreas Bötticher, Early Music Sources
The aim of this website is to simplify the access to the vast amount of online early music sources. The sources database as well as the iconography database allow for a quick search and offer a gateway to sources according to various categories. In addition, Early Music Sources also features a youtube series dealing with various topics relating to early music.
Volker Schier, Corine Schleif et al.: Opening the Geese Book
A multisensory work of the past is explored through multimedia technologies of the present. Completed in 1510 for the parish of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, this large-format gradual preserves the mass liturgy that was sung by choir boys until the Reformation was introduced in 1525.
Opera
The Opera Platform is the online destination for the promotion and enjoyment of opera. It is designed to appeal equally to those who already love opera and to those who may be tempted to try it for the first time.
Stanford University Library: Opening Night! Opera & Oratorio Premieres
This application is a cross-index of data for over 38,000 opera and oratorio premieres. Originally compiled by Richard Parrillo, entries include works that received a public performance between the years 1589 and 1995.
Music and the Holocaust
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Music of the Holocaust
This Web exhibition spotlights material in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Music Collection.
Yad Vashem: Heartstrings. Music of the Holocaust
The songs presented here are taken from the earliest recording conducted by Shmerke Kaczerginski who documented folklore and music for the Central Historical Commission in Munich in 1946. The collection of songs is preserved in the Yad Vashem Archives.
World ORT: Music and the Holocaust
The site provides concise, informative articles for a broad audience of teachers, students, commemoration organisers, and members of the general public interested in the subject. The Resources and References section contains resources that have been created specifically for secondary school teachers as well as for those interested in including music in their Holocaust commemoration events.
Ian Biddle, Newcastle University, Music in the Holocaust course blog
The modules aim to give students a clear sense of how the Holocaust intervened in and shaped musical culture, how victims responded musically to the Holocaust at the time and what kinds of musical responses victims and their families made to the Holocaust after 1945.
University of South Florida, A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust: Music of the Ghettos and Camps
Databases
University of California, Santa Barbara: English Broadside Ballad Archive
We provide high-quality ballad sheet facsimiles of all ballads as well as facsimile transcriptions (which preserve the ballad’s original ornament while transcribing its unfamiliar typeface into easily readable modern print). In addition, we supply recordings of the ballads whenever a tune is extant, extensive cataloguing of the ballads … We also offer background essays on the various ballad collections included in EBBA and on ballad culture generally as well as other helpful ballad resources.
Royal Holloway, University of London: Hofmeister XIX
In 1829 the Leipzig music publisher Friedrich Hofmeister began publishing a series of monthly or bi-monthly catalogues of printed music. His catalogues constitute the single most important bibliographical source for the publication of music during this period. The Monatsberichte permit the dating to within approximately eight weeks of any piece of printed music listed. They also cover books, music periodicals, illustrations, portraits and busts of composers. Hofmeister XIX makes this key resource available on the web in a fully searchable form; the records are linked to the high-quality facsimile images of the original Monatsberichte on the website of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.
Yale University Library Digital Collections: The Music Library Letters Database
Library of Congress: National Jukebox
The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives.
Department of Musicology, Innsbruck University: Musik nach Bildern
A comprehensive database of musical works that reference the visual arts [German].
Department of Musicology, Innsbruck University: Klingende Texte
A comprehensive database of musical works that reference literary texts [German].
Delve into the 121-year history of the world’s greatest classical music festival.
Vaughan William Memorial Library: The Full English Digital Archive
The world’s biggest free digital archive of English traditional folk music and dance tunes
American Musicological Society: Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology (DDM)
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.
Individuals
Library of Congress: Leonard Bernstein Collection
Ilias Chrissochoidis: Handel Reference Database
The largest collection of documents on the composer’s life, career, and early reception. This open-access online resource has fully absorbed Deutsch’s documentary biography on Handel up to the year 1726 and aspires to incorporate every available document on Handel up to his Commemoration Festival of 1784.
Cliff Eisen, King’s College London: In Mozart’s Words
In Mozart’s Words provides multilingual access to an annotated version of the voluminous correspondence of Mozart and his family. The Mozart family letters are the most extensive and richly detailed correspondence of any composer of the eighteenth century or earlier and a fundamental source of information concerning daily life at the time and Mozart’s own biography.
Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg: Mozart Briefe und Dokumente—Online-Edition
This project is designed to publish online all the letters and documents pertaining to the Mozart family from the period between 1740 (Leopold Mozart’s settlement in Salzburg) and 1880 (establishment of the International Mozarteum Foundation) [German].
British library: Mozart's Thematic Catalogue
This manuscript is Mozart's record of his compositions in the last seven years of his life, and thus is a uniquely important document. According to the description on the front cover, Mozart planned to include all his compositions, but there are a few minor omissions. Intriguingly, there are also entries in the catalogue for a number of works that have since been lost.
Schenker Documents Online: The Correspondence, Diaries, and Lessonbooks of Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935)
For the Schenker oeuvre, the correspondence opens up the development of his theoretical and analytical ideas, tracing in detail his plans for publication and showing how those plans came to fruition, were aborted or transformed. It also casts light on the forging of his analytical terminology and graphic symbols.
Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Bonn, Clara and Robert Schumann manuscripts
Bonn University Library holds an extensive collection of music autographs and letters from Clara and Robert Schumann. The holdings in Bonn are considered as one of the most important Schumann collections in Germany. Bonn University Library digitized these holdings in the past years and offers online access to its digital collections.
The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music