Music & Dance Library

Search the OSU Library Catalog

Getting Started

Library catalogs typically list books, recordings, scores, journal titles, microforms, electronic resources — everything but articles. To find articles, search the databases under the "Articles" tab.

OSU LibrariesBooks, sound and video recordings, scores, maps, microforms, journals, images, electronic resources, other materials owned by OSU.
OhioLINKA combined catalog of most Ohio college and university libraries. If an item is not available at OSU (not in our catalog, checked out, etc.), search for it in this database and make an online request to have it sent to you here. Most OhioLINK items arrive in three to five business days.
OCLC WorldCatIf you cannot locate an item in our catalog or in OhioLINK, search this union catalog of thousands of libraries around the world. Many items can be requested by interlibrary loan, and you can make the request on line.
SearchOhioThe catalog of a consortium of Ohio public libraries, SearchOhio makes millions of books, audio and video recordings, and other items available. Most SearchOhio items arrive in three to five business days.
Columbus Metropolitan LibraryBooks, sound and video recordings, scores, maps, microforms, journals, images, electronic resources, other materials owned by the Columbus Metropolitan Library.
Library of Congress. Millions of books, journals, manuscripts, maps, scores, recordings, images, and electronic resources in the Library of Congress collections.
Additional Library CatalogsA directory of libraries worldwide. Each listing includes links to the library's website and catalog.
 

 

Music Periodical Indexes

Music Index. Articles from more than 600 music periodicals, 1970 to the present.

Music Periodicals Database. Articles from hundreds of music periodicals, mostly mid-1990s-present, but some as early as 1874.

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text. An international music literature index, including indexing of music periodical articles from the mid-1960s to the present.

RIPM - with Full Text. An international index of classical music periodicals from the late 18th century to the mid-1960s, including articles, reviews, illustrations, music examples, and advertisements.

RIPM Jazz Periodicals. A full-text collection of about 100 jazz journals and magazines published from roughly 1914 to 2000.

Rock's BackpagesInterviews, feature articles, reviews on pop music of many genres, 1950s to the present.

 

Multidisciplinary Periodical Indexes

JSTORFull-text articles on the arts and humanities, including important music and dance journals.

Web of Science Citation Index. Covers several major music and dance journals. Offers cited reference searching (find articles that cite a work or works by a particular author).

Dance Periodical Indexes
 
International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance. Includes full text for more than 100 journals, and citations, often with abstracts. Indexes articles, books, and dissertations on all aspects of theater and performance. Includes full content of the 14-volume print International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance.
 
Performing Arts Periodicals Database.  Indexes several dozen dance periodicals from the 1970s to the present and offers indexes and abstracts of some periodicals back to 1864. The full texts of recent issues of some dance journals are searchable through this database. 
 
 
Classical

Music Online: Classical Scores Library.  More than 53,000 titles and 1.3 million printable pages of important scores in classical music, ranging from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. Approximately 4,600 composers are included, from Mozart and Tchaikovsky to contemporary artists, including Kaija Saariaho, Peter Maxwell-Davies, and John Tavener.

IMSLP - Petrucci Music Library.  Roughly half a million items, including scores or parts of 165,000 works. IMSLP stands for "International Music Score Library Project." The collection is named for Ottaviano Petrucci, printer in 1501 of the first book of polyphonic music set in movable type.

Recent Researches in Music Online. The series comprises two kinds of editions: those that span the history of Western music, and those with ties to specific cultural milieus. Most editions are devoted to works by a single composer or in a single genre.

Project Gutenberg Sheet Music Project.  Digitized public-domain sheet music, emphasis on chamber works.

Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music.  Provided by the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music: 17th-century works in modern editions for scholars, performers, and students.

Josquin Research Project.  Polyphonic music from the period c.1420-1520.

Juilliard Manuscript Collection.  Manuscripts, sketches, engravers' proofs and first editions, including an engraver’s proof of Beethoven’s ninth symphony with annotations by the composer, the manuscript of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge in his arrangement for piano 4 hands, and the last scene of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, together with select manuscripts from the Juilliard Library’s Special Collections, including scores in the Artur Rubinstein Music Collection.

University of Washington Music Library Digital Scores Collection. Scores dating from the 17th through 19th centuries, most of them 17th- and 18th-century operas, opera excerpts, and other vocal music.

African-American Sheet Music (Brown University). Music by, and relating to, African-Americans from the 1820s to the present.

Loeb Music Library, Harvard University.  Digital collection of scores and libretti, selected for their rare or unique natures and their popularity as objects of research and teaching.

Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London). Images and metadata for thousands of medieval manuscripts.

Early Music Online (Royal Holloway, University of London, the British Library and JISC). Digitized images of some of the world's oldest surviving volumes of printed music.

University of North Texas: Virtual Music Rare Book Room. A digital collection particularly strong in eighteenth-century French opera.

Indiana University VARIATIONS (scores collection). Experimental prototypes of ways in which scores and recording liner notes might be used in conjunction with sound recordings available online through VARIATIONS.

The Morgan Library & Museum Music Manuscripts Online.  High-quality images of music manuscripts owned by the Morgan Library & Museum. Works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Fauré, Debussy, Haydn, Liszt, Mahler, Massenet, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Puccini, Schubert, and Schumann, others.

Library of Congress Music Treasures Consortium.  Primary source manuscripts, early printed editions of notated music, early treatises on music, and correspondence of prominent composers. See also the scores available in Library of Congress Collections with Manuscripts/Mixed Materials.

Munich DigitiZation Center (Bavarian State Library).  Free access to hundreds of scores by Beethoven, Schumann, Distler, Mendelssohn, Michael Haydn, Rheinberger, others, including complete works sets of Liszt, Handel, and others.

Beethoven-Haus Bonn.  Text, image and audio of Beethoven scores.

Neue Mozart Ausgabe (complete)

Brahms-Institut an der Musikhochschule Lübeck.  c.40,000 digitized scores, letters, photographs.

Chopin’s Editions Online.  c.400 first and early editions in the University of Chicago Library.

Bach Digital Database (Leipzig Bach Archive).  High-resolution scans of nearly all of J. S. Bach’s works.

Schubert-online. Free access to images of c.500 manuscripts and c.600 early editions of works by Franz Schubert, together with selected autograph letters and biographical documents.

Schumann autographs (Bonn University Library). Autograph scores and letters of Clara and Robert Schumann. 

Classical String Quartets (Duke University Libraries). Collections of string quartets dating from c.1770-1840, representing composers whose works are seldom found in modern editions. 

Contemporary Music Score Collection (UCLA Music Library). Open-access scores from the Contemporary Score Edition series, the first open-access edition of new music published by a library.

Archive of Seventeenth-Century Italian Madrigals and Arias (University of Birmingham). Critical editions, with introductions and translations. 

New York Philharmonic Digital Archives.  Includes marked conducting scores and parts, business documents, printed programs, photographs.

 

Jazz Lead Sheets and Chord Changes

Free Jazz Chord Charts That You Can Transpose.  c.1300 chord charts of jazz standards that can be transposed to any key.

Jean-Luc Barbier Quartet: Les standards du Jazz.  Website of Jean-Luc Barbier, saxophonist and jazz flutist. Contains the archives of his quartet from 1975 to 1986.

The Fake Book Library.  A collection of musical lead sheets.

 

Choral and Art Song

ChoralWiki : Choral Public Domain Library.  CDPL was Founded in 1998, ported to ChoralWiki in 2005, and incorporated in 2010 as a tax-exempt charitable organization. Free choral and vocal scores, texts, translations.

Art Song Central.  Free sheet music, chiefly classical, for singers and voice teachers.

 

19th- and 20th-century Popular Song

Sheet Music Consortium.  Tools and services that promote access to and use of online sheet music collections by scholars, students, and the general public.

 

Band

Chatfield Brass Band & Music Lending Library.  The library is a member of the Southeast Minnesota Library System and lends music to bands and musicians from all over the world. Borrowers are charged a small handling fee to cover expenses. The library has collected and cataloged more than 30,000 pieces, many of which are no longer in print.The music collection not only includes band music (the largest portion), but also orchestra, dance band, sheet music.

BandMusic PDF Library.  Preserves and shares band music from the Golden Age of the American town band. If you are looking for public domain music to play with a school band, community band, or other group, you will find it here — marches, waltzes, rags, theater music, cornet solos, trombone features, and more.

Grove Music Online (Oxford Music Online)

MGG Online. Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG) is a general encyclopedia of music. It offers detailed articles on every aspect of music as well as on such related areas as literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. MGG Online contains the second print edition of MGG, published from 1994 to 2008, as well as continuous updates and additions.
 

International Encyclopedia of Dance. Articles by scholars from many countries. Covers dance — theatrical, ritual, dance-drama, folk, traditional, ethnic, and social dance. Cultural and national overviews are accompanied by entries on dance forms, music and costumes, performances, and biographies of dancers and choreographers.

Harvard Dictionary of Music Online

Garland Encyclopedia of World Music

Classical Music Reference Library. Includes Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians.

Directory of Music Faculties in Colleges and Universities, U. S. and Canada. Search for music professors teaching at colleges, universities, and conservatories in the United States and Canada.

Index to Printed Music. Use this database to find individual pieces in complete works editions and anthologies (e.g., the M2 and M3 call number ranges). Searchable by title, composer, editor, genre, language, librettist, publisher, series, or instrumentation. The database lists sets and series organized by various criteria: composer (complete works: Gesamtausgaben), geographical area (Monuments: Denkmäler), period or style, original source (including manuscripts), anthologies.

Musical America Worldwide. A music business reference source. Includes music industry news, a database featuring artists and artist managers, links to venues and presenters, and a directory of orchestras, opera companies, arts organizations, and more.

RILM Music Encyclopedias. A collection of music encyclopedias in full text, including historical and current encyclopedias published between 1775 and the present.

Oxford Bibliographies

Bibliography of Music/Dance Reference Sources (MusRef)From Brigham Young University. Includes c.8,000 bibliographies and reference sources (print and digital), some 1,600 of which are annotated with critiques on use, coverage, organization, and pros and cons. Many entries also list published reviews for the corresponding sources. Regularly updated. Includes directories, dictionaries and encyclopedias, periodical indexes and other specialized indexes, bibliographies of music research, repertory guides, thematic catalogs, catalogs of music collections and exhibits, discographies, chronologies, and select histories and guides to music librarianship.

OnMusic Dictionary

 

Classical Music LibraryMore than 950,000 tracks, including almost 50,000 recordings from EMI. Browse by discipline, release date, language, label, performer.
Naxos Music Library (Classical)Includes among other labels the complete Naxos, Marco Polo, and Dacapo catalogs: c.1.6 million tracks of classical, world, folk, and Chinese music.
Naxos Music Library (Jazz) c.100,000 tracks of jazz, and rhythm/blues.
Jazz Music LibraryThe largest and most comprehensive collection of streaming jazz available on line — thousands of jazz artists, ensembles, albums, genres.

DRAM - Database of Recorded American MusicAmerican music largely ignored by commercial recording companies. CDs, LPs, broadcast tapes, archival recordings. Based on the catalogs of New World and Composers Recordings, Albany Records, Artifact Recordings, Cedille Records, Cold Blue Music, Deep Listening, Frog Peak Music, Innova Recordings, Mutable Music, Pogus Productions, and XI. Full liner notes, scholarly articles, other research materials. The DRAM Experimental Intermedia Archive includes Live Yasunao Tone and renowned experimentalist composers.

electrothèque.  Electroacoustic music compositions from the empreintes DIGITALes record label catalogue and its composers. 

American SongHistorical collection of songs by and about miners, immigrants, Native Americans, slaves, children, pioneers, cowboys. Included are songs of Civil Rights and other political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and anti-war protests.
Smithsonian Global SoundSmithsonian Folkways Recordings and the archival collections of Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon, and other labels. Includes music recorded around the African continent by Dr. Hugh Tracey for the International Library of African Music at Rhodes University and material collected by recordists on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology.
Contemporary World MusicReggae, worldbeat, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, neo-traditional, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz, and other genres such as traditional music — Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku.
歴史的音源 Japanese Historical Recordings Collection (Rekion)Compiled by the Recording Industry Association of Japan, in cooperation with the National Diet Library, the collection consists of approximately 50,000 digitized recordings from 1900 to 1950. A fraction of these recordings are available to the public through the National Diet Library Online Collections, but most of the material is only available through libraries that have been granted special access. Click here for blog posts about the Collection. Accessible only from the Rekion workstation in Room 206.
Garland Encyclopedia of World MusicIncludes audio examples.
 

Met Opera on Demand. More than 550 full-length Met performances, in addition to telecasts from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and hundreds of historic radio broadcasts back to 1935.

 

Dance in Video. Contains dance productions and documentaries from many influential contemporary performers and dance companies. Selections cover ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance.

 

Medici.tv. A collection of classical music videos: concerts, operas, ballets, contemporary dance performances, documentaries, artist profiles, and educational programs.

 

Qwest TV. Jazz, Soul, Funk, and World Music concerts and documentaries.

 

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam. Concerts by one of the world's premiere ensembles.

 

Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall. Concerts by one of the world's premiere ensembles.

 

Jacob's Pillow Dance. Jacob's Pillow is a dance center and school in Becket, Massachusetts. It is the oldest internationally acclaimed summer dance festival in the United States.

 

Films on Demand. Thousands of documentaries, educational films, and instructional videos.

 

Kanopy. Thousands of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases across diverse subjects and disciplines, including music and dance. Titles from the DEFA Film Library, ArtMattan Films, HBO, Frameline, Ruscico, Pragda, the BBC, Flicker Alley, National Film Board of Canada, First Run Features, Cinema Libre Studio, New Day Films, and the Criterion Collection/Janus Films.

 

On the Boards. On the Boards theater is located in Seattle, Washington. Founded by artists in 1978, On the Boards introduces audiences to artistic innovators who are defining the future of dance, theater, and music on stage in Seattle and on the global screen.

 

Classical Music in Video. More than 1,500 performances by leading orchestras, chamber music and vocal ensembles, and solo artists, together with masterclasses and interviews.

 

Opera in Video. More than 500 hours of opera performances, including staged productions, interviews, and documentaries.

 

Ethnographic Video Online. A comprehensive online resource for the study of human culture, behavior and society around the world. The collections contain over 1,300 hours of streaming video, including ethnographic films, documentaries, select feature films, and previously unpublished fieldwork.

Music & Dance Library faculty and staff are always ready to help you. Ask us!

Alan Green (Head, Music & Dance Library) 614-292-2319 green.200 @osu.edu 

Sean Ferguson 614-688-0127 ferguson.36@osu.edu