Library & Learning Commons: Music: Archives

Digital Archives

Digitization of historic sheet music, musical manuscripts, and other primary music resources continues to advance rapidly. Here is a selection of digital archives that could be useful in your research.

10th-16th Century Liturgical Chants
PDFs of medieval liturgical chant manuscripts from the Library of Congress.
American Choral Music, 1870-1923
Featuring choral music from the collections of the Library of Congress, this resource is a result of collaboration between the Library and the American Choral Directors Association.

Bach Digital This link opens in a new window
Digital reproductions of works and sources by J. S. Bach and the whole Bach family.
Beethoven-Haus Bonn Digital Archives This link opens in a new window
One of the most important archives of primary source documents concerning composer Ludwig van Beethoven.
Carnegie Hall Digital Collections This link opens in a new window
Digitized archival materials from the famed concert hall, including programs, flyers, photographs, and more.
Chopin Early Editions This link opens in a new window
400 first and early editions of Chopin compositions from the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago Library.
Chopin's First Editions This link opens in a new window
The first impressions of Chopin's first editions, along with commentary on significant textual features.
Choral Public Domain Library This link opens in a new window
A source for free scores of nearly 30,000 choral and vocal works by over 3,000 composers.

Digitizing Juilliard's History: 1950s Audio Recordings
483 reel tapes from Juilliard's first decade of audio recordings, 1951 to 1959, are available online. Featured performers include John Cage, Isaac Stern, and Risë Stevens, as well as student performances by Van Cliburn and Leontyne Price.
Historic American Sheet Music
Duke University's Historic American Sheet Music Project provides access to digital images of more than 3,000 pieces published in the United States between 1850 and 1920.

Historic Sheet Music Collection, 1800 to 1922 This link opens in a new window
This Library of Congress collection consists of approximately 9,000 items published from 1800 to 1922, although the majority is from 1850 to 1920.

Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection
This collection, held by Johns Hopkins University, contains over 30,000 pieces of American popular music spanning the period from 1780 to 1980.
Mirskey Collection of Salon Orchestra and Silent Film Music
Instrumental parts for over 3,500 compositions, including markings, marginalia, and manuscripts in the hand of Bronislaw ("Nek") Mirskey (1887-1927). Mirskey worked as music director at several theaters in the U.S. between 1914 and 1927. The collection is held by the University of Pittsburgh.
Music for the Nation
Over 47,000 pieces of historical sheet music held by the Library of Congress that were registered for copyright during the years 1870 to 1885.

NYPL Digital Collections This link opens in a new window
The New York Public Library's collection of over 700,000 digitized archival images, including prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, and streaming video.

Online Resources for Music Scholars
Links to over 100 sites compiled by the Harvard College Library, including archival collections, online scores and sound recordings; article indexes, discographies and bibliographies; scholarly societies; and musical reference works, most of which are accessible to users outside of Harvard.
Sheet Music Consortium
A unified index to a broad group of digitized sheet music collections made available by the UCLA Digital Library Program.
Sibley Music Library
Over 21,000 digitized scores and 1,500 music books in the public domain available through the library at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music.
Wikipedia list of online digital musical document libraries
List of over 60 sources that offer "access to collections of digitized music documents (typically originating from printed or manuscript musical sources). Some contain scanned images, some contain fully encoded scores, some contain encodings adapted for music playback (e.g. via MIDI), and others (e.g KernScores) are adapted for music analysis" (Wikipedia).

UNCSA Archives

The UNCSA Archives includes audio recordings, programs, photos, and posters from the school's history. Here are some links to music-specific content in the Archives:

Dr. Benjamin F. Ward Collection
Learn more about the namesake of the UNCSA Music Library.
Giorgio Ciompi Papers
The papers of the artistic director of the school's first summer session in Siena, Italy, later known as the International Music Program.
Piedmont Chamber Orchestra Records
Correspondence and other records of this ensemble, a professional affiliate of UNCSA, from 1969-1983.
Poster Collection
Includes posters from School of Music events from 1969-2012.
Program Collection
Includes programs from School of Music events from 1965-2020.
Sound Recordings
You can find all of the sound recordings in the Archives here. Please note that not all sound recordings are recordings of musical performances.
Vittorio Giannini Collection
Manuscripts and facsimiles of manuscripts for operas, orchestral works, works for band, chamber music, and songs composed by one of the founders of UNCSA.

For more information about accessing resources in the Archives, visit the Archives home page!