Music: Music Research Websites

A guide to more than 8000 print and internet resources.

The home of WGBH Media Library and Archives. It provides online access to unique and historically important content produced by the public television and radio station WGBH. The ever-expanding site contains video, audio, images, searchable transcripts, and resource management tools, all of which are available for individual and classroom learning.

This library contains over two hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by users.

A searchable database which covers over 307,000 recordings and over 1.5 million song titles, with 45,000 biographies and over 107,000 reviews.

UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.

The Appalachian College Association has created a database of thousands of objects, including musical recordings, spoken recordings with transcripts, photographs, manuscripts, newspaper articles, and other historical materials.

The International Computer Music Association is an international affiliation of individuals and institutions involved in the technical, creative, and performance aspects of computer music. It serves composers, engineers, researchers and musicians who are interested in the integration of music and technology.

Twelve video episodes streamed from the Annenberg Foundation learner.org collection.

University of Washington guide for world music and ethnomusicology.

The Global Music Archive is a multi-media reference archive and resource center for traditional and popular song, music, and dance of Africa and the Americas. The archive is housed within the Anne Potter Wilson Music Library in Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

A national public reference archive and resource centre for the traditional song, instrumental music and dance of Ireland.

Digital preservation of the earliest known recordings of ancestral classical and Hindustani music.

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.

Collection of 140 priceless autograph manuscripts, sketches, engravers proofs and first editions,

Created by the Library of Congress, the Aaron Copeland collection has hundreds of primary source documents written by and to the American composer. An excellent examination source for research on Copeland himself as well as American classical music from the 20th century.

Thousands of downloadable sound files of free classical music. Browse by title or composer.

Covers all aspects of classical music — genres, composers, performers, period links and geographical guides to instrumental music.

IMSLP stands for International Music Score Library Project.

Reference archive of texts and translations of art songs and choral works (formerly Lieder, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive)

This archive (at the University of Birmingham) contains critical editions of seventeenth-century Italian madrigals and arias, together with introductions to the editions in Italian, German and English, and translations of the texts into English and German.

Everything you wanted to know about opera, from Stanford University

Video, audio, articles, and latest jazz news.

The International Jazz Collections (IJC) was formally established at the University of Idaho in 2000, featuring papers and photographs of the legendary Lionel Hampton. The IJC merged with the University of Idaho Library's Special Collections & Archives department in 2007. It is now the preeminent jazz archive in the Pacific Northwest.

The Stanford University Archive of Recorded Sound began continuous web streaming of the Riverwalk Jazz programs consisting of more than 350 hours of historic radio broadcasts as of January 1, 2013. Using rich narrative, oral histories and interviews, clips of historic musical recordings, and live musical performances by the Jim Cullum Jazz Band, each radio show entertains and educates its listeners, promoting classic jazz music and an appreciation for its place in history.

Covers a number of subject areas, including music. Follow the links to explore the great American musical heritage.

Historical Recordings from the Library of Congress.

Part of the Library of Congress Performing Arts Encyclopedia. Includes biographies, portraits, scores.

From the Performing Arts Encyclopedia at the Library of Congress. Includes sheet music and band music, both print and audio.

Provides access to over 3000 pieces of sheet music from the Duke University digital collections.

Library of Congress collection. Consists of over 47,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the years 1870 to 1885. Included are popular songs, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra.

Library of Congress Collection, Consists of over 15,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the years 1820 to 1860.

Created by the Smithsonian Institution, this Web site invites visitors to appreciate a collection of recordings that support cultural diversity and increased understanding among peoples. Folkways is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian and helps people to learn about their own cultural heritage as well as those of others.