Instrumental Performance

Find print and online 'sheet' music for instruments and ensembles. Includes repertoire search tips.

A collection of several thousand titles of printed music, some rare early editions, published between 1760 and 1850, mainly chamber ensemble repetoire. These titles are freely available to music scholars, professional musicians, and music-making amateurs alike. Part of the collection has been digitized and is available through the Internet Archive. See more finding aids for the collection here: http://www.lib.uwo.ca/music/thedrsjamesandmargaretwhitbycollections.html

Web-page listing the Music Library's significant collections of music (printed and manuscript) on microfilm, with links to the PDF-guides (where available), or to the print guide in the Music Library.

Scores by CMC Associate Composers are available to view online, loan, or purchase.

Searchable archive of modern editions of sacred and secular choral music that is in the public domain, currently listing over 8,800 titles. Includes texts, translations and information about composers.

This collection holds digitized images of more than 300 volumes of 16th-century music from the British Library.

A comprehensive collection of Canadian music; includes over 20,000 patriotic and parlour songs, piano pieces, sacred music, and novelty numbers, some dating back to the 1700s. Click "Aurora" to access search. Click "Sheet Music from Canada's Past" for search tips.

The Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe (English: "Bach Society Edition") of the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach was published in a series of 46 volumes from 1851-1899, by the Bach-Gesellschaft and Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig. A single supplemental volume was issued in 1926. The last surviving editor of the series died in 1928, and these volumes are public domain worldwide.

The edition varied in quality, depending upon the individual editor in question. The BGA volumes edited by Wilhelm Rust (1822–1892) were generally quite good and often differ little from their modern counterparts found in the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (NBA), although other editors were less meticulous. In subsequent years lost manuscripts and other source material have been rediscovered, resulting in significant changes. On the other hand, several manuscripts have been lost over the same period, so the BGA remains an important source.

(Note: A newer, more authoritative edition, the Neue Bach Ausgabe, is available at the Music Library.)

The Digital Archive makes the inventory of the Beethoven-Haus and its contents accessible for research, use and the general public. Beethoven's life and oeuvre can be experienced in a multimedia way through linked image, text and audio data. You can find:
- High-quality colour scan facsimiles of music manuscripts, written documents, music prints, pictures and objects
- Short titles, source descriptions, interesting facts, systematics, content summaries, text transcriptions, related links
- Sound examples, autographs with sound, audio letters

This is the digital collection of the Brahms Institute, which includes manuscripts of many Brahms works, first and early editions, letters, photographs, and includes the composer’s address book.

"The Chopin collection at the University of Chicago Library includes over 400 [digitized versions of] first and early printed editions of musical compositions by Frédéric Chopin, maintained in the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. Because Chopin's works were often published concurrently in several countries with variant texts, scholars can establish a sequence of publication by comparing a range of printings.

"Chopin Early Editions consist of digitized images of all scores in the University of Chicago Library's Chopin collection. Users can search or browse Chopin Early Editions via a variety of data points, including titles, genres, and plate numbers."

The late 19th century Chrysander edition of Handel's collected works.

(Note: A newer, more authoritative edition, the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, is available at the Music Library.)

Thirty-four volumes of the Carl Alexander Edition of Liszt’s works, that ended in 1936, and remain incomplete.

"This project was conceived in 1996 both as a multimedia thematic catalog of the UNT Music Library’s collection of early editions of operas and ballets by the French Baroque composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), and as a nucleus for collecting information useful to anyone studying those works. A pilot version of the Lully Web Project has been on the web since 1997.

"With the assistance of a grant from TexShare, we have since scanned the scores and present here full-text versions of all of the volumes in the collection.

"In his position of service to Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Lully played a significant role in the development of French opera. His works remained historically important during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and have fueled a revival of French baroque music. We hope that this collection of first and second edition prints - themselves a witness to Lully’s popularity in the seventeenth century - will continue to provoke interest into the twenty-first."

"The compositions of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847) were published for the first time in the form of a systematic complete edition in the years 1874 to 1877. The edition of his complete works, divided into 157 volumes, was compiled and edited by Julius Rietz (1812-1877), a musician who was Mendelssohn's friend, and published by the publishing house Breitkopf & Härtel."

(Note: A newer, more authoritative edition, the Leipziger Mendelssohn-Ausgabe, is available at the Music Library.)

"The digitized version offers the musical text and the critical commentaries of the entire Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, edited by the Internationale Stiftung Mozart in cooperation with the Mozart cities of Augsburg, Salzburg, and Vienna."

"...provides free online access to digital images of more than 500 music manuscripts and more than 600 first and early editions of works by Franz Schubert. In addition, the digital collection includes a selection of autograph letters and biographical documents.

"Up to this point, the database includes music manuscripts, autograph letters and biographical documents from the collection of the Vienna City Library, the National Library of Austria, the Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage and the National Library of Norway. Moreover, we provide access to digital images of first and early editions of works by Franz Schubert from the collection of the National Library of Austria. An extension of the database in cooperation with further Schubert collections is planned."

"The compositions of Robert Schumann (1810-1856) were published for the first time in the form of a systematic complete edition in the years 1881 to 1893. The edition of his complete works, divided into 156 volumes, was edited by the composer's widow Clara Schuman (1819-1896) and published by the publishing house Breitkopf & Härtel."

(Note: A newer, more authoritative edition, the Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, is available at the Music Library.)