Many sites offer digital copies of scores, but they are by no means exhaustive. Remember, if there is a score you need that is not available at the Howard Music Library, you may be able to request it through Interlibrary Loan.
Subscription Sources for Online Scores
If accessing these databases from off campus, you may be required to enter your MTSU Pipeline username/password.
Music Online: Classical Scores Library, Volume I includes more than 400,000 pages of scores and manuscripts by composers such as Bach, Schubert, Mozart, Handel, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms, Chopin, and more.
Music Online: Classical Scores Library, Volume II provides online access to 200,000 pages of scores. In addition to new works from contemporary composers, Volume II includes a range of important composers not represented in the first volume and alternative editions of many of music’s most studied compositions. Featured composers include Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Andrew Schultz, Moya Henderson, Nicholas Vines, Giovanni Sammartini, Michael Haydn, and many others. This volume also includes The Symphony 1720-1840-- the largest source of 18th century symphonies comprising 550 symphonic works.
Over 600 vocal and instrumental scores from antiquity through the Romantic era, with extensive content for the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque eras.
A good source for high-quality transcriptions of scores, created using Sibelius. A particularly good source for Brahms, Schubert, and Schumann lieder. Requires downloading and installing the Sibelius Scorch plug-in.
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, 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.
Digital Mozart Edition: A Project of the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum and The Packard Humanities Institute. Includes both the music and critical commentary volumes of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe.
The Sheet Music Consortium provides tools and services that promote access to and use of online sheet music collections by scholars, students, and the general public.
The scores and libretti in this Virtual Collection include first and early editions and manuscript copies of music from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by J.S. Bach and Bach family members, Mozart, Schubert and other composers, as well as multiple versions of nineteenth century opera scores, seminal works of musical modernism, and music of the Second Viennese School. Many, such as variant editions of nineteenth century operas and related libretti, fall into intellectually related sets that are meant to be seen and used together. As a group, they give scholars a window into the study of historical performance practice.
Nearly 50,000 pieces of sheet music from the Library of Congress, including popular songs, sacred and secular choral music, method books, music for bands,etc.
