Many digital titles at the UC Berkeley Library can be found through regular searches of UC Library Search.
The Library purchases most electronic books in collections of titles rather than by individual title. UC Berkeley Library eBook Collections can be from a single publisher, cover a wide range of subject areas or specialize in one subject.
UC Library Search contains electronic collections rich in titles from the Arts & Humanities, such as ProQuest eBook Central, Cambridge University Press eBooks, EBSCO eBooks, Oxford Scholarship Online, Hathitrust, ACLS Humanities E-Book, and UC Press eBook Music Collection. In addition, many more individual titles can be found searching:
Other collections of texts about music are freely available on the web, but there is no standard portal where these are gathered and made searchable at one location. A selection includes:
Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads The Bodleian Library has unparalleled holdings of over 30,000 ballads in several major collections. The original printed materials range from the 16th- to the 20th-Century. The Broadside Ballads project makes the digitised copies of the sheets and ballads available to the research community.
Books About Music Before 1800. Online presentation including digital scans of well over 2000 pre-1801 publications about music that are reported in the RISM B VI series with the Library of Congress sigla (US Wc).
The Complete Theoretical Works of Johannes Tinctoris: A New Digital Edition "This project, currently in its initial stages of development, presents a complete new edition of Tinctoris's treatises, along with full English translations and multiple layers of commentary material, covering a wide range of technical, historical and critical issues arising from both the texts themselves and the wider context of Tinctoris’s life and the musical environment of early Renaissance Europe.">
CPANDA, Cultural Policy and the Arts National Data Archive, is an interactive digital archive of data on the arts and cultural policy in the U.S. available for research and statistical analysis, with data on artists, arts and cultural organizations, audiences, and funding for arts and culture.
Handel Reference Database "The largest collection of documents on the composer’s life, career, and early reception. This open-access online resource is the ongoing work of Ilias Chrissochoidis. Currently at 800,000 words, it has fully absorbed Deutsch’s documentary biography on Handel up to the year 1726 and aspires to incorporate every available document on Handel through his Commemoration Festival of 1784."
Mozart Letters and Documents from the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg in cooperation with Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos, California.
saggi musicali italiani (SMI), intended to comprise printed texts on Italian music theory and aesthetics from the Renaissance to the present, following the model of the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML). From the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature, Indiana University.
Texts on Music in English (TME), from the Medieval and Early Modern Eras, designed to extend the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML) and comprise all relevant manuscript and printed texts on music theory and aesthetics from the Middle Ages to the 17th century. From the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature, Indiana University.
Thesaurus musicarum italicarum (TMI), is an electronic corpus of Italian music treatises from the Renaissance and early Baroque in multimedial transcription, from the Institute of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Netherlands.>
Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), evolving to contain the entire corpus of Latin music theory written during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It complements but does not duplicate the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL), Lexicon musicum Latinum medii aevi (LmL), and similar projects such as the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (CCAT) and saggi musicali italiani (SMI). From the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature, Indiana University.
The UC Berkeley Music Library subscribes to two digital score collections:
This is a licensed collection of digital scores/eScores from Alexander Street Press in a series of four volumes that provide a reliable and authoritative source for scores of the classical canon, as well as a resource for the discovery of lesser-known contemporary works. The collections encompass all major classical musical genres and time periods from the Middle Ages to the 21st century.
The BabelScores database provides online access to more than 4,000 musical scores by over 350 composers active in recent decades. The scores are offered in a virtual booklet format that allows users to read the music while they listen to it.
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Digital scores—usually printed music that is out of copyright, digitized in PDF format—also appear frequently in several large online collections, such as HathiTrust, whose items also appear in UC Library Search. In addition, important sources for eScores include IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library and Internet Archive.
There are also a few portals where collections of digital music and musicology are gathered or emphasized. The American Musicological Society maintains links to sites of interest to musicologists; musiconn is another such resource with a German-language interface and deeper searching capabilities.
Single-Composer collections of printed and autograph music, a selection of which includes:
Bach Digital
Beethoven-Haus Bonn Digital Archives
Beethovens Werke , Breitkopf und Hartel Edition
Brahms-Institut an der Musikhochschule Lübeck
Chopin Early Editions, University of Chicago
DuFay Opera Omnia, DIAMM
Georg Friedrich Händel's Werke, Chrysander Edition
Franz Liszts musikalische Werke, Liszt-Stiftung Edition
Jean-Baptiste Lully Collection, University of North Texas
Mendelssohns Werke, Julius Rietz Edition
Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum
Ignaz Pleyel Early Editions, University of Iowa
Schönberg Music Manuscripts, Arnold Schönberg Center
Schubert-Autographs, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus
Franz Schubert's Werke, Mandyczewski Edition
Robert Schumann's Werke, Clara Schumann Edition
Schumann Autographs, University of Bonn
General, Thematic, and Regional collections, a selection of which includes:
Music Treasures Consortium, Library of Congress and other institutions
Sibley Music Library Scores, EastmanSchool of Music
Digitized Score Collection, Bavarian State Library
Loeb Music Library Digital Scores Collection, Harvard University
DDT / Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst (Monuments of German Musical Art), Series 1 & Series 2
Opera Project Cologne, 1770-1830
Trent Codices
Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, University of Oxford and University of London
Digital Scriptorium, Columbia University
Choral Public Domain Library
Classical String Quartets, Duke University
Web Library of Seveenteenth-Century Music, Society for Seventeenth-Century Music
Music Library Digital Scores Collection, University of Washington
Jewish Art Music, Jewish Theological Seminary
Early Music Online, British Library
New York Philharmonic Digital Archives (scores and parts)
Variations Prototype: Online Musical Scores,Cook Music Library, Indiana University
Sounding Spirit, songbooks and hymnals from the US South, 1850 to 1925
Sheet Music—printed music, usually popular songs, published in unbound sheets of paper as opposed to book form—is generally not found in the collections above. The Sheet Music Consortium is a web portal allowing the search of over 30 separate digital sheet music collections, most significantly the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress, which includes the following significant collections:
African American Sheet Music, 1850-1920
America Singing: 19th-Century Song Sheets
"We'll Sing to Abe our Song", Sheet Music Collection of Lincolniana
Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1820-1860 & 1870-1885
Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920
Collections not yet harvested into the Consortium include:
California Sheet Music Project, UC Berkeley
Digital Sheet Music, University of Colorado
IN Harmony, Indiana Sheet Music Collections
Inventions of Note, Sheet Music Collection, MIT
Performing Arts in America 1875-1923, New York Public Library
Finally, when a score isn't quite what you need, consider generating parts using Partifi.