LibGuides: Music: Primary Sources in Music

Primary Sources in Music

Special Collections & Archives at Chapman University The Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections & Archives is the principle repository for the preservation and access of the Leatherby Libraries’ rare and unique collections. Special Collections holds rare books, manuscripts, maps and collections of enduring value while the Archives preserves the history of the university and the Chapman family. The department includes the Dan and Sarah Caton Hogan Seminar Room with appropriate presentation technology and the Aquin Mitsuo Yamagishi Reading Room. The Library was named by the late Trustee C. Stanley Chapman, Jr., and his wife, Joan Mt. Pleasant Chapman in honor of Joan’s uncle, Frank Mt. Pleasant, a Tuscarora Indian.
Chapman University - Digital Commons - Archives and Special Collections
The Henri Temianka Archives

Audio Recordings

Sound recordings are primary sources related to the particular performance when they were recorded. Of special importance are field recordings, which are recordings of music, spoken words, or other sounds recorded while "in the field" (anywhere outside of a studio).

Places to find field recordings:

Smithsonian Global Sound This link opens in a new window Stream audio collections owned by the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and others. Access music from various genres and world cultural groups. Terms of Use. Coverage: Music composed from the Middle Ages through the 21st century, with recorded performances from the 20th century-present.

Video

Interviews and performances can be found in many places. Here are a few to explore:

Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Cross-search subscribed video collections from Alexander Street Press. Virtually every video is fully transcribed in addition to being indexed for subjects, people, places, release date, language, publisher, and video type. Terms of Use.

Images

Digital Archives

Tools to search music archives:

Digital Resources for Musicology (DRM) A valuable new tool for music research. It provides links to open-access resources such as digitized music manuscripts, digitized score reprints, early newspapers, historical audio, images, and more.
Open Music Library The Open Music Library is an initiative from Alexander Street to build the world’s largest free index of digital resources for the study of music. Curated by a community of music scholars, students, teachers and librarians, the Open Music Library brings together peer-reviewed journal articles, books and music scores from the world’s digital collections. (https://openmusiclibrary.org/about/) Leveraging shared ontologies, linked open data and principles of the semantic web, the Open Music Library integrates disparate digital collections and establishes meaningful links between the items they hold. By aggregating, enriching and integrating valuable primary and secondary sources, the Open Music Library aims to not only advance the state of the art in music knowledge discovery, but also increase opportunities for creative reuse, and promote new possibilities for research and collaboration.

Find Manuscripts:

RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, a.k.a. International Inventory of Musical Sources) A database of musical sources from around the world. Use it to locate manuscripts by individual composers, printed music from 1600 – 1800, and anthologies issued between 1500 and 1550.

Large Music Archives

Digital Scores and Libretti "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."
Juilliard Manuscript Collection "The Juilliard Manuscript Collection is an extraordinary collection of 140 priceless autograph manuscripts, sketches, engravers proofs and first editions, ... . Among its highlights are the late engraver’s proof of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9, with hundreds of markings and annotations by the composer; the original manuscript of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, in his arrangement for piano, 4 hands; and, the last scene of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. All of the manuscript scores and sketches have been digitized. Also available on this website are selected manuscripts from the Juilliard Library’s Peter Jay Sharp Special Collections, including scores in the Artur Rubinstein Music Collection."
Music Treasures Consortium The Music Treasures Consortium 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. The Music Treasures Consortium is an alliance of many libraries with holdings of unique music resources, including music manuscripts, prints, and first and early editions. The Library of Congress is hosting the consortium Web site which gives bibliographic information on each item; access to the digital items is provided through links to the holding library's own Web site. Since each library provides bibliographic information for its items, the amount of information in each record may vary according to each institution's practice. Similarly, the interface and tools for each digital item will vary according to institution.
New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives Current material available in the Digital Archives includes: 1,789 scores marked by Leonard Bernstein, Andre Kostelanetz, and others 16,198 music parts marked by Philharmonic musicians 13,882 printed programs 5,550 business and planning folders 16,517 photographs and images [From the About page]

Composer archives - manuscripts and digital collections:

Beethoven - Beethoven-Haus Bonn Digital Archives "The Digital Archives contain unique music manuscripts, first editions, letters and pictures from the museum's and library's collections of the Beethoven-Haus. [Contains] over 6,100 documents on 37,600 coloured scans of high quality, 1,600 audio files (music examples, audio letters) and 7,600 text files, ... ."
Carter - Elliottt Carter Manuscripts Library of Congress collection of sketches and manuscripts of Elliott Carter.
Chopin - Chopin's First Editions Online (CFEO) "The c. 5,500 digital images in the CFEO archive were obtained from five lead institutions (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bodleian Library, British Library, Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina and the University of Chicago Library) and seventeen other libraries. The full score of each first impression appears along with commentary on particularly significant textual features. In addition, there are excerpts from the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin’s First Editions. Innovative methodologies for complex textual interlinking and web delivery of this material were devised using advanced imaging techniques allied with relevant open standards for metadata and interface design."
Copland - Aaron Copland Collection "The first release of the online collection contains approximately 1,000 items that yield a total of about 5,000 images. These items date from 1899 to 1981, with most from the 1920s through the 1950s, and were selected from Copland's music sketches, correspondence, writings, and photographs."
Mozart - Digital Mozart Edition is produced by the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg in cooperation with Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos, California. This fantastic resource provides access to: digitized Letters and Documents of W.A. Mozart and his family; the complete digitized collection of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe (the new complete works of Mozart); and a digital critical edition of libretti for Mozart's operas.
In Mozart's Words "In Mozart’s Words provides multilingual access to an annotated version of the voluminous correspondence of Mozart and his family - approximately 1,400 letters..."

Large digital archives. Many of these will have music-related documents (manuscripts, photos, sketches, etc.) in their online digital collections:

Europeana Europeana searches libraries across Europe for digitized content, including artworks, artifacts, books, videos, and sounds.
The European Library provides a single search that looks into the collections of 48 European national libraries and leading research libraries.You can use this resource to search for hard-to-find research materials such as historic newspapers, manuscripts, and obscure corpuses.
Online Archive of California The Online Archive of California (OAC) provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 200 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses. Description from website http://www.oac.cdlib.org/about/
Library of Congress - Performing Arts Databases

Find even more online archival resources for music research using this guide:

Vanderbilt University Library - Primary Sources for Music - Digital Collections Links to selected primary source materials for music, including manuscripts, scores, sound recordings, sheet music, and more