Research Guides: Music: Online Scores

Key Online Score Sites

Babel Scores This link opens in a new window
Repository of contemporary music scores and parts. Most scores are accompanied by notes by the composer and recordings.
Art Song Transpositions This link opens in a new window
A resource for voice students find repertoire that fits their specific voices. It has a large catalog of art songs (most are all in the public domain, so written prior to 1927) that have multiple keys already available for you to download. If those keys don’t work, one is able to request a new transposition—for both songs already in the resource AND for songs not already available. UCI’s subscriptions allows each person to request up to 5 transpositions/quarter. Click on the “Institutional Membership” login button (near the middle of the page) to access materials.
UCI’s subscriptions allows each person to request up to 5 transpositions/quarter.
Classical Scores Library This link opens in a new window
Provides digital music scores for both public domain and in-copyright scores. This site is more valuable for the in-copyright scores it offers (generally from British publisher Boosey & Hawkes).

Recent Researches in Music Online is the online version of the excellent scholarly editions produced by A-R Editions. Includes pdf versions of scores from the "Recent Researchers in... the Music of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance; Renaissance; Baroque Era; Classical Era; Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries; and American Music. UCI's online access begins with scores published in 2018 to the present.

IMSLP (Petrucci Music Library) had over 275,000 freely available scores as of June, 2014. Scores available to Americans using this site have been published prior to 1923 (i.e., they're in the public domain). Generally you will find old 19th century editions of music that are good for a quick look, but are sometimes fraught with errors that more modern, scholarly editions have corrected.

Open Music Library helps you discover what music is out there on the internet. It regularly gathers information about new electronic sheet music, books, articles, etc. that are available online and provides a single search engine to find them. This is particularly helpful for locating small collections of electronic sheet music

Harvard Online Resources for Music Scholars Digital Scores is a continually growing directory of high quality online repositories of online sheet music.

Other Online Score Sites

Music Treasures Consortium is a collaborative effort between the Library of Congress, Juilliard School, and others. Researchers can browse and view scans of important music manuscripts such as Beethoven's opera Fidelio or Mahler's Symphony no.1.

Sheet Music Consortium, a joint effort UCLA and other universities across the country, provides access to scans of public domain sheet music. Popular song sheet music makes up a large proportion of this database.

Web Library of Seventeenth Century Music is an open-access, peer-reviewed collection makes available works composed between 1600 and 1700 that are not commercially available in print, and no editions have been posted online. The WLSCM is a service offered by the Society for Seventeenth Century Music.

DIAMM Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music

Josquin Research Project - Don't be fooled by the name. This resource has music by famous early composers like Josquin des Prez, as well as many of his well known, and lesser known contemporaries.

Early Music Sources is a helpful site to help one cut through the massive amount of early music resources on the web. Rather than having much of its own content, it acts as an excellent database and index for finding relevant resources quickly.

Composer Specific Score Sites

Mozart, Wolfgang - Access the full Neue Mozart-Ausgabe online for free