Scroll down for a list of online sources of scores/parts of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music. Enjoy!

ETIQUETTE

We’re all in this together, folks. Online availability of musical scores benefits everyone!
Editors and publishers deserve our APPRECIATION but need not serve as gatekeepers to our collective musical inheritance. 

Here are a few suggestions to help foster our online community of performers and music scholars:

  • Name your files! [composer piece number of parts part.pdf] EXAMPLE: [dowland, john “lachrymae antiqua” a5 tenor I.pdf]
  • Upload upload upload (Did you just spend the afternoon in a quiet library scanning that obscure publication or microfilm to your hard drive? Why not share it?)!
  • If you’re scanning material, please include a title page or write the publication info (composer, editor, date, etc.) on the first page of music.
  • Don’t be too squeamish about copyright! If you can order scores/parts that are reasonably priced, do so. If something is out of print, however, or is exorbitantly priced or unavailable (such as the big “national” collections including DTÖ and Musica Britannica), or is printed without parts (such as Ladewig’s Italian Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries) …

RESOURCES

 [see also Peter Holman’s article “Viol Music on the Internet” in the Viola da Gamba Society Journal vol. 5 (2011): http://www.vdgs.org.uk/files/VdGSJournal/Vol-05.pdf

http://imslp.org/ Scores/parts! (I typically type “imslp and [composer name]” into google)

http://icking-music-archive.org/index.php  Scores/parts (soon to be defunct, but Icking has a much better search capability than IMSLP for consort music)

http://www.baroquemusic.it Scores/parts! [Mainly 17th and 18th century. See the “links” page for an amazing list of online sources of Renaissance and Baroque music (primarily facsimiles)]

http://www.geocities.jp/lyrischesuite/gakufu_main.htm Vast repository of free editions of Renaissance and Baroque music by a mysterious (and tireless!) Japanese musician

http://vdgsa.org/pgs/music_3.html Scores/parts of Jenkins a4, a5, a6

http://www.vdgs.org.uk/thematic.html The justly famous Thematic Index of Music for Viols by Admiral Gordon Dodd and Andrew Ashbee. Go here first to find all the sources of consort music (and, in some cases, solo music) by a particular composer

http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home (“Early English Books Online”–high  resolution scans, text searchable, of everything printed in England before 1700! Requires library access/password)

http://digirep.rhul.ac.uk Manuscripts! “Early Music Online is the result of a pilot project in which more than 300 volumes of 16th-century music from the British Library were digitised from microfilm.”

http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/ British Library Digitised Manuscripts [Lots of Renaissance polyphony; includes some consort music (such as the manuscripts of the Purcell fantasias)]

http://www.diamm.ac.uk/index.html Digital Archive of Medieval Music (incredible trove of high resolution scans of medieval music manuscripts)

http://www.cpdl.org/ (“choral wiki”) Scores/texts/translations of vocal music [includes a lot of Renaissance polyphony]

http://www.solovoces.com/page.php?18 Scores of Renaissance vocal music (primarily Spanish repertory)

http://www.partifi.org/ (upload a PDF of a score, make parts!)

www.worldcat.org      Consolidated, searchable “meta” catalogue of the world’s library catalogues. This is the place to go to find out whether an edition exists.

http://www.globalchant.org/links.php [Online database of chant melodies with textual and  melodic search capabilities]

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ “Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and its  partners” [among the more than 2 million digitized items are many music publications and manuscripts from all eras of music history]

http://bvmm.irht.cnrs.fr/ “Virtual Library of Medieval Manuscripts”

http://www.stanford.edu/group/dmstech/cgi-bin/drupal/machautmss [links to the motherlode of Machaut manuscripts]

http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/scores/ [diverse list of links to “facsimiles, editions & texts” of Medieval and Renaissance music as well as many resources for scholars and editors of early music]

http://www.uma.es/victoria/partituras.html [The complete works of Victoria and lots of music by Morales, Guerrero and others]

http://www2.musik.uu.se/duben/Duben.php “The Düben Collection Database Catalogue is a digitised catalogue presenting meta-data and scanned facsimile of the Düben Collection, a large and important collection of musical manuscripts and prints from the 17th and early 18th centuries.”