Researching in the Performing Arts @ CCM

Advanced search screen for searching the UC Libraries online catalogue for CCM materials..

A brief but essential guide to searching for items in the UC Libraries’ online catalog, making your searches for music and other materials easier, more efficient, and more effective. Sections explain: How the catalog works; How music is described; Searches: keyword, author, title, and subject; Limit by format; Red Box search (Summon); Sample searches.

On the shelves of the CCM Library Scores Room, scores are organized by Library of Congress call number, outlined here.

nkoda serves as a portal to 100K+ digitally published scores from over 100 music publishers, including Boosey & Hawkes, Bärenreiter, Breitkopf & Härtel, Ricordi, etc. All content is accessible exclusively within the nkoda app, available for iOS, Android, MacOS and Windows. The nkoda reader simplifies your score reading and your creating and accessing annotations. This guides explains how a UC user might access and login to the nkoda app.

A virtual library of public domain* music scores based on the wiki principle, which currently offers over 416,000 scores representing 128,000 works.
* Note: The IMSLP servers are hosted in Canada, and they determined whether scores are in the public domain (no longer protected by copyright) according to Canadian copyright laws. Because American copyright is timed differently, be careful to read the small print to determine whether the score is also in the public domain in the USA. For more information, see CCM copyright FAQs.

The Sheet Music Consortium now provides cross collection searching to 22 sheet music collections and a total of 226,914 items.

The collection "consists of over 47,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright (1870-85). Included are popular songs, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra."
Most of the content should be in the public domain, but you need to verify it.

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University holds a significant collection of 19th and early 20th century American sheet music. The Historic American Sheet Music Project provides access to digital images of over 3000 pieces from the collection, published in the United States between 1850 and 1920.
Refer to the library's "Citations, Permissions & Copyright" page for questions and obtaining permissions. Most of the materials are in the public domain, but for any item you may wish to use, this needs to be verified.

Contains popular American sheet music from 1780 through 1980. As the range of dates makes clear, not everything is in the public domain. For any score you may wish to use, the copyright status needs to be checked.

Access to nearly 23,300 PDF copies of scores and books in the public domain. Many of these are unique to the Sibley Music Library collection.

Bronisław ("Nek") Mirskey (1887-1927) was a Polish violinist and conductor who worked as music director at several movie theaters across the United States between 1914 and 1927, including Toledo, Ohio, Punxsutawney and DuBois, PA, Richmond, Virginia, Washington D.C., New York, Boston, Dallas, and Kansas City. His efforts to improve the quality of musical accompaniment performed live for early silent film productions are an important part of the history of both music and cinema. Mirskey was considered one of the experts in the field, possessing a great intuition for selecting musical pieces, taking into account the tastes of the local audiences, and skillfully conducting orchestras in close synchronization with the films.
The collection contains the instrumental parts for approximately 3,500 musical compositions. The sets include numerous markings, marginalia, and manuscripts in Mirskey's hand, revealing certain patterns of preparing music material for performance. The open-access online collection includes digital scans of all the instrumental parts in each set, including those with performance markings.

Published by the UCLA Music Library in eScholarship, the Contemporary Music Score Collection includes the digital, open access scores from the Contemporary Score Edition series, the first open access edition of new music published by a library, and scores from the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library.

A free online resource listing the mostly unfamiliar repertoire for solo violin without accompaniment. This edition (COVID-19 "Back-to-School") lists over 650 works for which both the score and recording are available (as of July 2020). Each entry includes the following information: composition title, date, and duration; composer's nationality and racial/ethnic/gender identity; difficulty level (1-5 = easiest-hardest); price ($=under US$10, $$=under $20 etc., excluding shipping); pdf availability (free/imslp/paid digital download)

To learn more about LC classification for music, which will make finding books and scores on the shelves easier, please have a look at the this excellent tutorial developed by Susannah Cleveland, Music Librarian at Bowling Green State University.