Best Links

Over the past 6 years, I have collected an extensive list of useful sites related to music and academia. Here are some of my favorites, by category.

Free Sheet Music

Imslp.org The sine qua non of all free classical music, IMSLP now has a “search by melody” linked section and categories by genre, era, and instrumentation. Various legal challenges have been brought in the past against IMSLP’s public-domain collection, but the site is still going, and stronger and more useful than ever.

http://www.music-scores.com/useful collection featuring Sibelius Scorch playback and score previews, with music for all skill levels drawing on the classical canon, unusual pieces, and new compositions. Some scores require a subscription to print, but the playback section is always free.

https://urresearch.rochester.edu/viewInstitutionalCollection.action;jsessionid=BC940326E443F1ABB943E6C46A04863B?collectionId=25 The Sibley library at U Rochester has a great database of scanned music (i.e. no Creative Commons work) and is especially useful for piano repertoire and turn-of-the-century works. Much of their collection is now duplicated to IMSLP, but the number of unique holdings at Rochester are still worth searching if IMSLP doesn’t turn up enough for you.

http://www.mutopiaproject.org/browse.html#byComposer All typeset using Lilypad, Mutopia’s various works are fewer and more mainstream than the others mentioned here, but the editions are cleaner and nice to play from. Sometimes an odd gem will appear, so I check the new listings every so often.

CPDL.org Good choral music site, wiki-based for ease of use. Most of the collection is cross referenced along with IMSLP at Wikipedia, so if you look at a composer bio linked from IMSLP, you might find a different set of results at CPDL.

http://icking-music-archive.org/index.php The Werner Icking music collection is also linked frequently at Wiki, and generally is good for Baroque or organ repertoire.

Honorable mentions: 

The Smithsonian collection and the National Library of Australia both feature limited full-color scans of 20th century editions, generally popular prints but also some lesser known music. These sites are good as reference, but not for printing or downloading.

Recordings

Classiccat.net is great for downloading free classical music recordings. This site does not host any recordings, but archives them from around the web categorized by composer. The quality can be hit and miss, and the same for the coverage overall for each composer, but I've found some gems here as the sites referenced often contain large, quality collections and other links.

Naxos Music Library has an extensive listing of labels and records both famous and truly obscure, all worth sifting through and updated frequently.

Classical Music Library and Classical Scores Library are two halves of an excellent archive which fills in important gaps in Naxos and IMSLP's collections. The recordings at CML are not as many as Naxos but I have often found recordings there of artists not listed with Naxos, or historical records from an era not yet available to stream at NML. The scores database in some cases extends past 1923, so the scores are not always public domain; the downside is that you cannot download them (though printing is allowed and if you have a "print to" option such as PrimoPDF you may be able to download a copy in that manner).

Academic Research

These are the databases which my school subscribes to, but some of their functionalities are available for general use.

EBSCO I generally use this database to collect the first few articles on my topic, because EBSCO covers a wide range of topics and levels of focus (i.e. scholarly articles, opera reviews, newspaper editorials).

JSTOR‘s collection overlaps with EBSCO but contains many unique periodicals and subject coverage. Large full-text collection available.

Project MUSE Another full-text database, MUSE is for the arts and offers citations and downloads for their collection.

Grove Music This database covers the serious, in-depth articles of Grove and the quick-reference entries of the Harvard and Oxford Dictionaries and the Oxford Companion to Music. Also available at this site is Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, which is good for a long read or a reference for what you know and should know on the subject.

The Lost Operas of Palais Garnier

It all started for me with Phantom of the Opera.  I have always loved Broadway shows (and operetta, starting in 2003) and after listening to the original cast soundtrack and reading Phantom 3 times in a row cover to cover, decided to try listening to a real opera. The first operas available to me were Lucia di Lammermoor,  Don Giovanni,and Dido and Aeneas.  But as soon as I could get to a Borders bookstore, I bought myself a copy of Faust,  because this opera is central to the plot of Phantom.  Christine sings the role of Marguerite, Faust's virginal victim, in this most famous of Gounod's operas (or entire works). Faust was the most popular and first opera at the Metropolitan Opera House when it opened in 1883, and continues to be performed today because of its dramatic story and archetypal characters. But there were other operas mentioned in Leroux' novel: La Juive,  by Halevy; Le Prophete, by Meyerbeer; and more. These operas, blockbusters in their day, survive today on excerpts albums or curiosity revivals. If Meyerbeer is thus represented, what of the countless other operas  which premiered in this era of luxury and grand 5 act dramas only to be forgotten by the newer trends? 

This question has intrigued me since I first listened to Faust,  in 2006. Some time I would like to find a list of performances in the 1870s-1900s at the Paris Opera, and research the scores and composers who have become obscure. There may be better reasons for their disappearance than changing tastes, but the librarian in me would love to properly archive them in order to facilitate research and possible revivals. 

Here is an aria which made it out of obscurity into recent renown when Placido Domingo performed it at the original Three Tenors concert, 1990.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TscVCfHAJvc  O Paradis, from Meyerbeer's L'Africaine sung by 20th c. tenor Jussi Bjorling

One more to go!

Well, here I am at the end of 2010-11, technically junior year. This spring I woke up one morning and found myself a senior, and have been adjusting to this for a while - since I can, I'm graduating a semester early in December.

I have had more papers to write this year than ever before, but they have been (mostly) a joy to write. Now that finals and papers have been discharged peacefully, I really miss writing! So I wrote a paper. No kidding.

This blog was an idea of mine last year, to archive the fun and arcane projects that I (sometimes) complete for the fun of it. I will be posting a few assorted papers here which may be interesting or fun to read, as well as working on my academic writing in a fun blog about music.