Jim Dan Hill Library: Music: Open Access Online and Digitized Archival Resources

Online Resources

ABLE Voices Podcast
From the website description of this Berklee College of Music Project: "Dr. Rhoda Bernard, founding managing director of the Berklee Institute for Accessible Arts Education, is proud to present the ABLE Voices podcast, featuring disabled artists and arts educators. Each ABLE Voices episode is guest-hosted by a disabled artist. Guests on ABLE Voices discuss their experiences navigating their careers, their artistic development, their arts education, and their creative process."
Association for Recorded Sound Collections Podcasts
From the website: "ARSC has produced two podcast series: Echoes of History, produced by Anthony Wellman, and Time Collected, produced by Joe Stolarick and other ARSC members. Echoes of History explores vanished eras and forgotten times through the medium of sound. Time Collected takes a closer look at the people, places, and events associated with selected historical sound recordings."
The Avid Listener
"Dedicated to the idea that music commentary and criticism can be literate and fun to read, The Avid Listener is a blog from W. W. Norton & Company, which fosters discussions between scholars and novices alike." (The last post appears to date to 2021)
Black Music History Library
"BMHL is a living register of books, articles, documentaries, series, podcasts and more about the Black origins of traditional and popular music dating from the 17th century to present day. Resources are organized by chronology, genre and/or geography for ease of browsing. For more information about our categorization methods and curation process, please visit our about page."

The Many Musics of America Project by The American Musicological Society
Publication Date: 2024
Features include:
- "What Was the Aerobics Craze?"
- "Mexican Music and The South"
- "How Have Recording Technologies Changed Music-Making?"
- "Passing Along Traditions in the Mississippi Hill Country"

Musical Care Research
"We aim to provide interdisciplinary insight into how musical care is understood and provided during different stages of the life course. We prioritise the overlapping areas of practice, engagement, and research that are widely applicable rather than the boundaries between them."
Musicology Now
"An online platform for sounds, words, and ideas from the American Musicological Society"
Podcasts and Audio Programs via the Society for Ethnomusicology
Compiled by Liz Przybylski and Jorge Arévalo Mateus
Society for Ethnomusicology: Music and Social Justice Resources Project
"The Society for Ethnomusicology’s Music and Social Justice Resources Project is a repository of material on how people worldwide are currently using music to address issues of social conflict, exclusion/inclusion, and justice. We welcome notices on public events (e.g., rallies, performances, conferences) and other general news; proposals/reports on projects involving community engagement, activism, or advocacy; syllabi, lesson plans, and other educational material; information on activist organizations; and research articles."

Open Access Audio and Video

United States (primarily)

Concert Spirituals Playlist
From the Description: Below are a selection of concert spiritual recordings from the personal collection of author and musician Randye Jones. Most tracks were originally released on 78 RPM or long-playing discs between 1916 and the 1970s, with some rare tracks more recently released.
Learn more...less...
Vocalists whose recordings of concert spirituals are included in the playlist are:

Adele Addison, soprano
Betty Allen, mezzo-soprano
Marian Anderson, contralto
Ethel Ayler, soprano
Jules Bledsoe, baritone
Anne Wiggins Brown, soprano
Lawrence Brown, vocalist
Count Carnette, vocalist
Kitty Cheatham, soprano
Clarence Carroll Clark, baritone
Mattiwilda Dobbs, soprano Todd Duncan, baritone
Nelson Eddy, baritone
Mario Haniotis, bass
Roland Hayes, tenor
Eugene Holmes, baritone
Inez Matthews, mezzo-soprano
Dorothy Maynor, soprano
Robert McFerrin, baritone
Robert Merrill, baritone
Reed Miller, tenor
Sherrill Milnes, baritone Nettie Moore, contralto
Elwood Peterson, baritone
Leontyne Price, soprano
Paul Robeson, bass-baritone
Bayard Rustin, tenor
Oscar Seagle, baritone
Kenneth Spencer, bass-baritone
Helen Traubel, soprano
Camilla Williams, soprano
William Warfield, baritone
Lucretia West, contralto
DRAM - Database of Recorded American Music
DRAM (Anthology of recorded music) is a scholarly resource of recordings, liner notes and essays from independent record labels and sound archives. Its goal is the preservation and dissemination of important recordings that have been neglected by the commercial marketplace, from folk to opera, Native American to jazz, 19th C classical to early rock, musical theater, ‘contemporary’, electronic and beyond. Search or browse by composer, performer, ensembles, instruments, or labels. Links to associated blogs.
Kennedy Center: Digital Stage
From the website: "Watch extraordinary performances from the Kennedy Center’s stages and beyond, with new releases daily, special series and original stories. Explore our vast collection of thousands of videos."
National Jukebox
The National Jukebox, maintained by the Library of Congress, makes sound recordings available free of charge to the general public. Recordings include opera, ragtime, jazz, and more.
New Music USA Online
Information about American music and composers; a source of grants in support of composers’ creative activities. Contains over 57,000 works by more than 6,000 composers, and includes over 14,000 media samples (recordings and scores).

The United States and Beyond

Europeana Sounds
European Commission and the Europeana Sounds consortium co-funded project to increase awareness of Europe’s sound and music heritage, including oral memories and spoken word, world & traditional music, soundscapes and natural sounds, classical music, popular music, and languages and dialects.
Global Music Archive
Through Vanderbilt University, The Global Music Archive is a multi-media reference archive and resource center for traditional and popular song, music, and dance of Africa and the Americas, with a primary focus on music of Indigenous communities.
IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library
International Music Score Library Project. Includes over 102,000 world public domain works with scores or parts, as well as MP3 sound files. Note the copyright statements for Canada and the U.S.
Theme Finder
Sponsored by the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, Stanford University, this site contains an online thematic catalog that includes classical and instrumental music; European folksongs; and Latin Motets of the 16th C. Search ‘basic’ or by composer. Use Themefinder to search for musical themes. Musical notation of major themes in works from classical and instrumental music; European folk songs; Latin Motets of the 16th C. Options for detailed information about the piece, Midi sound files, and Clipboard available.

Digitized Archival Collections

English Broadside Ballad Archive (Housed at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Department of English)
Featuring images, transcriptions, and select recordings of English Broadside Ballads collated from ten institutional repositories arising from support of the National Endowment for the Humanities
ITMA: Irish Traditional Music Archive (Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann)
Vast range of services and materials relevant to the study, practice and performance of Irish traditional music. Downloads of pamphlets and scholarly monographs. Collections without copyright restrictions are particularly impressive, with audio, video, photo and newspaper galleries and manuscripts. Playlists by performers, events, studios, record labels, recording media.
A Night at the Opera (Library of Congress)
Library of Congress Music division Online Exhibition attends to Wagner, Verdi, and "Beyond." Includes manuscripts, printed scores, librettos, photographs, and set designs.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
The Online Collections of the Music Division of the LOC range from Liturgical Chants (10-16th C) forward, across multiple regions, styles, and cultures.
The Shelby White and Leon Levy Digital Archives (New York Philharmonic)
Featuring: "Exhibits, podcasts, and other special projects from the Archives."
Open Data: " This Performance History database documents all known concerts . . . amounting to more than 20,000 performances."
Includes but is not limited to scores, parts, programs, and images.
Music HerStory: Women and Music of Social Change
Website description: "From our earliest musical encounters to the formation of complex social identities, the American musical landscape wouldn’t be what it is today without the countless contributions of women changemakers, groundbreakers, and tradition-bearers. Women’s leadership in music and social change is central to the American story. Music HerStory explores these contributions through unique media collections from across the Smithsonian."
Dance to the Music (Smithsonian)
"Dance and music, music and dance. One inevitably happens in the presence of the other. Even in dances with no music, the absence of music is felt, and the dancers nonetheless keep a beat or tune in their head or feet. We describe particularly enjoyable music as being "foot-tappingly good," calling out our desire to move to the music."
Music and Spirituality (Smithsonian)
"Music and spirituality are intricately related, with spirituality often being the inspiration for the creation of music, and music so often creating the desired atmosphere for a spiritual occasion. While spirituality is not necessarily experienced through religion, many people use religion as a conduit for their everyday spirituality. The objects selected here help demonstrate the relationship between music and many of the world's largest religions."
The Lomax Digital Archive
From the about page: "The Lomax Digital Archive provides free access to audio/visual collections compiled across seven decades by folklorist Alan Lomax (1915–2002) and his father John A. Lomax (1867–1948)."
The Spirituals Database (Compiled by Randye Jones)
"The Spirituals Database offers searchable access to recorded track information for concert . . . settings performed by solo Classical vocalists."

[Historic] Notated and Sheet Music Collections

Examples of the many music resources "hiding" in the UW Digital Collections

Americana Sheet Music Collection
The Americana Collection contains sheet music published in America before 1900. The collection includes principally music from the popular tradition, although that distinction is blurred until ca. 1865. Many compositions are songs for voice and piano, but music for solo piano and other instrumental music is also included. Midwest publishers are well represented as is music by women composers.
Mills Music Library Digital Collections
Mills Music Library Digital Collections provide online access to some of the unique materials found in the Special Collections Department of Mills Music Library, including the Wisconsin Music Archives. Among these online collections you will find thousands of pieces of published sheet music from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, page-by-page access to one of the most important sources of Civil War era band music, discographies of our holdings of recordings by two important Wisconsin recording companies, and an online repository of the Wisconsin ethnic heritage materials collected by Helene Stratman-Thomas.

Additional Examples from Repositories beyond the Universities of Wisconsin

Early Music Online (British Library via Royal Holloway Digital Repository)
"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."
Irish Sheet Music Archives
High quality digitized images of public domain print music held by the Ward Irish Music Archives in Milwaukee; published ~1750 to present, although full access limited to pre-1923. Irish American content particular strong.
The Juilliard Manuscript Collection
140 digitized autograph manuscripts, sketches, engravers’ proofs, and 1st editions. Composers section has works from the baroque, classical, romantic, and later stylistic periods. Other Collections feature collections named after Arthur Rubinstein and Meredith WIllson, with works by Heitor Villa-Lobos, WIllson and contemporaries. *The Willson collection is password protected.
Civil War Sheet Music Collection
Another Library of Congress collection. Contains 25,00 pieces from the broader LOC collection. Pieces specifically about the war, not simply of the period. Songs about particular battles and events, instrumental dances and marches named for particular units or personages, etc.
Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music: Part of Special Collections at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of The Johns Hopkins University.
"The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music consists of over 29,000 pieces of American popular music.This music was generously donated to The Johns Hopkins University by Lester S. Levy over a period of years starting in 1976 and is now housed in the Special Collections Division of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. The collection spans the years 1780 to 1980, but its strength is its thorough documentation of nineteenth-century America through popular music."
Sheet Music Consortium
Via UCLA, "The Sheet Music Consortium provides tools and services that promote access to and use of online sheet music collections by scholars, students, and the general public."

Jim Dan Hill Library

University of Wisconsin - Superior

Belknap and Catlin Ave

P.O. Box 2000

Superior, WI 54880

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