Music: Open Source Databases

New Source for Jazz - . Music Rising at Tulane: The Musical Cultures of the Gulf South  The Archive of New Orleans Jazz (renamed the William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz in 1974) at Tulane University was established in 1958 with Ford Foundation funding to initiate an oral history fieldwork project gathering the stories of the men and women who contributed to the development of jazz in New Orleans.

American Composers Alliance -  In 1937, the American Composers Alliance (ACA) was first formed as an independent licensing association, to represent American-born or naturalized composers whose music was based on classical, not popular styles. In 1944, ACA became affiliated with the newly-formed Broadcast Music Inc. 
In 2000, ACA joined with Special Collections in Performing Arts at the University of Maryland (SCPA) to preserve ACA music score masters in a state-of-the-art research archive. The masters and copies deposited with ACA have been donated to SCPA for professional preservation, and for ongoing future access for students, researchers, and performers, while the scanning and digitizing of the scores continues on an ongoing basis as funding is available.

Bach Bibliography: for the Global Community of Bach Scholars - Currently, the database contains ca. 52,000 reference items (the exact number and the date of the last upload are always displayed in the homepage). Since the aim of this database project is to provide scholarly information to the community of academics, the following guidelines are used for the selection of references:

• Published books of scholarly contents and reviews
• Published articles of scholarly contents (including reviews and correspondence)
• Published facsimiles
• Printed edition of music (focusing on pre-1950 at present)
• Unpublished dissertations (Master and Doctor) from universities
• Unpublished papers read at recognized conference or meeting

Canadian Music Periodical Index - The CMPI database includes over 37 000 entries on articles dating from the late-19th century to the present day. 630 Canadian music journals, newsletters and magazines are represented here, almost 200 of which are currently active and continue to be indexed. A complete list of the periodical titles that have been included in CMPI is available on this website.

Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology - (DDM) is an international database of bibliographic records for completed dissertations and new dissertation topics in the fields of musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology, as well as in related musical, scientific, and humanistic disciplines. Currently containing over 14,000 records, including the corrected and updated contents of all earlier printed editions of Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology and supplements contributed from musicological centers throughout the world, the database is fully searchable. 

International Inventory of Musical Sources -RISM—the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (International Inventory of Musical Sources)—represents a worldwide effort to identify and describe sources of music and writings about music from the earliest times through ca. 1850. RISM activities in the United States are overseen and sponsored by the Joint Committee on RISM of the American Musicological Society (AMS) and the Music Library Association (MLA). 

 Latin Choral Music- is an English language compilation of information about choral music by Latin American composers from 1550 to the present.  Most of the music relates to traditional forms though some world and  folk music is represented. Original compositions and arrangements are included..

The Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection -  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. The collection is especially strong in music spawned by military conflicts from the War of 1812 through World War I, and minstrel music is also well represented. Other topics include music about the circus; dance; drinking, temperance, and smoking; fraternal orders; presidents; romantic and sentimental songs; schools and colleges; and transportation. 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. The collection is especially strong in music spawned by military conflicts from the War of 1812 through World War I, and minstrel music is also well represented. Other topics include music about the circus; dance; drinking, temperance, and smoking; fraternal orders; presidents; romantic and sentimental songs; schools and colleges; and transportation.

The Living Composers Project - The LCP contains, as of 18 June 2014, data about 2816 composers, from Aa–Zyatkov, representing 94 countries and altogether more than 110,000 works. This resource is a combination of profiles and  website links.

MuseData -  The CCARH MuseData collection has been developed with the goal of providing a secure foundation for research, performance, pedagogy, and virtual editions. All of these needs require a "core work" but each may additionally require data nuances that may not be found in these encodings. Musical data for computational analysis purposes is available in the MusicData repository: http://musedata.org . The encoding efforts have thus far been focused on music composed in Europe roughly between 1700 and 1825. Sources are easily available for this period. Notational conventions are well understood. Interest on the part of performers, teachers, scholars, and listeners is well established.

 MuSICA currently provides all issues of MuSICA Research Notes. MRN is a newsletter of analysis and commentary on the broad field of research on music and behavior, including evolution, brain mechanisms, child development, perception, learning, memory, performance, health and related topics.

Music Education Search System – contains these two research tools.  Be sure to read the site information.

 The Poland-Cady Abstract Collection - More than 4,500 entries collected by William Poland and Henry Cady of The Ohio State University during the late 1960's.  Under a federal grant, these researchers attempted to collect and abstract important writings in the field of music education written prior to 1965.  The database contains author, title, source, and abstract information for each of the citations identified by Poland and Cady.

Music Journals – this site indexes the following journals and is best for known items. Most have been indexed from inception to the most current issue.  It cannot be subject searched:

Themefinder - Themefinder is a non-profit collaborative project of the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH) at Stanford University and the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory at the Ohio State University. Both the notated images and underlying data representations used by Themefinder are protected by international copyright laws. Visitors to this site are free to use Themefinder to search for musical themes for personal, teaching and non-commercial research purposes. However, any attempt to download the database, in whole or in part, will be considered a breach of copyright, and may lead to denial of access or legal action.