best sites:
http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/cgi-bin/sheetmusic.pl?all&titlepages&1
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm/browse
Smaller collections or harder to browse:
http://libraries.mit.edu/music/sheetmusic/fileindex.html
http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/
http://digital.library.msstate.edu/collections/sheetmusic/index.html
some racial stuff (socially its kind of shocking today) blacks in
jazz:
http://www.sheetmusiccenter.com/71/125.jpg
thousands of cool songs and wonderful sheet music cover art...
Enjoy, I know I did.
I'm always trying to restore lost arts.
But .30 a copy for piano seems like a kind of steep price in 1919. In
todays dollars I'm sure that would be over 3.00.
I do like the way they previewed other songs one might want to buy by
showing you the first couple measures:
http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/cgi-bin/sheetmusic.pl?Rag12th&Rag&2
These covers make excellent wallpaper for your computer BTW.
I got mine changing to a different one every re-boot.
Excellent idea! And having access to that stuff for study purposes is
great, too! Ibookamrked each site (except for the last one).
Thanks a mil!
Greg
These are high quality scans of sheet music and I am thrilled to view
them. I have no use for them as a musician, though I have an abiding
interest in music publishing. This is top notch music layout -
especially since it was mainly done using metal punches and design
skills we can hardly imagine nowadays.
The songs are forgettable but what do you expect when music publishing
- putting ink onto paper - was a masterful art but composition was
slavish and formulaic? Nowadays we have little respect for the fine
art of publishing, though there are many excellent compositors, but
the unlearned "artists" continue to vy for popular acclaim without the
ability to write down the message they wish to convey. No matter,
reading skills are negligible!
There ought to be another category - to help us find the work we can
emulate - for songs that we can read with accuracy yet interpret with
originality - what am I thinking?
I appreciate this link. Good stuff!
Ammo
If you click to the largest image past the thumbnail images, the scans
are excellent, most cover pages are 1 to 2 meg.
Now I'm looking for 1940's WWII hand drawn pin-up girl scans :)
Actually Rick, I meant the design of the music manuscripts, not the
cover pages!
Music publishing was a real business for a long time, but now it is a
sham.
So there is no reward for people to perfect an arrangement for
publication.
Want to fix this problem? Invite people over to sing around your
piano!
Make stuff up! Play along with the radio!
Have a "Chopsticks" contest!
Party games, that's where it's at!
AMMO