Music: By Subject Subject Guide

Songs and Sheet Music

13 resources available
- Restricted to WMU users  - Open Access

Books about Songs

Secular, ML 1600-2881; Sacred, ML 2900-3275; Texts and translations, ML 54.6 (Reference and General Stacks)
Indexes to song collections: Ref ML 128 .S3

American Song: The Complete Musical Theatre Companion

by Ken Bloom
Ref ML 128 .M78 B6 1996
Basic information on 4800 American musicals-Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway, from 1877 to 1995. Vol. 3 lists pop and show songs by songwriter and year. Indexes to song titles and collaborators.

Folk Song Index

An index to folk and traditional songs from around the world with an emphasis on English-language songs. Contains more than 42,000 entries from more than 2,200 anthologies.

NetHymnal

Over 10,000 Christ­ian hymns & gos­pel songs from ma­ny de­nom­in­a­tions. Lyr­ics, MI­DI files, scores, pic­tures, his­to­ries and more. Search­a­ble, ad­vanced Au­to­play fea­ture, free down­loads.

Oxford Book of Carols

Ref M 2065 .N48 1992
Many standard carols, with historical commentary.

A-Z Lyrics Universe

Lyrics of about 50,000 songs. Browse or search by artist, song, or album. Site users may submit lyrics, so more are being added all the time. Sources aren't always clear, however.

IPA Source 

Provides International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and literal translations of about 5,000 art songs and 800 opera arias.

Lied and Song Texts Page

Indexes by composer, poet, first line, title. Texts in the public domain are available, along with some translations.

Public Domain Opera Libretti and Other Vocal Texts

Links to sources of opera libretti and secular and sacred song texts.

Historic American Sheet Music: 1850-1920

Presents over 3,000 pieces of sheet music from collections at Duke University. Includes minstrels, protest songs, Southern antebellum and Confederate music, spirituals and plantation songs, and more, including some piano music.

Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music

Contains over 29,000 pieces of music focusing on popular American music from 1780 to 1960. Images of covers and pages of music are retrievable if music was published before 1923 and is in public domain.

Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1820-1860, 1870-1885

Includes over 15,000 pieces of sheet music copyrighted between 1820 and 1860, and 47,000 from 1870 to 1885...popular songs, piano music, sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental, band and orchestra music, method books and instructional materials.

Sheet Music Collections

A master list of sheet music collections throughout the U.S. Links to digital collections.

login