February 7, 2008
Sheet Music Consortium
I occasionally become obsessed with a piece of classical music. This time around, it's Chopin's Nocturne No. 19 in E minor - Op. 72, No. 1. (Don't let the opus number fool you. It was actually written very early in Chopin's career but wasn't published until after his death.) It may well be my favorite of his nocturnes... or at least among the top three. Anyway. I decided to learn it, which meant tracking down sheet music. These days, it's not very difficult to find sheet music for well-known compositions (unlike the "good old days" when you had to take a trip to the music store, hope they had a copy of the piece you were looking for, and pay some exorbitant amount for it). However, doing a simple web search means sifting through lots of extraneous links, commercial sites, and such.
For well-known classical pieces, my first stop is the wonderful Mutopia Project, which has a decent selection of sheet music (based on public domain editions and created using LilyPond). If that doesn't work, I often try to find a site that focuses on a particular composer, like chopinmusic.net. They had a PDF version of the song. Theirs appears to be scanned from a print version and unlike the copy I found at Mutopia, it has fingering, which is helpful at first (even if you don't end up following it exactly).
Finally, it's often useful to check with university libraries and music departments, which often have extensive sheet music collections, many of which have been digitized and put online. (See this list, for example.) The University of Chicago has a large collection of Chopin first editions, which is pretty cool.
But the reason I'm writing this post is because today I stumbled across a site that I had previously been unaware of. Several schools have formed a Sheet Music Consortium, using OAI-PMH to make their collections interoperable. What this means is that in one step, you can search several sheet music collections at once. (There are currently seven data providers.) I tried it and immediately located a digitized, accessible copy of the nocturne from the Library of Congress. I love stuff like this. I hope the project continues to grow and incorporate even more collections.
07 Feb 18:53 | Link | Category: Libraries & Digital Information, Music