Here is a selection of online resources for teachers, students, scholars and lovers of American song.
Founded in 1997, this is the home of interchange between performers and scholars interested in art song by African-American composers. Here you will find information and links to assist with your discovery of our contribution to song.
http://artsongalliance.org
The vision of the African Diaspora Music Project is to create a repository for the concert works (those intended for the concert stage; a.k.a. classical works) of composers of the African Diaspora. (The African Diaspora in this context is defined as those composers throughout the world descended from people of West and Central Africa); to provide access to scores, recordings, and programmatic information about these composers and their extant works for students, teachers, professionals and presenters; to encourage the research, exploration and performance of these works; to assist students who wish to enter the George Shirley African American Art Song and Operatic Aria Competition with appropriate repertoire choices.
http://africandiasporamusicproject.org
First established in the 1930s, ACA has developed as a publishing administrator for American concert music, representing composers and estates through several generations of creative work. The curated catalog currently contains more than 14,000 compositions from 1905 to the present day. ACA is working to preserve historical works, introduce new works, and develop innovative ways to increase awareness, performance opportunities and public engagement with its unique and growing catalog, available online, with options for print and other formats.
https://composers.com
Linking composers and communities. The American Composers Forum provides opportunities for composers and their music to flourish and engage communities in the creation, performance and enjoyment of new music.
https://composersforum.org
The American Music Center is dedicated to building a national community of artists, organizations, and audiences interested in new American music. Its Online Music Library is a comprehensive digital library with over 45,000 works by over 5,500 composers.
http://library.newmusicusa.org
The American Music Preservation website provides information about American music from the past to more recent times. The goals of the website are to present, preserve, promote, protect and provide American music through lectures, performances, research, publications, and recordings. Information regarding the music of classical composers, as well as film music, Shaker music, "New England" music, and popular songs, can be found on this website.
http://www.americanmusicpreservation.com
The American Music Research Center (AMRC) is a rare music repository dedicated to exploring the rich tradition of American music. The AMRC shares its resources with students, faculty, scholars, and the public through concerts, symposia and lectures, publications, and other scholarly activities. Important collections include the Helen Walker Hill Collection of Black Women Composers, separate music sheets from 1870 to 1920, and an extensive archive of Colorado composers.
https://www.colorado.edu
The Thomas Hampson Fund was established in 2009 in honor of the OPUS Campaign and by the AMS in recognition of Hampson's outstanding contributions to the field of music as a performer, teacher, and scholar. The fund is dedicated to fostering editions and scholarship on classic song in all its contexts, as well as new and innovative technologies for promoting and understanding classic song via interactive media and the Internet. The current maximum award is $1,000.
https://www.amsmusicology.org
The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) was founded by Alan Lomax to explore and preserve the world's expressive traditions with humanistic commitment and scientific engagement. This website includes extensive resources for students and educators.
http://www.culturalequity.org
The BBC Radio 4 three-part series America, Empire of Liberty, featuring scholar David Reynolds, "charts the development of the United States, exploring three key themes: Empire, Liberty and Faith." On this website, you can find teasers for each episode of the series, as well as audio-video slideshows featuring historic photographs.
http://www.bbc.co.uk
This digital library was born out of a need to make resources about Black music history as comprehensive and accessible as possible. It contains well over one thousand entries (and counting) in the form of books, articles, documentaries, series, radio segments, and podcasts about the Black origins of popular and traditional music, dating from the 18th century to the present day. These materials range from informal to scholarly, meaning there is something in the library for everyone.
https://blackmusichistorylibrary.com
Designed for everyone – musicians, performers, conductors, students, researchers, educators, artistic administrators, and anyone with a curious mind – the Boulanger Initiative Database (BID) provides access to thousands of works by women and gender-marginalized composers. By sharing knowledge and resources, BID increases access to works by underrepresented composers, empowering all who wish to diversify classical music programming. Explore over 8,000 works by more than 1,200 composers with ease, available to you for free.
https://database.boulangerinitiative.org
Classical Radio Announcer Bruce Duffie has posted many of his interviews, including those with singers and composers of songs. The webpage is updated as new items are added.
http://www.bruceduffie.com
Encompassing the earliest folk traditions to present-day popular music, the new Timeline of African American Music is a detailed view of the evolution of African American musical genres that span the past 400 years. This exploration of African American musical traditions reveals the unique characteristics of each genre and style, while offering in-depth studies of pioneering musicians who created some of America’s most timeless artistic expressions.
https://timeline.carnegiehall.org
Classical Vocal Repertoire offers the largest collection of solo vocal sheet music in the USA: opera, art songs, specialty numbers, new composers, rare music and old favorites, including many hard-to-find titles. Formerly located at the url http://www.classicalvocalreprints.com, Classical Vocal Repertoire has launched a new e-commerce site at the address http://www.classicalvocalrep.com.
http://www.classicalvocalrep.com
The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.
https://dp.la
Donne's BIG LIST of Women Composers is an ever-expanding list featuring more than 5,000 women composers (and counting). From pre-medieval composers to 21st century singer-songwriters, pick a country, a century, a music genre: you will find a woman there!
https://donne-uk.org
The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University holds a significant collection of 19th and early 20th century American sheet music. The Historic American Sheet Music Project provides access to digital images of 3042 pieces from the collection, published in the United States between 1850 and 1920.
https://library.duke.edu
A resource for musicians to aid in the discovery and celebration of art song by women composers.
https://www.kassiadatabase.com
The Library of Congress offers classroom materials and professional development to help teachers effectively use primary sources from the Library's vast digital collections in their teaching.
https://www.loc.govSearchable databases and catalogs of materials in the Library of Congress
http://www.loc.govThis Web site commemorates the history of the American art song by highlighting the Library's unparalleled collections of holograph manuscripts, first editions of published sheet music, copyright deposits, and recordings.
https://www.loc.gov
Featuring many American women poets, The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project aims to eventually be the largest database of women poets in the world. The site is a meeting place for poets, scholars, and students of poetry to see the global relationships among women poets across time, space, and national barriers.
http://www.mezzocammin.com
New Muses Project is a DEI-centered classical music organization, promoting justice and curiosity through performance, education, and scholarship. We are driven by a radical desire to always keep learning , as well as strong commitments to intersectionality and depth of understanding.
https://newmusesproject.com
"Oral History of American Music (OHAM) is the preeminent project in the field of music dedicated to the collection and preservation of oral and video memoirs in the voices of the creative musicians of our century. It is a special kind of history, one that captures sights and sounds and recreates the spontaneity of a moment in time. The sound of a voice is an immediate link to the past--gestures, speech patterns, laughter--these are vivid reminders of the unique qualities of a personality, and they reflect the atmosphere of his or her time and place in history." -- excerpt from OHAM website
https://web.library.yale.edu
The WGBH PBS American Experience series, both on TV and on the Web, produces high-quality programs that bring "to life the incredible characters and epic stories that have shaped America’s past and present." Of particular interest to the Song of America project are the programs Stephen Foster and Walt Whitman. Other related music and song-related programs include Ballad of a Mountain Man, Duke Ellington - Reminiscing a Tempo, If You Knew Sousa, Jubilee SIngers: Sacrifice and Glory, Now In Praise of Famous Men - Revisited, and That Rhythm, Those Blues.
http://www.pbs.org
Find a poem. Discover poetry. The Poetry Foundation is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit organization with a mission to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry.
https://www.poets.org
Online retailer of classical sheet music from Medieval through Contemporary. Your purchase supports the Hampsong Foundation, which supports SongofAmerica.net.
https://www.sheetmusicplus.com
The mission of the Society for American Music is to stimulate the appreciation, performance, creation and study of American musics of all eras and in all their diversity, including the full range of activities and institutions associated with these musics throughout the world. The Society's website includes links to various web resources, educational documents (such as classroom syllabi), and information regarding the organization and its publications and affiliations.
http://american-music.org
SongHelix is a search engine designed to search through the vast number of art songs by poet, date of composition, thematic links, keywords, or utility. The website’s immediate purpose is to give singers and teachers the primary online tool for finding related repertoire. A secondary, and broader purpose will be to help to revitalize the form of voice recital by allowing for creative programming through novel associations. The website makes it possible for the user to search song repertoire by terms customarily found in print reference, but SongHelix’s real power is the ability to search by “Feature” as well. When searching within the “Feature” category the user will be able to discover aspects of the songs such as: dreams, stages of life, moving water, Greek mythology, particular metaphors, etc.
http://www.songhelix.com
StarSpangledMusic.Org is dedicated to sharing instructional resources and educational projects about American patriotic song. It was founded on September 14, 2012 — the 198th anniversary of the writing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” — and will serve as a permanent site to celebrate the history of the United States in song. The organization will post a calendar of events and weblinks dedicated to this same mission. To find out how to list your event or link, or to find out how you can help develop starspangledmusic.org, please email [email protected].
http://starspangledmusic.org
The Colonial Music Institute conducts and promotes research and educational outreach in the fields of early American music and dance. Through its website the Institute offers information and resource materials for students and fellow scholars, as well as helpful publications and online databases for researchers and teachers. CMI’s mission features primary research enlightened by interdisciplinary scholarship, disseminated through scholarly writing, authentic performances, and sound recordings made to the highest standards.
https://www.colonialmusic.org
Founded in 1994, The Gilder Lehrman Institute promotes the study and love of American history. The Institute serves teachers, students, scholars, and the general public.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org
The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music consists of over 29,000 pieces of American popular music. The collection spans the years 1780 to 1980, but its strength is its throrough 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.
http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu
This site houses an extensive, growing archive of texts to over 67,000 settings of Lieder and other classical art songs. RecMusic.org was created in May 1995 by Emily Ezust, and is offered as a free public service.
http://www.lieder.net
The Petrucci Music Library is a virtual library containing public domain music scores and/or sheet music, as well as scores from composers who are willing to share their music with the world without charge.
https://imslp.org
UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. Rare and out-of-print recordings of composers, poets and pieces of music are available for free to the public.
http://www.ubu.com
The University Musical Society and AADL have partnered to create an online home for the UMS archives. This online exhibit contains concert programs from the first 100 years of UMS as well as photographs up to the present day.
https://aadl.org
American history through music: a “Timely Tunes” listing of American songs relating to the season or current events.
http://voices.pitt.edu
This database, a research project of Christopher Reynolds of the University of California, Davis, "contains 5116 songs (and song sets and cycles) by women composers active in North America and England between 1890-1930, songs by fully 515 composers."
http://musdra.ucdavis.edu
WorldCat is the world's largest network of library content and services. WorldCat lets you search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the world for books, scores, recordings, and other media.
http://www.worldcat.org
American song database of the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library: Streaming audio sound recordings relating to American history in song and spoken word. Contains songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, pioneers, cowboys, etc.
https://web.library.yale.edu