Sheet Music Round-up

We are living in a great age for sheet music research. After a long period of scholarly apathy, in the last few decades the world has awoken at last to the great historical value that sheet music holds, from its topical texts, to its extraordinary illustrations. Researchers today can discover online sheet music-based exhibits on a huge variety of subjects, from the blockbuster Music for the Nation exhibits and digital collections on the Library of Congress website, which embed detailed articles and essays into curated collections of sheet music resources, to exhibits created by specialized institutions like the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, which brings together songs from the North and South concerning enslaved persons, pacifists and carpetbaggers, complete with historical context and analysis. Many blogs tie sheet music illustrations in with current events: McGill's Marvin Duchow Music Library current exhibit, for instance, Women, Work, and Song, in Nineteenth-Century France (Fig. 1), provides impressive historical context and brief essays in both English and French. Accessed entirely through the lens of sheet music, the McGill exhibit neatly demonstrates the power of the Wayback Machine that sheet music can provide us. All things ‘culture’ can be explored: the economy, religion, gender, LGBTQ issues, consumerism, elements of popular culture such as the figure of the diva, sociological topics, and so on. Sheet music is invaluable for research of all kinds, as it documents trends as they happen in a specific time and place. McGill's music library curators have harnessed just this type of documentary evidence to build an excellent exhibit. But how do researchers find the music for this kind of detailed analysis? This round-up will explore the current landscape of historical sheet music, centred around how we access it online, news about the Sheet Music Consortium (where it has been, and where it is going) and, finally, a brief listing of digitized sheet music collections which are not included in the Consortium.