MUS 151, Van Mechelen, A., Spring 2025

Finding scores free online (or anywhere) is very difficult. This is in part owing to copyright law - the protection of intellectual property (see tab), followed by whether anyone is holding the specific piece you are looking for. In many ways the best you can do is be lucky!

On this page are suggestions and advice about finding collections of scores online. The very real possibility is that you may need to purchase a vocal score. 

First, let's not overthink it! Try a Google search! Search terms suggestion: the title of the piece, and vocal score.

Lucky! One of the top three results from that Google search model is a pdf version of the piece, from Opera Database, free to download.

Domain searching can put you in touch, quickly, with specific types of websites:

• .edu = websites for education institutions only, including colleges and universities. In this case we are going to search for .edu sites that often result in college and university Library and/or Archive websites
• .com = commercial sites - generally selling something
• .org = may be useful for this project. These websites are often for non-profit organizations (not always). 
• .gov = may also be useful for this project. These are US government websites that include the Library of Congress.

Domain search for free sheet music: Search terms followed by site colon dot edu (site:.edu)

Many college and university Libraries provide lists of sources for sheet music. One that frequently appears is IMSLP, a public domain sheet music repository. 

Below is a recent video demonstrating how to use this database. It's worth a watch because searching IMSLP is not necessarily intuitive.