LibraryMusicSource.com (review)

Many music libraries went through a brief period of collection development during which librarians purchased compact discs containing hundreds of pages of scanned sheet music. Instead of purchasing a single printed score, a library could pay about the same amount of money for dozens of titles on one easy-to-use disc—what a great deal! Perhaps the largest of these compact disc publishers, CD Sheet Music, took the next digital step forward by offering institutions and individuals a subscription option to their entire collection. This subscription product is Library Music Source.

Library Music Source (LMS) is a subscription sheet music database that offers the entire collection of CD Sheet Music and the Orchestra Musician’s CD-ROM Library. This collection amounts to more than 300,000 pages of music comprising approximately 35,000 works. The collection provides public domain sheet music for almost all instruments commonly studied in American music schools, but primarily focuses on solo piano, piano duets, solo violin, violin and piano, voice and piano, opera vocal scores, choral vocal scores, full orchestral scores, and individual instrumental parts to major orchestral works.

The search box, found on every page of the site, only allows for simple keyword searches. This could sometimes be frustrating as I would occasionally retrieve far more results than I was expecting; fortunately, LMS makes up for their simple search capabilities by providing rather good browsing options. One may begin browsing by either composer’s surname or by instrument family, both of which quickly branch out into multiple options. For example, I was able to very quickly locate the Concerto in D Minor, op.47 for violin by Jean Sibelius with a quick browse; unfortunately, the resulting music was not what I expected as it provided me with the piano reduction score even though the Browsing category was clearly labeled “Solo Violin with Orchestra.”

While the score was not exactly what I wanted, I downloaded the PDF file with a single click and was rewarded with a very clean scan of some score. I describe it as “some,” because LMS does not provide any information as to who published the original score, which I would certainly like to know so that I could easily compare editions if I were preparing for a performance. This issue became even more problematic to me when I noticed scores that contain fingerings without any information as to who originally provided the fingerings. The CD Sheet Music Web site states that scores come from publishers such as Durand, Schirmer, Peters, Breitkopf & Härtel, and others, but they “do not identify the edition of each work” because the “collections include so many individual works from a variety of different published editions.”¹

Next, I decided to look at the vocal selections, because I work with many voice students. LMS certainly has many of the standard literature by Brahms, Schubert, and Fauré that students frequently perform; however, I was unable to find both high and low voicings for all the songs I searched for. Additionally, songs were not all arranged in a standard manner for each composer. For example, all of Schubert’s songs appear to be available individually by each individual song title (and therefore downloadable as a single file), but most of Fauré’s songs are grouped by opus (and therefore one must download a large group of songs at once).

Somewhat frustrated by the vocal music, I next looked at the orchestral parts. As someone who spent many hours practicing (and sometimes almost as many searching for) excerpts, I was happy to see so many standard excerpts in one place. Most of the excerpt books I’ve ever used generally provide only one or two small parts of the whole piece, but these excerpts provide an instrument’s entire part for a work so one could truly study...