January 2004
Sheet Music on the World Wide Web	Show Menu

James Pasley (Lucan & Leixlip parish) describes how to download sheet music

If you have access to the Internet and a printer for your computer, you need never visit a sheet music shop again. There are endless web sites on the Internet dedicated to all aspects of music and many of these provide sheet music. This article describes three such web sites that I think you will find interesting.

Something for nothing

There are many web sites that offer sheet music for free, which can simply be downloaded and printed. They can do this because so much classical music is now out of copyright. To see just how many such sites there are, pick your favourite search engine (e.g., www.google.com) and type in "free sheet music". However, there is a down side; as they are giving the music away for free, they make their money through advertising, so you are bombarded with advertisements, and it sometimes feels as if you have to navigate a maze of advertisements just to find the elusive sheet music. One site that I would recommend is www.sheetmusicarchive.net, for the simple reason that for around $20 they will send you a CD with all the music from their web site on it. This contains over 1400 files featuring most of the great composers. Much of the music appears to have been scanned infrom old books, but is perfectly readable.

Something for singers

With all this free sheet music available, why would anyone pay for sheet music again? Well, one good reason is the next web site: www.schubertline.co.uk, a site especially provided for singers. As the site itself says, you’ll find "over 1100 vocal scores of songs by great composers." This site uses special software to display the music. Once this software is installed, simply select a song and the sheet music is displayed in very high quality notation. Each score can be printed out for about £0.60 or for a subscription fee, you can print out as many scores as you wish. But it doesn’t stop there: you can press play and listen to the song you have selected. If you have a synthesiser or digital piano connected to your computer, it will even play the music using the MIDI connection. Now here’s the clever bit: before printing you can transpose the music to any key of your choice and the sheet music is updated accordingly. So now you can have any score printed to the highest quality in the key that suits you best.

Something for composers

There are a number of other web sites that use the system described above. You’ll find a list of them here:

www.sibelius.com/products/scorch/users. One such site is www.sibeliusmusic.com, which describes itself as "The largest collection of new scores on the web". Simply put, you can buy the computer program used to enter sheet music into your computer suitable for publication. Then you can send it to SibeliusMusic and they will publish it. So now there’s no excuse not to unleash on the world those compositions you’ve been keeping secret, or even that arrangement of Amazing Grace (there are five of them on the web site already).

In this article I’ve highlighted just three of the music-related web sites available from the endless such sites on the Internet. So it’s well worth investing some time searching for the sites that suit you. The first two web sites mentioned in this article have links pages, which contain lists of other websites that the authors think are interesting. These would be good places to start your search.

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