And I’m talking really old here, kids. I just found it, and I can’t believe they’ve been online since February, 2006 and I never heard about it. It’s called the International Music Score Library Project, a public domain music score library where they have 8,625 scores of 5,131 different works available for free download. Absolutely free. God bless Web 2.0!!
There are some modern works available on the site. It all depends on their copyright restrictions, but anything that’s really, really old and thus in the public domain will probably be on here.
My #1 Pick:
All of J.S. Bach’s inventions. I don’t care what you play: you should practice some of these for at least a little while in your life. There are no greater facility builders that Bach’s inventions, and they are all beautiful.
more articles by Brien Henderson
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- Every Musician Should Read This
- Saxes: Work Your Pinkies!, part 1
- Spice Things Up With The Tritone Sub
- Writing Your Own Music: How To Get Started
- Intro to chords in Jazz
- Subdivide. It Pays Off
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Thanks for the resource. I looked at a few pieces, some of the scans aren’t great, but I can’t imagine traveling to every library around the world to find all this music. That would be fun, but who has the money
And I’ll second your thoughts on Bach. Not only are they great for facility but for ear training as well. Even single note lines lead you fluidly through the chord progressions. I also like using Bach with all students because they sound great at any tempo.