Welcome to the ‘OpenScore’ collections of carefully transcribed scores released under the maximally permissive CC0 licence.

There are three collections. These links below will take you to the full set, including links to download individual items:

  • Lieder, c.1,500 songs
  • Orchestral works, c.100 movements (full index to follow soon)
  • String Quartets, c.100 multi-movement quartets (full index to follow soon)

Here’s an example from the lieder collection:

Schumann, Clara - Lieder, Op.12, No.4 - Liebst du um Schönheit on the OpenScore LiederCorpus main site

More information

If you’ve scrolled this far, you’re probably looking for more information. Here goes!

The main, latest, and best source of all information is this recent academic paper (click here). for which this is the full reference:

Gotham, M. (2026). Wherever I Lay My Hat is Home?: A Complex Case Study of Crowd Sourcing, Coordination, and Cross-Platform Integration for Hosting Open Humanities Data. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 12: 43, pp. 1–14. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.456

Here is a brief “digest” summary.

History

‘OpenScore’ began with a 2017 initiative to encode sheet music chosen by sponsors of a crowdfunding campaign, but the effort took off in earnest in 2018 with the launch of a (then ‘satellite’) project focussing specifically on 19th-century songs. The ‘OpenScore Lieder Corpus’ (as it became known) now includes over 1,300 songs in a range of languages on MuseScore.com and also exists in a GitHub.com mirror specifically for corpus study/MIR research (as above).

The ‘satellite’ did not seek crowd-funding, but it did benefit from the crowd-sourced contributions of a gradually evolving team of transcribers, reviewers, and managers. This is axiomatic to ‘OpenScore’ efforts: not only to serve a range of communities (musicians, academics, others), but also to engage those groups in the creation of the corpus.

In 2023, the next generation of that evolving team released a new OpenScore corpus effort specifically for string quartets. That time, we were able to present at the same time both the public-facing collection on MuseScore.com and the dataset on GitHub for use by the MIR community.

2025 sees the third OpenScore corpus, of Orchestral works. Full paper and explanation to follow.

Process and URLs

The links above provide all you need to get the scores. Those looking for more information about these collections, the transcription projects, editorial policy, and more may like to check out our notes on the ‘Scores of Scores’ encoding initiative and/or the following additional links:

What? Play online Whole Corpus Publication Other
~1,300 songs musescore.com GitHub Mirror Gotham and Jonas 2021,
Gotham et al. 2018		 Magazine piece,
Coordination Spreadsheet
~100 quartets musescore.com GitHub Mirror Gotham et al. 2023 Editorial notes,
Coordination Spreadsheet
~100 orchestral works Not yet available GitHub VoR Coming soon Prototype visualisation on TiLiA:
Beethoven;
Beach

Are the various site and repos all the same repos?

The OpenScore GitHub repo is the version info record, including uncompressed scores to support version control. This fourscoreandmore set is a duplicate of the scores but not of the format. Here we provide compressed MuseScore (mscz) and MusicXML (mxl) scores. These minimise the file size (and we’re not tracking changes here).