Score

At the heart of fourscoreandmore is the musical “score” (aka “symbolic data” aka “sheet music”). In our case, the focus is on digital encodings of scores such that we can make use of helpful modern functionality. One key priority of fourscoreandmore has been to make more digital scores, by more composers, more easily accessible.

In the spirit of open scores, this site serves to provide easy overviews and direct download to individual files without any login and certainly without payment. It’s hard to be more open than that!

This page lists all (known) score collections meeting the following (strict!) criteria:

• Digitally encoded scores in a standard format (MusicXML, MuseScore, MEI) 🎼 🎵
• Clearly stated, maximally open CC0 or PD licence (supporting all use cases) ⛓️‍💥
• Free to download individual files or the whole collection, with no login required or prospect of a corporate takeover ⛓️‍💥
• Proper provenance information available ℹ️
• Detailed editorial notes 📝

If that sounds good, you came to the right place!

Have we missed a dataset meting the above criteria? Do you have one? If so, let us know and we’ll include it!

Scores for Performance, by repertoire

• Song 🎤🎹: OpenScore Lieder corpus: Search, sort, and direct downloads
• String Quartets 🎻: OpenScore String Quartets: Search, sort, and direct downloads

(For more about the OpenScore collections, click here)

Primarily Pedagogical Texts

• Species Counterpoint:
  • About the Species Corpus. Also provided (via that page):
    • Whole Part (I, II, III) Direct download in multiple formats.
    • Search, sort, and direct download individual figures
      • Download any in either mxl or krn format
      • View and interact with online using Verovio Humdrum Viewer (VHV)
    • For reading and engaging the book in full, fourscore recommends: playablebooks.

And finally

Here are some other corpora meeting most but not all of the above criteria:

• … Craig Sapp’s ‘Verovio Humdrum Viewer’ which includes many of the corpora produced in the humdum format.
• … The ‘RicercarDataLab’ notable collection of Renaissance scores, including rich metadata, search functionality, and direct file download.

Tl;dr

Still confused? In short, this page is a sign posting service to accessible music score data. This listings include those corpora I/we made, and those by others.

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    │  AND MORE THIS WAY → │
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