IU launches online sheet music collection
Four of the state's premier cultural heritage institutions recently launched an online collection of more than 10,000 pieces of Indiana-related sheet music, making some of their most popular and sought-after materials freely available on the Internet.
A Web site at www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/inharmony/ showcases sheet music from Indiana University's Lilly Library, the Indiana State Museum, the Indiana Historical Society and the Indiana State Library. The IU Digital Library Program led the project.
Drawn primarily from the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the collection includes works by well-known composers such as George M. Cohan, Cole Porter, Al Jolson and Jerome Kern. Most of the pieces are related to Indiana by subject matter or because the composer, arranger, lyricist or publisher has an Indiana connection.
Composed by Albert Von Tilzer, this century-old tune popularizing baseball has become its unofficial theme song.
Memorable favorites such as "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," "Put Your Arms Around Me" and "Apple Blossom Time" are included because composers and brothers Albert and Harry Von Tilzer were born in Indianapolis.
Patricia Steele, Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries, says one of the project goals was to leverage the expertise of IU's Digital Library Program in showing how collections of disparate organizations could be described and organized. "Libraries and museums often have different needs, and this project showed how to cross institutional boundaries to the benefit of not only residents of our own state, but to music-lovers throughout the country and even beyond," she said.
Historians and musicologists will value the collection because sheet music is a significant resource chronicling social history and mores, said Stacy Kowalczyk, IU's manager of the project.
"In the pre-television and pre-radio days of the 19th century, many homes had pianos, and music was the entertainment of choice. Connections to family stories are inevitable," Kowalczyk says. "Someone will say, 'They played this song at my grandmother's wedding, and I'd really like to have a copy.' With this new database, people can find playable copies of out-of-print music."
One outcome of the project, Kowalczyk said, was to work through the issues of providing consistent terminology and mapping to ensure content is retrieved reliably. Works are searchable by genre, composer, subject or a range of other categories.
Available downloadable images of music and cover art may be freely used for non-commercial personal use. For materials still under copyright, researchers should contact the holding institutions. The sheet music collections of the Indiana State Library, Indiana State Museum and the Indiana Historical Society have been completely digitized.
Thousands of items from the Lilly Library sheet music collections are currently part of the site, and the entire collections -- more than 150,000 pieces -- will be systematically added in an ongoing project.
Written and composed by Edwin S. East, "Hello Hoosier Town" commemorates the states centennial in 1916.
The three-year project was funded in part by a $343,437 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary source of federal support for the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums.
The IU Digital Library Program is dedicated to the production, maintenance, delivery and preservation of a wide range of high-quality networked information resources for scholars and students at IU and elsewhere.
IU's Lilly Library contains sheet music in several named collections. The Sam DeVincent Collection of American Sheet Music includes approximately 24,000 pieces of sheet music, songbooks and folios. All of the sheet music in the DeVincent collection can be searched in the IN Harmony portal. The DeVincent Sheet Music Collection complements the Lilly Library's vast Starr Sheet Music Collection, which contains more than 100,000 pieces and ranges from the 18th century to modern times. Work on adding entries for the Starr Sheet Music Collection is ongoing.
Indiana Historical Society sheet music collection is composed of items gathered from a number of other collections, with about 950 items related to Indiana by composers including Irving Berlin, Paul Dresser, Al Jolson, Jerome Kern, Fritz Krull, John A. McGee, Cole Porter and Albert and Harry Von Tilzer. The Historical Society recently acquired the Jane B. Anderson Sheet Music Collection, with approximately 12,000 items, dating from 1854-1980, in subjects beyond Indiana ranging from semi-classical to vaudeville.
Indiana State Library Indiana Division owns a collection of approximately 1,600 pieces of sheet music with an Indiana connection. These pieces date from 1840 (a campaign song for William Henry Harrison) through the 1960s, with the bulk of the music dating from 1890 through 1950. The collection includes a wide variety of pieces: "booster" songs promoting a particular city or railroad stop; centennial songs from state, county and city celebrations; religious works, college songs; and songs based on the literary works of well-known authors such as James Whitcomb Riley.
Indiana State Museum owns about 1,800 pieces of Indiana-related sheet pieces from the Sam DeVincent collection and other sources. The collections include many of the published works of the Von Tilzer brothers, who were born in Indianapolis. The museum also holds a very good selection of Indiana Ragtime and representative collections of composers Hoagy Carmichael and Cole Porter.
For more information, contact William Henry Smith Memorial Library, Reference Services, 317-234-0321, reference@indianahistory.org.
