Fine & Performing Arts

The 92nd Street Y in NYC has recorded on-site performances since the 1940s. Its new website makes 1,000 of those recordings available to stream. Plans are in the works to live upcoming stream events and to add as many of the organization's 10,000 archived recordings to the internet as possible. Check back often for new content.

Berklee Shares is an OpenCourseWare portal produced by Berklee College of Music. This website offers, free of charge, a collection of individual self-contained music lessons developed by Berklee faculty and alumni.

Selection from the British Library’s extensive collections of unique sound recordings, which come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound: music, drama and literature, oral history, wildlife, and environmental sounds.

This website includes thousands of pieces of music that are searchable by voicing, accompaniment, form, and sacred season. The site also contains texts and translations as well as information about composers.

The goal of this site is to create a virtual library containing all public domain music scores, as well as scores from composers (living or otherwise) who are willing to share their music with the world without charge. Note: This site adheres to Canadian, not US copyright.

Internet Archive partnered with etree.org to create this collection of freely available, strictly non-commercial music recordings.

The LoC provides access to a portion of its audio collections through the Recorded Sound Reference Center's web page, the American Memory site, The Performing Arts Encyclopedia, and the American Folklife Center pages.

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution (SI). As part of the SI's mission to honor America's history, Folkways aims to document, preserve, and disseminate sound.

This online thematic catalog includes about 35,000 musical incipits from three sets: classical, folksong, and Renaissance. Themes can be searched by pitch, interval, scale degree, and contour and can be located at the beginning or anywhere within the incipit.

This site contains more than 150 royalty-free instrumental tracks intended for use as background music in YouTube videos.

A project between Nottingham Trent and Salford Universities to undertake a major collection and analysis of digital performance events and developments that occurred during the 1990s. Full videos and texts are available on this website.

A complete, searchable bibliography of plays written throughout history.

A database for Broadway theatre information. It is a searchable database encompassing Broadway production information from the beginnings of Broadway to the present.

The Lortel Archives is a database for Off-Broadway theatre information. It is a searchable database encompassing Off-Broadway production information from the beginnings of Off-Broadway to the present.

Search and browse descriptions of more than 235 music, theater, and dance resources by subject, title, or name.

Located within the Lincoln Center complex on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, this branch of NYPL houses the world's most extensive combination of circulating and non-circulating reference and research materials on music, dance, theatre, recorded sound, and other performing arts.

A digital archive covering 20th-century Broadway history. Information is sourced from original Playbills, many of which are digitized on this site.

View the list of all Pulitzer Prize-winning dramas

Created by the American Association of Community Theater, this online resource uses videos and articles to define the unique words and phrases relevant to performing artists. The site aims to be both a reference source and an art project.

The collection features stage and costume designs, still photographs, posters, administrative documents, and 68 scripts. The scripts are reproduced as images, not as searchable text documents.

Hathi Trust describes itself as "a digital repository for the nation’s great research libraries, HathiTrust brings together the immense collections of partner institutions." Thousands of books have been digitized in all subject areas. Many of the books are available in full text.

A large database includes texts from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. Look especially under Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

The Internet Classics Archives includes over 440 texts from Classical Greece and Rome, including translations of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes (but as of Jan. 2001, none of the Roman playwrights). The translations do not appear to be dated -- probably most are old and so are in the public domain. Caveat lector!

The Internet Archive Text Archive contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts, and academic books.

Includes sections with Noh and Kabuki plays, some with Japanese and English versions.

A source for a range of medieval texts. The "Middle English" section (under Full-Text Sources) links to full-text versions. Also included are resources on studying medieval history, each significant period of the Middle Ages, various countries, and special topics such as the Church, sex and gender, Jewish life, and politics.

The collection includes materials from all eras and many languages and can be searched by author and title and browsed by author, title, and language. Texts can usually be downloaded.

The multimedia database contains interactive sources and studies on Ancient Greece, including primary texts, Aeschylus, with an English translation by Herbert Wier Smyth. Perseus has a library of over 4,000 vases, sculptures, and coin images in terms of visual materials.

All the plays are available for download, either by scene or whole.

Owned and run by its members, ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) is the leading Performing Rights Organization in the US, representing over 435,000 songwriters, composers, and music publishers.
The licenses to most musical plays can be found here.

BMI (Brodcast Music, Inc.) collects license fees on behalf of songwriters, composers, and music publishers and distributes them as royalties to those members whose works were performed.

SESAC, originally the Society of European Stage Authors & Composers, deals with all aspects of the business, from creation to licensing and administration. SESAC is the smallest of the three PROs in the US but the fastest growing.

Sam French publishes plays and represents playwrights. It holds the rights to more titles than any other agency.

Most cinematic performance licenses can be obtained from the Motion Picture Licensing Corporation (MPLC), an independent copyright licensing agency authorized by motion picture copyright holders, such as studios and producers, to issue the MPLC Umbrella License for the public performance.