Music

The online Britten Thematic Catalogue aims to document all manuscript sources pertaining to Britten's works as well as providing audio and notation incipits, full bibliographic details, other related material such as performance history, photographs, and, eventually, links to relevant correspondence. It will also for the first time provide a complete chronological listing of Britten’s works, including all of his juvenilia.

Classical music is traditionally studied from notation; but music sounds, and how it sounds depends on performance style. The project developed techniques to show what constitutes a performance style. Expressive gestures in sound that characterise personal styles of playing and singing were identified and analysed in detail, using computer visualisation techniques for sound analysis. Their deployment and function in different musical contexts were examined.

The twentieth century's leading theorist of tonal music, Heinrich Schenker produced a series of innovative studies and editions between 1903 and 1935 and left behind a voluminous archive of correspondence, diaries and lessonbooks. Edited in near-diplomatic transcription and with English translations, these materials form the core of the edition, supported by additional documents relating to his life, and a set of "profiles" of people, places and organizations with which he came into contact.

Archival Sound Recordings is the result of a development project to increase access to the British Library Sound Archive's extensive collections. The British Library holds one of the world’s foremost sound archives with a collection of over 3.5 million audio recordings. These come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound from music, drama and literature, to oral history, wildlife and environmental sounds. You can search and browse information about all the sounds held in the British Library at our online catalogue.