IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana

Overview

The Indiana University Digital Library Program, in collaboration with the Indiana University Lilly Library, the Indiana State Library, the Indiana State Museum, and the Indiana Historical Society, has received a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to create a single Web site to provide access to approximately 10,000 pieces of digitized sheet music from our respective collections. The Web site, IN Harmony: Sheet Music from Indiana, will feature Indiana-related sheet music, that is, sheet music by Indiana composers, arrangers, lyricists or publishers as well as sheet music about the state.

Collection Highlights

Each institution will contribute unique, interesting and invaluable pieces of sheet music to IN Harmony. Listed below are collection highlights from each of the partnering institutions:

Indiana University Lilly Library
Indiana University's Lilly Library contains one of the nation's largest collections of American sheet music: in addition to the DeVincent Collection, the Lilly Library owns the Starr Sheet Music Collection, containing more than 100,000 separate items.

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-wide, county, and city celebrations, religious works, college songs, and songs based on the literary works of well-known Indiana authors such as James Whitcomb Riley.

Indiana State Museum
The 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. Their popular songs include standards such as "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," "I Want a Girl," "Apple Blossom Time," and "Put Your Arms Around Me." The museum also holds a very good selection of Indiana Ragtime, 1910-1925, and representative collections of composers Hoagy Carmichael and Cole Porter.

Indiana Historical Society
The Indiana Historical Society sheet music collection is also comprised 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.