If you’re a classical musician, music student, or music teacher, you will want to be aware of the International Music Score Library Project. With hundreds of thousands of public domain music scores available, the IMSLP is one of the best resources for free music scores available on the web. Here’s some resent news about this site:
28 December 2013 – 261,000 scores.
28 December 2013 – 74,000 works have scores or parts on Petrucci Music Library.
1 July 2013 – We are happy to receive news of the successful incorporation and launch of Petrucci Music Library – Canada! More information can be found in this forum post.
30 May 2013 – IMSLP is happy to announce the availability of a “score similarity” feature, created by Vladimir Viro, which will show other pieces similar to a particular IMSLP file.
Since all the works published on this site are public domain there isn’t much music available after the 20th century, but if you’re looking for music to study prior to 1900 you can try searching at the IMSLP first and you may be able to a PDF score of what you’re looking for, sometimes even more than one edition.
IMSLP is a marvellous resource. In Britain, amateur orchestras are increasingly using it to print off their own copies of parts for out-of-copyright music, as being cheaper than music hire.
It is also fantastic for individual players if you are asked to come in as a dep or extra for just the last rehearsal before the concert. You can download a copy of your part and take a look at it before the rehearsal. There’s no excuse these days for going into a rehearsal and sightreading the part if the piece is available on IMSLP.
Copyright laws vary between countries, so stuff that is out of copyright in the US might still be in copyright in Europe & vice versa. Rachmaninov for instance came out of copyright in the EU at the start of this year, it now being more than 70 years since his death, but some of Rachmaninov’s works are still in copyright in the US. So just because a work is available on IMSLP doesn’t mean that it is necessarily legal to download it. You should check.