IMSLP Petrucci Music Library is a comprehensive online source of music scores. I just got violin parts for a Bach cantata and a mass. Full scores are available as well as separate parts for individual instruments. I also saw a copy of Bach’s handwritten manuscript for a violin part to a mass. This was a scan of a manuscript in a library in Germany.
Documents all seem to be in PDF format which is excellent since they can be imported into MobileSheets in Android and displayed on a Galaxy Tab 10.1. It might not be the best display to stick on a music stand and read but it works! It really works!
What this means is that classical music scores can now be easily obtained for free and viewed with an electronic viewer instead of having to need physical copies of sheet music. You can put a tablet device on a music stand just as you would any book of music and play away (obviously make sure you don’t bump the stand and cause the tablet to fall)!
Ok, this actually does have some limitations over paper scores. In fact I seem to not be able to make notations and markings in the scores which is a big problem. MobileSheets appears to have some kind of support for this though so perhaps there’s just something more needed to do this.
One feature of MobileSheets which is really useful – you can set the default zoom level for an entire score. So if a score is displaying too small you can zoom until it fits exactly in the entire screen and that setting will stay the same for all pages in the score.
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