This is my first post on this wonderful forum I just stumbled upon, having just registered this morning! There's quite a lot to become acquainted with, so please move this to the proper topic area because I assume that there is a better place for this.
Regarding the subject of this post, I have studied the piano for the past 14 years of my life, since I began at the age of 4 (so infer my age from this). I started collecting sheet music just over a year ago, and have ammased a collection of at least 1,200 pieces of music pre-1900, mainly from 1840-1880. Ebay naturally has been my friend this past year, and the collecting "bug" began for me in August when I got a collection of about 250 pieces from the 19th century for only about $70! I still am so glad I won that auction to this day.... :
. It actually all started with a Liberace music book from 1953 (and a 1956 concert program which came with it), and of course, being an amateur antiquarian, it was just a slippery (but controllable) slope from there.
I will link below the Excel spreadsheet I've been working on for the past several months, attempting to catalogue all the sheet music I have. It is best to open it in Excel if interested, as simply viewing it for some reason causes the font to look like a printer with just not enough ink, and you are also not able to view the notes I have typed in. It is of course incomplete, as I am still constantly purchasing music, and haven't gotten around to cataloguing about 8 or so bound volumes of music c.1850 since March, though I have been working on the small amount of 1900-1930 I have just to get that out of the way.
The first several hundred I was also too unaware to realize that not all of them were composed for the pianoforte (which I make the point of doing later, saying what instrument(s) it is for). Of course, it can probably be inferred most of the time from the title of the music itself. I will admit that about 50% of the music is probably in the Library of Congress already and viewable online, but there are quite a many piece in here which have perhaps never been seen in hundreds of years.
I hope the spreadsheet seems clear. I am looking soon to digitze the music itself using the ForScore app on my IPad, since I am an active pianist, but I am not quite sure if this is the best method. I would absolutely love to hear any suggestions you have as to doing this, since I don't quite know if placing pictures in the Excel spreadsheet will work either.
This forum is exactly what I have been looking for for some time now, and I can't wait to see what else this place has to offer!
The Excel spreadsheet:
