Category
20th Century sheet music
6,603 titles in the index · page 1 of 138
The twentieth century is the period where copyright status changes what is available, piece by piece and country by country. Debussy is free almost everywhere; Bartók and Shostakovich frequently are not; anything after 1955 rarely is.
The listing below covers concert repertoire from roughly 1900 onward across all instrumentations.
Ain't It A Pretty Night
Trees On the Mountains
Night, Make My Day
Once I Was
Sweet Song
Afternoon On A Hill
My Sister's New Red Hat
Air
Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!)
The Lake Isle Of Innisfree
The Spring And The Fall
Souvenir
Coyotes
The Red Dress
What Shall We Remember?
Will There Really Be A Morning?
Sycamore Trees
Fewer Words
The Special Picnic
Janet Underneath The Roses
I Am Cherry Alive
An Old Fashioned Song
White Haired Woman
As Adam Early In The Morning
O You Whom I Often And Silently Come
Youth, Day, Old Age, And Night
I Am Rose
Sally's Smile
See How They Love Me
The Waking
Snake
Root Cellar
Memory
Night Crow
My Papa's Waltz
Overture
Oh! Just What I Wanted
Hello! Hello? (Lucy's Aria)
That Was Margaret
Try Again And Again
It All Began On A Sunday
Oh Where Has He Gone?
Amahl! Amahl!
Oh, Mother, You Should Go Out And See!
Stop Bothering Me!
Poor Amahl!
From Far Away We Come
Amahl...Yes, Mother?
Buying guide
What to know before you buy
Copyright, and why the free version may not be legal where you are
Most countries protect a work for seventy years after the composer's death, but the term and the exceptions vary. A score legally hosted in one jurisdiction may be an infringing copy in another, and the large public-domain archives handle this by flagging works whose status differs by country.
Where we link a free source we pass on what that source states. It remains worth checking the flag on the archive itself before downloading, because the answer genuinely depends on where you are.
Notation you may not have met
Twentieth-century scores introduce notation that older repertoire does not use: quarter-tone accidentals, proportional and graphic notation where horizontal space represents time rather than beats, prepared-piano instructions, extended techniques for strings and winds, and aleatoric boxes to be repeated freely.
Composers usually explain their own conventions in a preface. That preface is part of the score, and skipping it is the commonest reason a modern piece looks unplayable.
Common questions
- Is twentieth-century music in the public domain?
- It depends on the composer and on where you are. Most countries protect a work for seventy years after the composer's death, so Debussy and Ravel are widely free while Bartók, Shostakovich and later composers frequently are not.
- Why does a modern score have a page of instructions?
- Because it uses notation that is not standard. Extended techniques, graphic notation and non-traditional accidentals are all composer-specific, and the preface defines them. It is part of the score, not front matter to skip.