Music Libraries

The CMSA Orchestra and Ensemble Starter Music Library

An important element of CMSA’s mission is to ‘promote the study and playing of the family of mandolin instruments and the playing of the music written for those instruments’. To that end, we offer the following selections of mandolin ensemble music to help ‘kick-start’ new groups.

These pieces have been used for years by our own Joyce Adams, a music instructor and first chair with the Baltimore Mandolin Orchestra. They are mostly in easy keys (C, G, D, A) and can be easily and successfully worked up to build ensemble confidence or prepared for performance!

Music Notation for Mandolin Family Instruments

Music for mandolin family instruments is notated in a variety of clefs. Click the button below for a detailed explanation of the majority of clefs a modern player may encounter. Where possible, examples are drawn from the CMSA Starter Music Library.

Remembering John Goodin

John Goodin generously shared much of his work through his Mandotopia website and So Many Tunes… blog under a CreativeCommons license.  After John’s passing, Karen Goodin donated several of his tune books to CMSA and CMSA became the custodian of of the two sites.  You can find many orchestral arrangements at Mandotopia and hundreds of his tunes annotated in standard notation with recordings of his performances at So Many Tunes…, all freely available for non-commercial use.

The CMSA Nakano Memorial Library

An important element of CMSA’s mission is to ‘promote the study and playing of the family of mandolin instruments and the playing of the music written for those instruments’. Now, in addition to our Starter Music Library, CMSA is proud to offer one of the world’s largest troves of golden-age mandolin music, carefully collected over many years by Jiro Nakano.

Long unavailable, the Nakano Archive has been reloaded here, but with improvements in the indexing from the original Japanese version. Additionally, many typos and file name errors have been corrected so that the maximum number of titles from the original Archive could be made available.

CMSA is in the process of reviewing the Nakano files and it is the intention to only post public domain materials.  If there is a file that is not in the PD, please get in touch with us.  We will review the copyright status of the file, and delete if not public domain

Help us improve the Nakano Library.

A number of pieces of music in the Library need the titles translated from the Japanese. If you would be willing to help us with translations from Japanese, please contact us.

Many of the pieces in the Library were poorly copied or scanned and are difficult to read. If you download music from the Library and enter it into music transcription software (such as Finale or Sibeleus), please consider sharing your work with us all by sending a copy of the output as a .PDF file. These will be substituted into the Library for the poor originals.

Some of the music from the Nakano Library is under copyright, so will not be available.