Robert M. Keller: The Dancing Master, 1651-1728: An Illustrated Compendium (online database)—The Compendium is a searchable database of all known country dances published in the various editions of The Dancing Master, published by John Playford, Henry Playford and John Young, from 1651-1728 in London, with facsimiles of each “unique” dance with its music. This reference work is published by CDSS with the English Folk Dance and Song Society and the New Hampshire Library for Traditional Dance and Music at the University of New Hampshire.

The Colonial Music Institute (compiled by Robert Keller): Dance Figures Index: English Country Dances, 1650-1833 — A guide to the basic figures in major English printed longways country dances in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century sources. This database only includes sources for dances with instruction for country dances, or dances that could be identified as such. It does not include other dance forms, such as Cotillions or Allemand or similar dances.

The Colonial Music Institute (compiled by Robert Keller): Early American Songsters, 1734-1820: An Index —An index of all of the known songsters currently available. The index draws heavily from Irving Lowens’ Bibliography of Songster Printed in America Before 1821 (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1976), for titles and other bibliographical information. Lowens defines a songster “as a collection of three or more secular poems intended to be sung.” Most of the songsters do not include music, although many contain references to the names of tunes to which the song could be sung. This publication comprises those songs published through 1800.

The Colonial Music Institute (compiled by Robert M. Keller, Raoul F. Camus, Kate Van Winkle Keller, and Susan Cifaldi): Early American Secular Music and Its 
European Sources, 1589–1839: An Index — This is a series of indexes derived from a data base of musical information compiled from primary sources covering the 250 years of the initial exploration and settlement of the United States. It consists of over 75,000 entries that are sorted by text (titles, first lines, recitatives, chorus and burden), by music incipits (represented in scale degrees, stressed notes and interval sequences), with additional indexes of names and theater works.

The Colonial Music Institute (compiled by Mary Jane Corry, Kate Van Winkle Keller, and Robert M. Keller): The Performing Arts in Colonial American Newspapers, 1690-1783 — This publication fills a major gap in access to eighteenth-century American sources for research in the performing arts and related humanities fields. It includes all references to music, poetry (lyrics), dance, and theater found by our readers in American newspapers, from the earliest extant copy (1690) through the end of the Revolutionary War (1783).