BestClassicalTunes  - is a web site dedicated to music lovers, music students, music teachers, and people who are just discovering the world of classical music. Its objective is to make it easy for people to listen to the best tunes that classical music has to offer, and to provide free access to the sheet music for these tunes.  It works best in  Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers. It also supports Apple Safari on an Apple Mac, but the audio does not work with Safari on Windows. On other devices there may be limitations in the ability to start listening to a theme which starts in the middle of a recording.

One of the key criteria for a musical work to be included in this site is its tunefulness. You won't find any atonal or 12-tone compositions here. Nor will you find jarring or discordant music. You will find stirring patriotic tunes, plaintive beautiful romantic songs, heart-wrenching soaring lyrical melodies, familiar and well-loved folk-songs, nursery rhymes, christmas carols and sacred works, and famous immortal classics from the great masters. For an instant sample, try Six of the Best,  which will start playing mp3 recordings of six lovely tunes. Each time you open Six of the Best, you will hear different tunes.

One of the most important objectives for many users of this site will be to reach the tune details page devoted to a specific 'tune' or musical work that is of interest to them. On this page for most tunes there is a media player which plays the mp3 audio recording from its beginning. There is also a list of the themes belonging to the work, with musical notation, and a green 'Play' button for each theme, allowing you to start listening to the theme from where it first appears in the audio recording.    For many works this page displays the musical score in PDF format.  It also has links to streaming audio live recordings and YouTube video performances. And it displays a hyperlink which enables the tune to be played or downloaded from a MIDI file. The page also contains a description of the work, technical details such as key, time signature and tempo, and a list of the main themes, with play buttons for each tune.

There are many ways to reach the desired TUNE DETAILS, the most common are listed below:-

There is a dictionary of musical themes, which can help you identify tunes you know, but cannot name. All you have to do is pick out the first ten notes, using the mouse on a virtual piano. The system will look up your tune in its database. It may find more than one tune matching your notes. All matching tunes are listed, and you can click on any one to reach its 'Tune Details' page. This dictionary can also be accessed using English note names (C, D, F#, Bb and so on), or using tonic solfa, solfeggio or 'movable do'. 

There are six thematic indices which allow you to filter the themes by one of these criteria:- composer, instrument, category, period, ensemble or country. These all list all the themes  in musical notation, with a green play-button beside, allowing you to listen from that point.  Then the seventh index contains the entire dictionary in order by work-title. This is a rather long web page which might take a while to load  on slow internet connections.  These web pages are much easier to use than the 1949-published reference book by Barlow and Morgenstern.

There is also a German note section - 'Wörterbuch der musikalischen Themen. Tune-Lookup durch Eingabe deutschen Notennamen'. Lastly, there is a panel for using French note names, which are also used by Spanish, and Italian speakers, and by several other 'romance language speakers'. Dictionnaire des thèmes musicaux. Rechercher une mélodie en tapant les noms des notes françaises.

There is a 'Site Search' panel at the top right corner of every page. This is text-based, so you can type up to four key words, and all titles, descriptions and other text fields will be searched, and a list of matching tunes displayed. You can click on any row in the list to reach its Tune Details.

There is comprehensive information about composers, with lists of their tunes. You can click on any row in the list to reach its Tune Details. In a similar manner, there are data on periods, categories, ensembles, instruments and countries. All of these display lists of tunes belonging to the selected period, category, etc. You can click on any row in the list to reach its Tune Details.

Then there is a list of tunes for which PDF scores are available. Once again, you can click on any row in the list to reach its Tune Details.

There is a 'Six of the Best' page which plays an instant playlist of six tunes chosen at random from the 150 most memorable and recognizable classical tunes. You can click on any row in the list to reach its Tune Details. There is also a standard playlist page, which allows you to select your own tunes, either by keywords, or by asking for a random selection.

This site was created by Victor Gomersall, Queensland, Australia, and is now operated and maintained entirely by his relative Hugo Clarke.  It contains no advertising and has no connection with any commercial organization.  It exists solely for your pleasure.  Enjoy it!   You may contact Hugo here.