The "M.C. file" (songs from various musicals, plays, movies, and television) is an artificial collection of vocal sheet music from or about shows, films, television, radio and even comic strips.
This collection contains songs that were heard in stage musicals, film musicals and television musicals. This collection also includes lesser-known songs that were heard in stage productions of dramas, as well as songs used for movie and television dramas (such as theme songs, or songs heard during the opening and closing of television series). Also included are songs whose cover or title references a specific film but whose music was never used in the actual film. There are also a number of songs that were not written for films but are associated with films or characters that appeared in films or graphic comic strips.
"Sheet music" specifically refers to the format of individual songs published as 2-8 pages scores. This collection doesn't include the hundreds of vocal scores to musicals and film musicals in the Music Division. Nor does it include numerous anthologies which often assemble a collection of music previous printed as sheet music (many vocal scores and anthologies can be found in the online catalog).
The collection compliments the Music Division's extensive collection of mostly "American popular songs" (call number: *ZB-768). In some cases there are songs in American popular songs which are not in the M.C. file. (Sheet music from musicals dating from 1900-1906 were deliberately removed and put in the "American popular songs" collection.)
It must be remembered that the M.C. collection does not contain every piece of music (nor every piece of sheet music) that was ever in a show, film or television show.
The digitized portion of the collection represents only a small portion of its extent (the majority of which is still in copyright). Users wanting to see the full contents of the collection are advised to do a call number search in the catalog under the letters (with periods): M.C.
