Early Music Online is a pilot project in which 300 of the world’s earliest surviving volumes of printed music, held in the British Library, have been digitised and made freely available online. You can browse the digitised content in Royal Holloway’s digital repository.
Pages from Il primo libro de madrigali a sei voci di Pietro Vinci, 1571
You can also explore detailed descriptions of the content via the British Library Catalogue. Included are in the catalogue are full details of each digitised book, with an inventory of the contents of each, searchable by composer name, title of composition, date and subject, and with links to the digitised content. (Click ‘I want this’ in the Library catalogue to access the digitised content.)
Full descriptions of each volume, with links to the digitised content, have also been included in the RISM UK database and COPAC, enabling researchers to locate and access this digitised content by several different means.
You may use the digitised content on Early Music Online in any way and for any such purposes that are conducive to education, teaching, learning, private study and/or research as long as you are in compliance with the terms and conditions of our licence.