Electronic resources: Early music books of 16th century accessible to all

Fragile treasures of 16th century music are now freely available online, thanks to a partnership between Royal Holloway, University of London, the British Library and JISC. The Early Music Online project has digitised more than 300 books of the world’s earliest printed music from holdings at the British Library.

Some of the books date back as far as the 1500s and, due to their fragile nature, would not be freely available to researchers, but thanks to this digitization project, musicians from around the world can now source the original music free of charge using the Early Music Online website, as well as library catalogues and music databases. For the first time, musicians now have immediate access to more than 9,000 individual compositions.

Highlights of the collection include church music by the Flemish composer Josquin des Prez and the English musicians Thomas Tallis and William Byrd; songs from Nuremberg and Lyon; lute music from Venice and organ music from Leipzig.

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.