Rare music items now accessible online

August 31, 2015
Rare music items now accessible online

The library has recently made available online some 8,000 pages of music manuscripts and rare or unique early prints of scores and texts.

Over some twenty years, the Morrill Music Library has acquired a corpus of manuscripts and rare or unique prints of early music, as well as collections of poesia per musica, early printed books relating to festivals and a number of important sources for the study of the commedia dell’Arte in late 16th and early 17th century Italy. We are delighted to announce that the greater part of them are now available in digital format through the HOLLIS catalogue. Those wishing to consult our portion of a 14th century breviary containing the lives of saints Theobaldus and Judocus, or our anthology of cantatas and arias from mid-17th century Rome, or our two Petrucci prints of 1505 and1508, or our fifteen unique partbooks of sacred and secular music of the late Italian Renaissance (examples here and here), can now have direct access to them on-line.  We hope this substantial digitization project will benefit scholars of many fields, and in far-flung places.