World Digital Library

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This UNESCO-sponsored listing of digitized sources includes a number of significant musical works in single-item digitizations. The first chorus of Euripedes' Orestes (408 BCE, from the Austrian National Library) represents the oldest contribution found here. Although the source is necessarily deteriorated, vocal and instrumental symbols are found within it.Other WDL holdings include numerous sacred vocal works from the Ars Nova and Renaissance, German operettas, and twentieth-century sheet music. Other highlights include more than 2,700 historical maps from all parts of the world, a handful of treatises on music and music theory (including later colored drawings of St. Jerome's "Instruments of Hieronymous" (before 420 CE) and a seventeenth-century manual on the Chinese zither (quin).