COLLECTIONS:

Special Collections

University Archives

Collection Preservation

Research Collections:
Music Collection

Collection Overview
Development of the music collection follows the research and teaching emphases of the Music Department.  The primary emphasis of the collection is Western music with selective holdings for non-Western music and other areas and cultures. The collection includes monographs, serials, music scores (or sheet music) and other non-print media (sound recordings and videos).  Our Irish Music collections of monographs and sound recordings, housed at the O'Neill Library and at the Irish Music Center in the John J. Burns Library, are of particular interest to students and scholars.  Also of interest is our excellent laser disc collection of instrumental and vocal music at the O'Neill Library Media Center. The Abraham Collection, a collection of sheet music and monographs gathered by the eminent British musicologist Gerald Abraham (1904-1988), is an important research resource in the area of Eastern-European and Russian music.

The College of Arts & Sciences confers the academic degree of a Bachelors of Arts (B.A.) with a major in Music. The department offers courses in Western and non-Western music which cover history, theory, composition, and performance in order to educate both listeners and musicians, majors and non-majors. Consequently, the department's curriculum requires a collection that has been developed within a broad liberal arts framework. The music collection has interdisciplinary aspects and also relies on strengths in other collections.  

Alberto Hernández
Music Bibliographer
1-617-552-2066
E-Mail:  hernanal@bc.edu

Selected Resources

In the O'Neill Library:

• Collected works and critical editions of major Western composers: Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Chopin, Gabrielli, Haydn, Lasso, Monteverdi, Mozart, Palestrina, Rameau, Schubert, Sweelinck, Vivaldi, Wagner, among others.

• Sound and video recordings collections at the Media Center.

• Important monuments, sets and series: Musica Britannica, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, Music  Research  and Information Guides, Old English Edition, Early English Church Music, Three Centuries of American Music, Printed Music at Christ Church Library (microfilm collection), Nineteenth Century American Musical Theater, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection, among others.

• Holdings in music journal literature, many from the first volume through the current issue.

• Reference works: New Grove Dictionary series for American Music, Jazz, Opera, and Musical Instruments; Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, among others.

• Subject index to the literature: Music Index (also CD-ROM) and the RILM Abstracts (Répertoire International de la Littérature Musicale).

On the Web (Restricted to the BC Community):

• General indexes:

  • Arts & Humanities Citation Index (Web of Science).

  • Expanded Academic Index ASAP (InfoTrac): Among the full-text titles included since 1996 are: Dance Magazine, Early Music, Journal of Musicology, Music and Letters, 19th Century Music, Notes, Opera News, Perspectives of New Music, Popular Music and Society, and Rolling Stone.

  • FRANCIS Bulletin Signalétique:  An international Humanities and Social Studies online service, FRANCIS covers a wide range of multilingual, multidisciplinary information in the humanities (63%) and the social sciences (33%). FRANCIS is strong in religion, the history of art, and literature, with particular emphasis on current trends in European and world literature. Updated monthly, available since 1984.

• Other databases in the humanities: Subject Indexes to Online Databases: Humanities.

On the Web (Unrestricted Access)

• Web directory (produced at Boston College): BC Virtual Music Library.

Research Guides
More information about available resources can be found in the following resource guides: Research Guide: Music, Boston College Virtual Music Library, and Irish Music Center.

Interdisciplinary Elements of Subject Area
Because music is a field within arts and sciences which encompasses so many other disciplines, the interdisciplinary elements of the collection are numerous. The music collection is enhanced by our holdings in communications, management, physics, acoustics, psychology, education, religion, sociology, foreign languages, philosophy, and computer sciences.

Formats and Types of Materials
The collection consists of music scores (full scores, miniature study scores, piano-vocal scores, condensed scores, performance editions with instrumental parts, close scores, and some facsimiles) monographs, periodicals, reference works, microforms, electronic databases, and audio-visual materials (cassette tapes, compact discs, video discs, laser discs, cd-rom).  Also among these there are the thematic catalogs, historical sets, and monuments of music.  Subscription to standard indexes services, such as Music Index (available also on cd-rom) and the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale are also available.  We do not buy curriculum materials such as games, elementary or secondary textbooks.  Multiple copies of music scores are acquired only when needed for performance and/or when full study scores are not available.

Languages
The monograph and periodical collections are almost exclusively in English and some German languages.  Less interest has been shown for materials in other languages, except for reference sources such as bibliographies, thematic catalogs, festschriften, etc.  Selected works in other languages are purchased when recommended by a faculty member of the Music Department.

Geographic Areas (Subject Approach)
The music collection (in all formats, i.e., print and non-print material) focuses primarily on Western and to some degree on Non-Western music and cultures.  Research and creative works dealing with these subject areas are collected, thus imposing no geographic area restrictions.

Time Periods (Subject Approach)
Current acquisitions of monographs and non-print media focuses primarily on on-going research and new technologies.  Subject approach is dictated by Western and non-Western music and historical time periods. There is great interest in creating an early music collection encompassing both research and performance aspects.

Date of Publication
Current monographs, newest editions of music scores, and the latest technologies for media material are most in demand.   However, important works (monument and historical sets) by major composers newly added to our collections, are collected retrospectively whenever possible. The library will acquire the latest available edition.  Another consideration is the need to balance the audio collections with historical sound recordings, thus collecting these archival or historical recordings in the latest format available.

Subject Areas Collected by Library of Congress Classification Number
BCAT, the online catalog, can be searched by LC Music classification number to get a better idea of what specific titles the music collection contains.  For example, the command c=M2000 will produce the beginning of a list of oratorios within the sacred vocal music works.  This list can be browsed by pressing the F8 key or typing f and pressing the Enter/Return key.