About Our Collections
Books and Scores
The Music Library has a collection of over 90,000 musical scores and books covering the entire repertory of Western art music, jazz, world music, and British and American folk and popular music. The Library's music research materials are noted in Resources of American Music History and the International Inventory of Musical Sources (RISM).
Highlights of the printed music collections include:
- the Mackay-Smith Collection of European Music, 1650-1910;
- the Monticello music collection
- Pre-1800 theoretical and historical treatises; and
- a large collection of shape note hymnals and tunebooks.
These and other rare music materials are housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.
The library maintains a list of music databases available online.
Tips for Searching Music Materials in VIRGO will help you locate printed music and other music materials in the library catalog.
Audio
The Library’s collection of over 38,000 music sound recordings is housed in the Music Library. The collection includes the repertoire of Western art music but also has a strong focus on jazz and folk and popular music from around the world.
The Audio Search is recommended for searching all types of sound recordings in the library catalog, VIRGO. Call numbers for compact discs begin with “CD”, those for 33 1/3 vinyl discs with “LP”, and those for audio cassettes with “C”. Recordings of concerts by UVa student and faculty performance ensembles are available for in-library listening. These have call numbers beginning with “CR”. Call numbers without prefixes refer to 78 rpm recordings which are housed in Ivy stacks but can be retrieved for in-library listening. The Music Library maintains listening equipment for all formats in the collection.
The Music Library staff has prepared a number of finding aids, including the following guides to our sound recording collection: