Music: books and journals

The Music department, located at the Richelieu Library (Site Richelieu), holds an extensive collection of works on music published in France and abroad, as well as music theory books (from the 15th to the 20th century). It also holds around 300,000 press cuttings relating to musical institutions, composers, and performers from forty or so countries (the Montpensier collection).

The François Mitterrand Library (Site François-Mitterrand) includes a major collection of open-access books and periodicals in the Reference and Research libraries.

Materials in the Reference library, most of which are in French, cover not only classical music but also popular and traditional music (French songs, rock, rap, raï, tango, Zairian soukous, etc.). Available journals range from consumer titles (Diapason, Chorus, Les Inrockuptibles, etc.) to specialist publications (e.g. Ethnomusicology).

As well as offering access to its closed-stack collections of printed material, most of which is in French, the Research library has an open-access collection of 8,600 books in the major European languages. The purpose of this collection is to support researchers working on heritage collections of recorded music: published discs and sound archives. The main discipline covered is musicology, together with closely related fields: music history, theoretical, semiotic, and sociological aspects of music, interpretation, organology, ethnomusicology, etc.

Traditional and popular music, rock, jazz, songs, etc. are represented alongside Western learned music. The collection also includes discographical works, as well as books on the history and economics of records and recording, live performance, opera, operetta, music hall, etc. The collection of journals includes both generalist titles (e.g. Juke Box) and highly specialized publications (e.g. Contemporary Music Review).

Tuesday, January 18, 2011