The library contains, first and foremost, all the publications produced by the Centro Studi and belonging to the various series published for Brepols, Ut Orpheus, Schott. There therefore are both the series of studies and essays and the Opera omnia of Pietro Antonio Locatelli, Luigi Boccherini, Muzio Clementi and Francesco Geminiani. The user can also find a number of international musicological journals, including one produced by the Institute staff, namely the Ad Parnassum Journal.The Library has acquired over time numerous volumes, both ancient and recent, which can be distinguished between repertoires, dictionaries and encyclopaedias, treatises, primary historical sources, monographs and miscellaneous volumes, specialised both in musicological research and in the history of the 18th and 19th centuries and the historical 20th century.
Alongside the so-called historical library is the corpus relating to all those volumes of historiography (be they monographs or collections of essays) that pertain to the various branches of musicological research, from historical musicology to systematic and applied musicology. Thus, one can consult biographical books, books on musical aesthetics, theory and analysis, music psychology, philology, etc., ranging from the beginnings of the discipline (understood in the modern sense) in the fin de siècle period to the most recent and up-to-date studies, also from a methodological point of view, as well as the new research trends of today.
Of particular importance is the section dedicated to the study of music publishing between the 18th and 19th centuries, consisting of repertories on the history of publishers, contemporary editorial catalogues, historiographical manuals for the study of printed music publishing as well as repertories such as some Cari Johansson books, those of Cecil Hopkinson and Anik Devriés-Lesure, Krummel, Kidson and Alexander Weinmann, just to name a few.
In the course of time, the Centro Studi has organized a huge number of activities on the relationship between music and politics and it has led to the birth of an important fund dedicated to the musical context of the Italian fascist period. This fund is made up of books from the period, with magazines, reviews, propaganda volumes, biographies, etc., as well as historiographical volumes that delve into the complex and articulated relationship between the regime and the musical world of the time, composers, events and festivals and the major exponents of the hierarchical apparatus, as well as censorship and cultural policies.
All the library’s volumes, both historical and modern, will be catalogued and entered into the National Library System (SBN), established by the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico (ICCU) (with the task of cataloguing the entire national bibliographic heritage), through the SBNCloud platform.
Here the link to the ICCU page: https://anagrafe.iccu.sbn.it/isil/IT-BG0928.
The Centro Studi has opened a collaboration with the Lombardy Region’s SBN Pole, in order to have the library surveyed and to work on all the administrative, assistance and operational phases, so that within a few years all the bibliographic heritage will be available in the catalogue and for online research.