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| Lewis Music Library | |
|---|---|
| Name | Lewis Music Library |
| Country | United States |
| Type | Academic library |
| Established | 1975 |
| Location | Irvine, California |
| Affiliated | University of California, Irvine |
| Collection size | "Approx. 150,000 items" |
| Director | "Head Librarian" |
Lewis Music Library The Lewis Music Library is an academic music library housed at the University of California, Irvine that supports research, performance, and pedagogy in music, musicology, ethnomusicology, composition, and sound studies. It serves students, faculty, and visiting scholars associated with institutions such as the Irvine School of Music, the California State University, Long Beach, and conservatories like the Juilliard School. The library collaborates with regional and national organizations including the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Music Library Association, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The library was founded amid curricular expansion in the 1970s at the University of California system alongside contemporaneous developments at the University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Berkeley. Early benefactors and advisors included figures associated with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and donors connected to the Getty Trust and the Packard Humanities Institute. The collection grew through partnerships with archives like the Smithsonian Institution and gifts from composers and performers active in networks tied to Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, John Cage, and Henry Cowell. Over decades the library adapted to shifts influenced by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act era, the rise of the Internet Archive, and digitization initiatives similar to those at the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Holdings include printed music, score editions, scholarly monographs, periodicals, and audio-visual media with strengths in contemporary composition, popular music, film music, and ethnomusicology. Notable provenance traces to collectors associated with Pierre Boulez, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Elliott Carter. The collection integrates materials from projects linked to the Library of Congress Veterans History Project, the Smithsonian Folkways archive, and the Roud Folk Song Index tradition. The library houses periodicals including runs of The Musical Quarterly, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Ethnomusicology, and holdings related to festivals like The Proms and Montreux Jazz Festival. Strengths extend to manuscript sources tied to composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich, Gustav Mahler, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Camille Saint-Saëns, and contemporary figures like Kaija Saariaho and George Crumb.
Facilities provide listening booths, score study carrels, digital workstations, and a seminar room used by ensembles from institutions like Irvine Chamber Music Festival, Philharmonia Orchestra workshops, and visiting artists from New York Philharmonic residencies. Services include interlibrary loan through the OCLC network, music notation support referencing Sibelius (software), Finale (software), and digital audio workstations like Pro Tools and Ableton Live. The library offers research consultations, course reserves for classes in the Department of Music, UC Irvine, and access to streaming platforms such as Naxos Music Library, Alexander Street Press, and databases like RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and JSTOR.
Special collections emphasize manuscripts, personal papers, recorded sound archives, and ephemera from performers, composers, and ensembles. Archival groups include donations comparable to those of Elliott Carter papers, materials relating to the West Coast jazz scene with links to Miles Davis-era networks, and documentation of experimental music movements overlapping with Fluxus artists and collaborators connected to George Maciunas and Nam June Paik. The archive maintains oral histories connected to the LA Phil and interview transcripts in the vein of projects by the Oral History Association.
Outreach includes concert partnerships, curricular collaborations, and public lectures featuring scholars and artists associated with The Juilliard School, Royal College of Music, Eastman School of Music, and community ensembles such as Long Beach Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. The library hosts workshops on cataloging standards from the Music Library Association and digitization protocols similar to projects by the Digital Public Library of America. Educational programming reaches K–12 students through partnerships with the Irvine Unified School District and regional festivals like Festival Mozaic.
Administration follows university library governance models present across the University of California campuses, with oversight by university librarians and advisory boards that include members from organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Funding sources combine university allocations, endowments patterned after gifts to institutions like the Carnegie Corporation, grant awards from agencies such as the National Science Foundation for digital projects, and private philanthropy from foundations akin to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
The library has mounted exhibitions and hosted events highlighting collections in collaboration with festivals and institutions like the Irvine Fine Arts Center, the Getty Center, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Past exhibitions have showcased manuscripts, correspondences, and scores tied to concerts by artists associated with Leonard Bernstein, archival presentations alongside the Smithsonian Institution and thematic exhibits echoing retrospectives at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Category:University of California, Irvine Category:Music libraries