Music Library

The UNT Music Library - one of the largest academic music collections in the United States - contains over 300,000 volumes of books, periodicals, scores, dissertations, and reference works in many languages, as well as nearly 900,000 sound recordings in a variety of formats, including cylinders, reel-to-reel tapes, 45/33/78rpm records, compact discs, and digital tape recordings.  Playback equipment for the different types of recordings (as well as a growing VHS and DVD collection) is in the Audio Center, and in-house transfers of older audio formats are performed in the preservation studio.

The Music Library's collection of rare books and scores, located in the Edna Mae Sandborn Music Rare Book Room contains material ranging from medieval manuscripts to autographed first editions of twentieth-century composers.  Original and facsimile scores include a noteworthy collection of works by Jean-Baptiste Lully, first editions of Handel's Messiah, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals, and several eighteenth-century operas.  Books of note include the first edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Giuseppe Tartini's 1767 Principi dell' armonia musicale contenuta nel diatonico genere.  Many of these items are being digitized and offered publicly on the UNT Libraries Digital Collections site.

Other special collections in the Music Library include manuscripts of Aaron Copland, correspondence of Arnold Schoenberg, recordings and photographs from band leaders Duke Ellington and Stan Kenton, composers Don Gillis and Julia Smith, the George Bragg Boy Choir Music Library, sheet music collections from radio stations WBAP (Fort Worth) and WFAA (Dallas), the personal archives of Leon Breeden (director of the UNT Jazz Program for over 20 years) and Willis Conover (jazz DJ on the Voice of America for over forty years), and an ever-expanding collection of recordings and program books from the UNT College of Music.

Music Library materials are accessible through the main online catalog with the exception of items from the WFAA and WBAP collections, which are cataloged in the Special Collections Database.

Music Library and Audio Center virtual tour videos, created by Katie Buehner: