Looking to find and access a chamber music score in the Library for the Performing Arts' collection? In the past, you'd have to search through 45 dense volumes of black books entitled the “Dictionary Catalog of the Music Division” on our third floor. Thanks to the generosity of The Achelis and Bodman Foundation, by December 2021, anyone will be able to find the Library's chamber music through our online catalog and through OCLC's WorldCat catalog, a catalog of thousands of libraries across the world.

Right now, tracking down a score in these black books is quite cumbersome. Patrons usually work directly with a music reference librarian to search through these books, which contain copies of the original catalog cards. These volumes include a listing of works by composers and works collected prior to 1972 when NYPL stopped creating physical catalog cards. Each volume contains hundreds of pages, and each page of each volume contains 27 catalog cards. These cards lead researchers to a score or a book in our collection.

The individual catalog entries are interesting and sometimes beautiful. The cards sometimes include initial bars of a score so users can determine the correct work they wish to request when searching a generic title such as “sonata” or “symphony." During the Depression, the federal government employed many unemployed music copyists through the Works Progress Administration program to create these cards. 

Music scores are the most requested and circulated items from the Music & Recorded Sound Division’s holdings. The collection is remarkable and includes rare editions of Tchaikovsky’s String Quartets, a piano four-hand arrangement of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and scores for a number of hard-to-find works by Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, among many others. The collection also includes important scores of women and Black composers, including those of Yvonne Desportes, Betsy Jolas, Ulysses Kay, and William Grant Still.

There are more than 120,000 scores in the Music & Recorded Sound Division's collection, making up nearly 30% of its holdings. What is fascinating is that many of our Library’s scores are the only known copies in the world available for public use for free. For many musicians, these black books are one of the essential ways to pursue music professionally.The fact that practically none of these scores appear in our online catalog has meant that researchers can only locate them onsite if they know where to look. This means that many artists, students, and scholars have no idea that these rare scores are available, even if they are regular Library patrons. Additionally, these works have remained largely invisible to companies and ensembles seeking to program lesser-known works.

The future is much brighter for the musician searching for a chamber music score. The Achelis & Bodman gift will enable the Library to transform the physical card catalogs of 25,000 chamber music scores to an online record on the OCLC system, making them just as easy to find as any bestselling novel or biography.