The library of the Milan Conservatory is a university library specialising in the musical and musicological fields, an essential support for teaching and learning as well as a research partner for students and lecturers.
The Library holds around 300,000 bibliographic items, including approximately 13,000 musical manuscripts and 60,000 volumes on musical subjects, as well as about 400 musical periodical titles.
A heritage of musical culture that the Conservatory itself has helped to enrich, for the artistic life of Milan and Italy, thanks to its students, teachers, concert performers, musicians, composers and scholars who trained within its halls.
The works and creativity with which they explored infinite musical worlds live on today among the Library’s collections, and characterise the diversity of musical inspiration linked to the art of sounds.
Music is reborn among the shelves of the Library, with scores and volumes available for consultation and study via the OPAC, for musicians and researchers in Italy and around the world. Not only that. The Conservatory's main mission, to teach and transmit music, makes the Library an indispensable tool for students during their formative years.
At the Conservatoire, one enters as a student and leaves as a musician through study in the Library.
Time has made it a great historical and research library, enriched by important collections, including the musical collection of the Gonzaga chapel in Mantua, the prints and manuscripts gathered in the extraordinary collection of Gustavo Adolfo Noseda, manuscript scores from Milanese opera houses, documents received thanks to provisions relating to the legal deposit of printed music (which have enabled the library to receive all Milanese publishing output of the 19th century) and, furthermore, an extensive antiquarian collection of music theory, the Autograph Manuscripts collection made up almost entirely of autographs by students or teachers of the Conservatoire, the Francesco Somma bequest, which is particularly significant for the history of Milanese theatre from the late sixteenth century onwards and for the librettos preserved within it, the Teresita Mascarello Bravi collection consisting almost entirely of autograph manuscripts (including such composers as Bellini, Cimarosa, Donizetti, Mercadante, Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti) as well as bequests and donations of entire private music archives. A unique example for the musical culture of Milan, Italy and the world.
The library has always paid particular attention to the updating and expansion of the reference sections: repertories and research tools, encyclopaedias, bibliographies, thematic catalogues, as well as Opera omnia and Monumenta musicae. In recent years, it has also been decided to enrich access to subscribed online repertories and databases (Jstor, RILM, RIPM, Grove Music Online to name a few), which are freely accessible even remotely for students and teaching staff via proxy server, and to create a Digital Library with images of their documents.
The library's bibliographic tools, available to students and musicians, are the main key to accessing the library's holdings.
The two main addresses of the Library are:
- University library: containing sheet music, scores, books on music theory, musicological texts, and bibliographical repertoires for the teaching and study needs of all courses offered at the Conservatoire
- Research library: with historical fonds and music manuscripts mainly for specialised studies by scholars and researchers.
Library Directors and Lecturers in Bibliography and Music Library Science (CODM/01):
- Eugenio de’ Guarinoni (1887-1917)
- Gaetano Cesari (1917-1924)
- Fausto Torrefranca (1924-1938)
- Federico Mompelio (1938-1949)
- Guglielmo Barblan (1949-1976)
- Agostina Zecca Laterza (1976-2004)
- Licia Sirch (2004-2020)
- Gianni Fidanza (2011-)
(from Chronology of lecturers, edited by Marina Vaccarini Gallarani, in The Milan Conservatory century upon century 1808-2008, Milan, 2008)