Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard University

NEW EXHIBITION: Original, prolific, and intense, Randy Weston was born in Brooklyn one hundred years ago. His career began in New York, stretched to Western Mass. and eventually took him across the world as a jazz ambassador. “Music on a Mission: the Jazz and Spiritual Legacy of Randy Weston” unveils the composer-pianist’s huge archive, acquired in 2016 by Harvard University. The exhibition spotlights Weston’s contributions to American cultural diplomacy, his joyous engagement in fruitful artistic collaborations, and the wildly enthusiastic reception in Africa of Weston’s African American art. 

Join us for an opening event on Sunday, April 12: a tour of the exhibition with the curators, followed by a performance by Vijay Iyer and others in Paine Hall.  
Open April 6, 2026-March 31, 2027 

Richard F. French Gallery, Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library 
Co-curated by Peter Laurence, Librarian for Recorded Sound and Media, and Christina Linklater, Curator of the Isham Memorial Library and Houghton Special Collections Cataloger.  
📚

Last year, our exhibit “Making a Scene” offered an engaging exploration of the Boston-area rock scene of the 1970s-90s, through the lens of the Arthur Freedman Collection. Although the exhibit is no longer on view in the library, the stories and materials now can be explored online through a new digital collection: https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/making-a-scene

There, you can learn about the infamous venue The Rat, local fanzine culture, and how women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color contributed to a rich musical community that is often understood as primarily white, and male. You’ll also find an interactive map of all the clubs represented in the collection, and more.

The Music Library will close for maintenance at 5:00 PM this Thursday, March 6 and reopen on Monday, March 10. Check all hours at https://library.harvard.edu.

The 3rd floor and the Aldrich Room are closed until further notice. If you need items from either of these spaces, please speak with our Circulation Desk staff.

We apologize for the inconvenience!

Following up on our post about the African-Portuguese composer Vicente Lusitano, several of our RISM working groups are engaged in projects to ensure that underrepresented composers are findable in RISM.

From the RISM US working group at the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard University, the collection "Indian melodies" (1845) by Thomas Commuck is now in our database. As stated on the title page, Commuck (1805-1855) was a "Narragansett Indian."
RISM Catalog: https://opac.rism.info/search?id=1001252875&View=rism
RISM Online: https://rism.online/sources/1001252875

Performing Arts at the Library of Congress carried out a project last year to add the music of Florence Price, William Grant Still, and other Black composers into RISM: https://rism.info/library_collections/2024/02/08/library-of-congress-summer-report.html

And we can also refer you to this post from 2020 where we link to music by other underrepresented musicians like Ignatius Sancho, Joseph Bologne de Saint-Georges, and Maria Antonia Palacios. https://rism.info/library_collections/2020/10/26/diversity-in-rism.html

Reporters from The Crimson stopped by for a tour of the library, and took great photos along the way!

In Photos: Symphonies Across Stacks at the Loeb Music Library | Multimedia | The Harvard Crimson Crimson photographers take a tour of the Loeb Music Library, which houses Harvard’s collections of scores, manuscripts, recordings, and music books.

Due to inclement weather, the Music Library will be closed on Tuesday, February 13, 2024. Cabot and Lamont libraries will remain open; check updated hours at

Locations & Hours Except where otherwise noted, this work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which allows anyone to share and adapt our material as long as proper attribution is given. For details and exceptions, see the Harvard Library Copyright Policy ©2024 Presidents and Fello...

We're hiring! Curator for the Archive of World Music: steward a collection of field and commercial recordings and archival material; inspire broad and creative use of those collections. Minimum salary $70,800. Apply by June 19. More info/apply:

Curator for the Archive of World Music - Harvard University - Job Details Click to learn more about and apply for the position

New on the library blog, a look at some of the details of a newly-acquired copyist's manuscript of the Goldberg Variations:

Thirty Variations in a Student’s Hand: A Manuscript Copy of the Goldberg Variations   The Music Library recently acquired a manuscript of the Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, in the hand of Bach’s last pupil, the organist, composer, and teacher Johann Christian Kittel (1732-1809…

Over the centuries and in different communities, Haggadot offer diverse ways to tell the stories and sing the songs of the Passover holiday. See a selection of Harvard Library's 6,000+ Haggadot in our student-curated exhibition, now extended through May 30.

It displays over 30 Haggadot from Harvard’s Judaica Collection (and one very special item from the Loeb Music Library: a facsimile of the exquisite Barcelona Haggadah). These volumes document the life and culture of the Jewish people throughout history—in all places, all languages, and all formats.

Harvard Haggadot Visit the Loeb Music Library until May 30 to view ancient, funny, breathtaking and moving Haggadot from the collections of Harvard Library.

The Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, Harvard University is pleased to announce the launch of The Music in The Music of Black Americans, a digital appendix to The Music of Black Americans, the landmark book by Dr. Eileen Southern. Dr. Southern was the first Black woman to receive a tenured professorship in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1974, three years after the first edition of The Music of Black Americans was published; the book itself is a monumental work that develops an extensive musical and cultural history of Black Americans, spanning from before the trans-Atlantic slave trade and continuing through to the mid twentieth century.

The Music in The Music of Black Americans offers the first organized, openly accessible inventory of the musical examples in the first edition of The Music of Black Americans. It provides full-text open access to the complete scores of almost all of these examples, from sources in the collections of Harvard Library and nine other institutions, and bridges the gap between the text and music as it appears in the book, and as it could appear in the hands or on the screen of a composer, conductor, or musicologist today.

This project was created with the support of an Advancing Open Knowledge grant from Harvard Library.

About the Project · The Music in The Music of Black Americans Eileen Southern’s book The Music of Black Americans: A History represents a monumental achievement for its author. Prior to its publication in 1971, American musicology had focused on European music, and studies of American music had not considered Black composers and performers. The book's resear...

Next week is Open Access Week! Join the Harvard Library for workshops, lectures, and events related to this year's theme, Open for Climate Justice. Find out more: https://bit.ly/hl-oaw-22