Music & Media

A temporary space for Music and Media is being configured on the 4th floor of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. There we are setting up listening stations and some initial replacement music and media collections. But through a careful restoration process, replacement purchases, selective donations, and strategic collection building we intend to eventually create new and stronger collections than were housed in the former Maxwell Music Library, which was among our basement collections lost to Hurricane Katrina.

In this new space we have also formed a new partnership with Tulane's Instructional Media Center to provide access to media work stations where students can produce media presentations from digital video, audio, and image files. Eventually, Music and Media will move to larger quarters, very likely one floor below, where it can expand its services in support of applied music and music studies and also house new collections of non-print media to serve many disciplines across the university.

Students and faculty will find that our online journals and databases for music are still accessible via the library web site and Tulane students and faculty have reciprocal borrowing privileges at the Monroe Library at Loyola University of New Orleans, whose campus is adjacent to Tulane's. Loyola has maintained a substantial music collection.

During Hurricane Katrina the basement of the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library building was flooded by about eight feet of water. However, the disaster manager company Belfor quickly arrived on the scene to limit the damages. While pumping the water out, Belfor also installed an elaborate series of generators and large tubes to pump dry air into the building. It employed a team of more than 100 laborers in special white suits and masks along with about a dozen coordinating staff for a major salvage operation. In the process, we were able to salvage some 70 percent of the music library's print books, scores, and journals. Now we will review the materials that were salvaged and try to restore what we can. This will be the base on which the new music collection will grow.

Along with the Tulane Department of Music, the music library at Tulane was established in 1909. It was made part of the main Howard-Tilton Memorial Library in 1981.

The music library evolved into one of the outstanding music collections in the Southeast. Its primary function has been to support the curriculum of Tulane's programs in music literature, musicology, music theory, composition, and performance, but it has also served musicians and researchers from all Tulane departments and from the adjacent Loyola University, the University of New Orleans, other universities and music schools in the City of New Orleans, and visiting researchers.