Building a hypothetical public music library

Premise: as a public librarian you are given a budget of $1000 to build a classical music CD library. Which selections would you include?

I start:

Bach Brandenburg Concertos, Raymond Leppard and The English Chamber Orchestra, on 2 discs:

Amazon.com: Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1, 2 & 3: Johann Sebastian Bach, Raymond Leppard, English Chamber Orchestra: Music

Amazon.com: Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Nos 4, 5 & 6: Johann Sebastian Bach, Raymond Leppard, Richard Adeney, English Chamber Orchestra, David Munrow, John Turner, Jose-Luis Garcia: Music

Cost = approx $10 for used CDs, not including shipping.

Well personally I think there are a lot of classical period music libraries around so I'd like to create a dedicated 20th century library. It would focus solely on composers who write with a high level of competency, displaying both harmonic and melodic prowess. So composers such as Rachmaninov, Strauss, Respighi, Desbussy, Ravel, Ibert, Rodrigo, Gershwin, Barber, Holst, Poulenc, Turina, De Falla, Prokofiev, Shostakovich etc!

I'm not against preserving the past but I feel that accessible 20th century music needs a publicity boost.

Here's a random selection from my soon to be critically acclaimed library:

Amazon.com: Rachmaninov: The Symphonies: Tom Krause, Sergey Rachmaninov, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Natalia Troitskaya, Ryszard Karcykowski: Music ($20)

Amazon.com: Joaqu

Uhm, I'd ask for more money. There's no point in building a library without the proper budget for building it. If you came to me and said, "I'll give you $1,000 to build a music library," I'd laugh and tell you, "Good luck with that..."

I think an online music library project would be a great resource for students. I'm talking full score PDFs, recordings, and all the relevant theoretical discussion about every possible work available or written is a golden idea to run with. Give me $100,000 and I'll look into it for you.

I think an online music library project would be a great resource for students. I'm talking full score PDFs, recordings, and all the relevant theoretical discussion about every possible work available or written is a golden idea to run with. Give me $100,000 and I'll look into it for you.

That's a fabulous idea. More or less, a university student has access to all three of these things online through their institution's subscription, but they are not unified in any way - it would be much easier to have all elements located in one database or at least cross-referenced to each other...

For a small town $100,000 would probably be the yearly budget for the whole library!

Imagine that a public (i.e. taxpayer funded) library of modest budget is already in place with books and media (CDs, DVDs) holding, but there is no classical music selection yet. You have discretion to spend the $1000 to bring classical music representation alongside the Elvis' and Beatles'. (Next year maybe there is more money to expand the classical selection).

C'mon guys, $1000! And we have only spent 7% ($70) of it!

Mahler!

Amazon.com: A Love Supreme: John Coltrane: Music $5 used

Amazon.com: The Complete Machine Gun Sessions: Peter Br

Aren't we kind of glossing over the fact that the cost of the right to distribute the CDs as a library is much more than the price of buying the CDs for personal use?

For a small town $100,000 would probably be the yearly budget for the whole library!

Imagine that a public (i.e. taxpayer funded) library of modest budget is already in place with books and media (CDs, DVDs) holding, but there is no classical music selection yet. You have discretion to spend the $1000 to bring classical music representation alongside the Elvis' and Beatles'. (Next year maybe there is more money to expand the classical selection).

C'mon guys, $1000! And we have only spent 7% ($70) of it!

Where are you getting this $1,000 figure, Cyg? I'm interested to know if it has ever been done before (to some limited extent at least) with a budget of only $1,000. If there was a serious investor out there that truly wanted to see that project come to the fore, they better be ready to spend $1,000,000 if they want to create a resource of true quality. The resources needed to create this library extend beyond the simple purchase of the CD and Score. You have distribution rights, storage space (either physically or in cyberspace), as well as a host of other protections afforded to published articles in journals about the music (that also require licensing to use). Add to that the cost of personnel to scan in documents and organize materials, handle any shipping costs for requested materials, and payroll to operate all the services of the library. What I think this thread is really asking is, what would 'you' include in your music library? I can tell you everything I already have included in mine and what I would buy with $1,000, but it's not a real 'library' in the same sense that a music library for universities would be considered a 'Music Library'.

When I have a million bucks to donate to a project like creating a music library, I will definitely set one up because I think it could be done as a non-profit with a substantive return on the investment over ten years. After all, most universities would be willing to make more space for other subjects in their on-campus libraries if it was possible for music students to access all their required materials online. There could be the possibility of donations of materials to the library project also, so it's certainly possible to mitigate some of the expense. But if it appears to be more cost-effective for schools to pay annually for music students to access their materials and recoup some of that cost in research fees, I think the recovery of the investment is almost certain. You just have to do it correctly the first time, making the website itself as user-friendly as possible.

Uh...you guys are completely missing point. No scraggy you can't build a library with $1000.

His whole point was to limit it to $1,000 so you wouldn't be sitting at your computer for 5 loving days, trying to come up with a list.

Aka, what you think would be the absolutely most essential. A stranded-on-a-deserted-island scenario.

I'm not familiar with copyright law, in particular fair use clauses, as applied to public libraries. Can anyone shed some light?

Perhaps the thread title was a bit misleading - I'm not referring to a 'music library' such as ones hosted at universities. For those even $1 million dollars would be a meager sum.

What I'm trying to engage you in is a hypothetical scenario whereby you are given authority to spend monetary resources (an arbitrary sum of $1000) to provide public exposure of classical music. The choice of repertoire is at your absolute discretion. BUT there is a catch - this is public money, which means it should be spent for the benefit of taxpayers. Given this, how would you spend the $1000?

On the real world side, I actually lived in a small town. Our public library had a selection of classical music CDs, not a lot (probably fewer than 200), but no doubt enriched my life and those of other patrons.

Another thing that might come out of this thread is, like Matt said, a list of beloved recordings that everyone should own!

I would put James Tenney's postcard pieces, Feldman's Coptic Light, Ligeti's Atmospheres, Xenakis' Persepsappha, Boulez's In Memoriam Bruno Maderna, Cardew's Treatise, Bartok's Music for Strings Percussion and Celeste, Varese's whole output (but mainly Deserts), Webern's whole output (but mainly his string quartet and his songs), Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Debussy's whole output (or if not all, his Etudes and his Preludes) (and some of his songs), Scriabin's Poem de l'Extase, Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No.1, Bartok's 4th and 5th String Quartets, Mozart's Piano Fantasias, Indian classical music, Japanese court music, Northern/middle African traditional music, Balinese music, Javanese music, Brazilian music, and the list can go on forever, really.

But what I would aim to do (as demonstrated by the short list above), is try to get a little bit of a LOT of different kinds of musics, taking a lot of examples from different composers of Western societies to the traditional musics of other cultures and times. This way, anyone who went in the library would be able to find a sample of the kind of music he's interested in, and then he'd be off on his own to find out more about the kind of music he found most interesting.

But I think it would be pointless to try and collect "all the great masters" of the past or whatever.

Antiatonality: stop being annoying without reason - that's why cygnusdei mentioned creating a hypothetical library. There is no such thing, nor will there ever be. It's just going to start and end in this thread (and it might end prematurely if people keep reacting like you did).

*Singsong voice* Jennifer Higdon!

And John Adams. Especially his Dharma at Big Sur.