The dedication of Yale’s new Irving S. Gilmore Music Library will take place Friday, Oct. 16, at 4 p.m. The new library is housed within Sterling Memorial Library, 120 High St.
Reporters are invited to get a first look at the new facility during an open house beginning at 3:30 p.m.
Yale President Richard C. Levin, University Librarian Scott Bennett, and trustees of the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation will speak at the ceremony. The library is named for the late Irving Gilmore, a 1923 graduate of Yale, who made a significant contribution to the construction of the new facility through a bequest. The University subsequently received a gift for the new building from the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation.
The music library was designed by Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott of Boston, took 18 months to build and cost $11 million. Barr & Barr, Inc. of New Haven managed the project. Book stacks and a Historical Sound Recording Studio are located on the ground level. The first floor has a listening area, two seminar rooms, offices and an exhibition space. On the mezzanine level are the reading area, periodical stacks, offices and a technical services area. Soaring approximately 60 feet above the mezzanine is a new, dramatic arched truss roof structure that allows indirect natural light into the new library.
Yale’s music holdings include approximately 160,000 books, scores, recordings and other work — vast collections of both sacred and secular works. In the collections are musical performance scores and parts, books on the theory and history of music, sound recordings in all formats, music manuscripts, periodicals, extensive collections of composers’ personal papers and archives, and rare editions.
