Boston Public Library
Allen A. Brown Collection of Music
Detail from:
Lullaby
The nucleus of the music holdings at Boston Public Library is the Allen A. Brown Collection of Music, which is named for the donor who presented it to the Library in 1894. Originally containing 6,990 volumes, Allen A. Brown (1835-1916) continued to add to the collection so that it had nearly tripled in size by his death in 1916. To this day, it continues to grow through purchases from trust funds and presently contains more than 40,000 books, scores, and manuscripts relating to music and musical topics.
The collection strongly reflects the broad musical interests and activities of a Boston music collector and serious amateur musician at the turn of the 20th century. It is particularly well rounded in the areas of operas, oratorios, orchestral and chamber music, and solo songs, both in manuscript and published score formats, created over the last 500 years. Other highlights include significant coverage of tunebooks and other early-American printed music, rare musical monographs and periodicals published throughout the world, and a strong emphasis on documenting musical life both in Boston and throughout the United States. The vast majority of items in the collection contain a wealth of ephemera relating to world premieres and subsequent reception history that Allen Brown--and later the Music Department at Boston Public Library--collected and preserved. Reviews of concert performances, published interviews, biographical sketches, news clippings, and concert programs are pasted into many of the musical scores he owned as well as in the hundreds of scrapbooks Brown compiled.
Critical funding to support long-term preservation of and enhanced public access to Boston Public Library collections, including this one, was provided by the Associates of the Boston Public Library.
The collection strongly reflects the broad musical interests and activities of a Boston music collector and serious amateur musician at the turn of the 20th century. It is particularly well rounded in the areas of operas, oratorios, orchestral and chamber music, and solo songs, both in manuscript and published score formats, created over the last 500 years. Other highlights include significant coverage of tunebooks and other early-American printed music, rare musical monographs and periodicals published throughout the world, and a strong emphasis on documenting musical life both in Boston and throughout the United States. The vast majority of items in the collection contain a wealth of ephemera relating to world premieres and subsequent reception history that Allen Brown--and later the Music Department at Boston Public Library--collected and preserved. Reviews of concert performances, published interviews, biographical sketches, news clippings, and concert programs are pasted into many of the musical scores he owned as well as in the hundreds of scrapbooks Brown compiled.
Critical funding to support long-term preservation of and enhanced public access to Boston Public Library collections, including this one, was provided by the Associates of the Boston Public Library.