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Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library
About the Library
The Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library (MSPAL) is the central location on the College Park campus for music, theatre, and dance materials. The circulating, reference, serial, and special collections include 56,000 books, 156,000 musical scores, 130,000 audio and video recordings, 4500 microform titles, and 281 active journal subscriptions.
Opened in 2000 as part of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, MSPAL's public spaces include a spacious main reading room, a separate reading room for special collections, a lounge-style study room, a seminar room, and a group study room. A multi-media exhibition gallery, with an adjacent lecture/concert room, links the Library to the Smith Center’s exciting programming via the Grand Pavilion.
Throughout MSPAL patrons find a variety of comfortable spaces for reading, listening, viewing, and studying. Individual carrels with computer workstations provide access to the UM Libraries' full complement of electronic resources, and feature an excellent remote audio and video delivery system.
Reference librarians, curators, and expert permanent staff are available on weekdays during regular working hours. However, the library is open evening and weekend hours, and offers basic circulation and information services during those times.
Special Collections in Performing Arts (SCPA) at MSPAL holds the archives of several musical organizations including the American Bandmasters Association (1929-), the Music Educators National Conference (1907-) and the Music Library Association (1931-).
The American Bandmasters Association Research Center includes materials relating to the Banda Mexicana, the ensemble Symphony in Gold for Brass and Percussion, and the careers of Herbert L. Clarke, Patrick Conway, Patrick S. Gilmore, Edwin Franko Goldman, Arthur Pryor, Claude T. Smith, and others.
The Music Educators National Conference Historical Center has collected the papers of several prominent music educators including Clifford V. Buttelman, Frances Elliott Clark, Charles Fowler, Lowell and Luther Whiting Mason, Lilla Belle Pitts, and C. M. Tremaine.
The International Clarinet Association Research Center includes over 8000 manuscript and printed editions of clarinet music.
The Irving and Margery Morgan Lowens Collection, which centers on American music and music criticism, includes the Irving Lowens papers, an extensive manuscript collection of autograph letters, and musical scores.
SCPA also holds the organizational papers of the American Handel Society, College Music Society, Mid-West International Band and Orchestra Clinic, and others. Also of note are the Maryland sheet music collection (including Bromo-Seltzer editions), the Hugo and Wouter Keesing Collections on Popular Music (161 linear feet of papers, serials, recordings, and sheet music spanning 1940-2000), and The American Composers Alliance collection, which is on deposit at the University of Maryland and contains scores of nearly 10,000 contemporary works.
The collections are accessible in the Lowens Room for Special Collections by appointment with the SCPA Curator.
The International Piano Archives at Maryland (IPAM) at MSPAL is a research center consisting of recordings, scores and documents relating to the classical piano repertoire and its performance history. IPAM contains the vast majority of all commercially-issued piano recordings (in all formats), an extensive archive of private recordings, 16,000 published scores (many rare and out-of-print), and documentation on the careers of many thousands of concert pianists.
Within IPAM, the Henry Z. Steinway Collection represents the artist files of pianists affiliated with Steinway & Sons (New York).
The Harry L. Anderson Collection, assembled by a pioneering researcher in the field of pianism, includes comprehensive discographies, scrapbooks, clipping files, record catalogs, and periodicals.
Over 60 individual collections hold concert programs, critical reviews, publicity material, photographs, correspondence, and other memorabilia of major 20th-century pianists and pedagogues, among them Leopold Godowsky, William Kapell, Jorge Bolet, Arthur Loesser, Gary Graffman, Nadia Reisenberg, Robert and Gaby Casadesus, Abram Chasins, Carl Friedberg, Olga Samaroff, and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. A number of IPAM publications – both books and compact discs – have been produced based on its unique holdings.
IPAM has closed stacks, a preservation/re-recording studio, and a listening room. The lecture/concert room adjacent to the Gallery, features a Boesendorfer Imperial Grand 290SE computerized piano capable of recording and playing back performances.
The collections are accessible by appointment with the IPAM Curator.
