Building a Music Library

We were lucky enough to get a generous donation from one of our former students in the form of several boxes of music books to add to our collection. Although we had a lot of traditional musical theater, classical, and pop standards in our extant collection, we were light on the contemporary. I'm glad we seemed to have filled that niche now. Of course, our lending library is still fairly small, but I think it offers a lot of options to our students and renters. We like to think of it as a little perk of working at Singers Forum!

The Singers Anthology books are helpful, especially because they are published by voice part. I also like vocal selections from musicals for a good way to find obscure material. Now we also have a lot of books of songs written and/or performed by a specific pop artist. I find them to be great resources for new songs to play on my uke!

What would be your ideal books in your music library? Do you like jazz standards, or would you love to have more contemporary musical theater books? And have you mastered the art of copying songs from these books without losing your bass clef or chord symbols? Share your thoughts in the comments!