Music collection
The stock of the music collection, comprising a total of around 15,000 bibliographical items, was built up by the musicologists Elmar Arro and Fritz Feldmann in the former Research Centre of Musical History at the J. G. Herder Research Council, initially located in Kiel, and later in Hamburg. After Fritz Feldmann retired in 1973, the collection was passed to the library of the Herder Institute and installed here separately. A specific feature of the music collection is that its regional focus extends beyond the narrow collection area of East Central Europe to include works on music theory and sheet music from all regions of East Europe. A not insignificant section refers to the historical eastern territories of Germany; individual areas of these are represented to differing extents. Silesia plays a dominant role here.
Large parts of the music collection were initially electronically catalogued and thus able to be researched online through the use of project funds of the DFG, and later using the Herder Institute's own funds.
In the case of Slavic sheet music, particularly worthy of mention are the complete works of Chopin, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev and Medtner, and numerous (hand-written) scores. Many other composers are represented through a large number of compositions. The collection of music theory, with approximately 7,000 titles, includes many treatises that appear rarely, if at all, in German libraries.