Major Endowment to Support Music Collection
Page from Liszt's "Mephisto Polka" (1883)
A million dollar endowment fund donated to Lauinger Library by Leon Robbin will enable the library to support, to expand, and to provide wide access to the Leon Robbin Collection of Musical Manuscripts and Letters of Composers. Robbin, a native Washingtonian now living in Key Biscayne, Florida, graduated from the Georgetown Law School in 1922.
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Leon Robbin |
The endowment will be used in part to support the creation of a World Wide Web page which will make available images of many of the manuscripts and letters as well as full cataloging data for items in the collection, thus enabling scholars at a distance from Georgetown to use materials in the collection in the development of their individual research projects. Rotating exhibitions of items from the collection will be mounted in Lauinger Library. |
Reflecting upon his decades
of collecting, Robbin said "I began collecting manuscripts not only
because of my interest in the great composers, but also because it gives
me a wonderful feeling to have in front of me the very piece of paper
that one of these immortal geniuses wrote on." The breadth and depth
of the collection are such that University Librarian Sue Martin added:
"With an academic program that increasingly emphasizes the fine arts,
the Leon Robbin Collection will add significantly to Georgetown's curricular
opportunities and also to its contribution to the world of scholarship."