The Sidney Cox Library of Music and Dance has an excellent collection containing approximately 131,000 periodicals, books, scores, and parts; 56,000 sound and video recordings; and a microfilm collection of early printed and manuscript sources. Its depth and breadth serve the needs of a wide variety of users on the campus. Highlights of the research collection include early opera libretti and scores, eighteenth-century keyboard and chamber music, and an archive of American popular song from 1850-1950. In addition, the Carl A. Kroch Library houses, in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, a collection of musical manuscripts and early printed books on music. The John M. Olin Library is one of the finest general research libraries in the country, and the nineteen units that constitute the Cornell University Library together hold more than seven million volumes.

The principal concert halls at Cornell University are Barnes Hall Auditorium (seats about 280) and Bailey Hall (which will seat about 1,350 after its renovation is completed in 2006). Sage Chapel (seats about 900) is also used for concerts. Keyboard instruments on campus include numerous practice pianos and electronic keyboards, six concert grand pianos, five fortepianos of varying provenance (including both restored originals and modern copies), two harpsichords, a clavichord, and four organs (one with tracker action, one with electric action, the third a 1746 Neapolitan chamber organ by Augustus Vicedomini, and most recently a small chamber organ modeled on an 18th-century German organ and built for us by Munetaka Yokota). The Department of Music also has a quartet of stringed instruments in eighteenth-century proportions, a complete Javanese gamelan, a complete drum-based instrumental ensemble from Ghana, six Philippine instrumental ensembles, several sets of North Indian tabla, and a steel drum band.

The Cornell Electroacoustic Music Center has five fully equipped, state-of-the-art digital music studios offering composers and others sophisticated hardware and software facilities for electroacoustic music, film, dance, and other advanced undertakings. The explicit mission of the digital music studios is to facilitate the individual creative musical ideas of Cornell's diverse and distinguished student body. The Master Studio is a large multichannel environment, well suited to a variety of applications: ensemble recording, film, and rehearsal of works with a live or interactive component. All studios provide a diverse and ever-expanding set of software tools including commercial applications as well as advanced opensource solutions and a growing variety of in-house utilities aimed at offering a multitude of creative possibility.