Lincoln Hall Renovation and Expansion

What did all of this mean for the areas of study within the Department of Music, including musicology, composition, and performance?

    from musicologist Neal Zaslaw, the Herbert Gussman Professor of Music:

To function efficiently on the highest, most creative levels, musicologists and their students need ready access to quiet study areas, a fine library, good music listening and performing facilities, and well-equipped classrooms. This is as true for the non-major taking an introductory course, as for the music majors, for the doctoral candidates preparing to enter the profession, and for their teachers and mentors. Now for the first time in its long history, Cornell has such purpose-built facilities. The old Lincoln Hall had no soundproofing; the new Lincoln Hall is blessedly quiet; the old Lincoln Hall's classrooms were scruffy and ill equipped; the new ones are attractive and feature state-of-the-art audio-visual equipment; the old Lincoln Hall had only crowded classrooms for rehearsals; the new Lincoln Hall has a real rehearsal hall and recording studio; the old Music Library was housed in an rabbit warren of jerry-rigged rooms, ill-suited to their functions; the new Music Library makes readily accessible to all members of the Cornell community fabulous collections of books, periodicals, microfilms, scores, recordings, and videos, most of it in spaciously arrayed, open stacks. To a scholar the library is what the lab is to the scientist, the playing field to the athlete, the studio to the artist. I have often been asked by visitors from abroad how so much world-class musical scholarship could originate from a cow-town in the Finger Lakes. The answer is: the library. Now, for the first time, we have a facility which provides complete, convenient access to our extraordinary library collection for all interested users.

Additionally, Music Librarian Lenore Coral reports that the facility includes a modern listening facility with fifteen streamed digital sound stations for reserves, plus a full complement of audio and video equipment, an internet-accessible computer lab with midi keyboards and music writing software available to all students on the campus, ample reading spaces, many with internet connection ports, and comfortable offices and workspaces for the library staff.