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Production & Design

A curated guide for Performing Arts Production & Design resources at Pace Libraries
The Beekman Library Score Collection is located in the new 15 Beekman building on the 5th Floor!  Browsable by genre, composer/artist, title, and year/decade! 

Subject-Specific Resources

Need to find a book on a particular subject? 

Materials in the Pace Library are organized by subject. Browsing the shelves of the library in-person can help you discover new work, materials, inspiration, and connections. Listed below are general call number ranges for sound, music, and related topics. Be sure to search for subject headings in the online search feature using quotations marks!

Subclasses M, ML, MT: Music

  • ML47-54.8: Librettos. Texts. Scenarios.
  • MT35-39: Notation
  • MT40-67: Composition. Elements and techniques of music.
  • MT68: Improvisation. Accompaniment. Transposition.
  • MT70-74: Instrumentation and orchestration
  • MT75: Interpretation
  • MT955-960: Musical Theatre
  • PN2091 .S6: Sound effects 

Musical Theater

Musical theater--Production and direction

Musicals--United States--History and criticism

Theater--Production and direction 

Theater--reviews

Theaters--Electronic sound control

Theaters--Sound effects

Looking for professional or trade publications in your discipline? 

Here is a list of publications, magazines, and trades dedicated to the professional and educational worlds of professional theatre technicians and designers. 

Looking for subject-related websites?

This is a list of useful websites related to the study, practice, and professional experiences of practitioners in the field of sound design and production.

  • Theatrical Sound Designers and Composers Association: an ever-growing list of resources for those working in sound design and composition. 
  • Association of Sound Design & Production: list specific to Sound Design resources in the United Kingdom, but still relevant to Sound Design and Production students anywhere
  • SoundGirls: established to provide women working in professional audio communities to come to for support and advice, and for empowerment and inspirations.
  • Composer Search Database: This database contains the profiles of composers from historically excluded groups who have consented to being represented in our databases, and whose works you can find in the database linked above.

Looking for primary sources online or in the NYC area?

Provided below is a list of in-person and digital archives featuring various archival collections of theatre productions, designs, lighting plots, and ephemera. 

  • The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound: The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound of The New York Public Library is one of the richest resources of recorded sound in the world. The Archives' extraordinary holdings cover virtually every aspect of recorded sound—from Mozart to Maria Callas to Motown, from symphonic works to presidential speeches, from radio dramas to television specials.
  • Music Division, NYPL for the Performing Arts: The Music Division is one of the world's preeminent music collections—documenting the art of music in all its diversity—classical and opera as well as the whole spectrum of popular music including spirituals, ragtime, jazz, musical theater, film, rock and world music
  • Billy Rose Theatre Divison, The New York Public Library for Performing Arts: The Billy Rose Theatre Division of The New York Public Library is one of the largest and most comprehensive archives devoted to the theatrical arts. Encompassing dramatic performance in all its diversity, the division is an indispensable resource for artists, writers, researchers, scholars, students, and the general public.
  • The Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project: serves to fill a gap in theater scholarship about an innovative period in post-WWII America by establishing a video archive featuring the artists who created Off- and Off-Off-Broadway. In their own words, actors, casting agents, directors, designers, press representatives, producers, playwrights, theater founders, and others share their personal accounts of how Off- and Off-Off-Broadway emerged and flourished. 
  • The Fake Book Library: Digital archive hosted by the Internet Archive (A fake book is a collection of musical lead sheets intended to help a performer quickly learn new songs. Each song in a fake book contains the melody line, basic chords, and lyrics - the minimal information needed by a musician to make an impromptu arrangement of a song, or "fake it.")