A library is made up of rooms full of shelves, both large and small, with rows of books waiting to be browsed, read and put back into place. Corridors lead from one room, or kingdom, to another, with new questions arising at every juncture, in search of new answers. Everything more or less as it should be, so far.
Yet within this Library there is a very special corner that fully deserves its place. It is the harmony corner - the Library music collection, on CD and video - created with intelligence and foresight by the R. Ruffilli Library to form something distinctive not only within the Library itself but also in relation to other libraries in Romagna.
If listening is indeed part of what makes a good reader, then refining one’s sensitivity and knowledge through music is a task that goes far beyond the purely pedagogical. It speaks to the broader formation and honing of our capacity to explore and to be welcomed into ever new worlds, almost retracing in sound those rooms we physically pass through in search of answers, or of other, more pressing questions.
The intention has not been to create something narrowly elitist. Instead, the choice was to build a living, evolving collection open to many genres and forms of musical experience: from classical music, focused on essential contributions by great composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner (to name but a few), to more modern explorations (Schoenberg, Ravel, Debussy); from Italy’s great tradition of singer-songwriters (De André, De Gregori, Guccini, Dalla, Capossela, Fossati) to Italian progressive rock (Area, PFM). A substantial section is also devoted to jazz (Mingus, Davis, Monk, Coleman), to rock in its various guises (Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin), and to the brilliant experimentalism of Frank Zappa.
The collection also contains a number of DVDs, which, through images and previously unseen materials, show how the recent history of music not only makes our time more enjoyable but also helps us to reconstruct that history and to interpret its most controversial periods.
This is why the “island of harmony”, like all the items that can be found in the other rooms of the library, offers yet another invaluable resource in the endless and varied pursuit of knowledge.
Prof. Francesco Giardinazzo
University of Bologna
