Based at the University of Pittsburgh and housed in the Stephen Foster Memorial, the Center for American Music is a library, archive and museum dedicated to expanding and documenting knowledge of American music and its role in American life. The centerpiece of the Center's library collections is the Foster Hall Collection, the principal repository for materials pertaining to American composer Stephen Collins Foster. In addition to being a library, archive, and museum, the Center's projects include, Voices Across Time, a curriculum support package that allows teachers to integrate historic American Music into their classrooms, and Resources of American History II, a proposed digital version of Resources of American Music History that will provide online access access to music scores, papers, sound recordings. The Center for American Music, a department within the Special Collections of the University of Pittsburgh Library System housed in the Stephen Foster Memorial building, is a center of excellence in the humanities. It engages in research, teaching, interpretive performance, and conservation of music in the context of its cultural and social roles in the history of the United States of America.
Further, the Center informs the academic, cultural, and general public communities about the richness of the American musical experience. In an age of global ethnic diversity and increasing factionalism, the Center's mission is founded on a belief that rigorous research, scholarship, performance, and education programs contribute vitally needed understanding of individual and shared expression through music, a cultural form that serves both to define and unify in a plural society. The Center is a focal point for cooperative involvement between the University of Pittsburgh and other scholarly, educational, and cultural institutions locally, nationally, and internationally. The Center serves a diverse academic and general audience. Located in a metropolitan population of 2 million, the University of Pittsburgh is a state-related institution of higher education with approximately 30,000 students and 7,000 faculty and staff, having strong undergraduate and graduate teaching and research programs in music, fine arts, American history, and related humanities' disciplines.
The Center's library, archive, and museum collection of more than 30,000 items including manuscripts, musical instruments, portraits, books, recordings, art works, scores, and journals is richest in musical documents and artifacts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States with particular emphasis on popular music and dance. Its Foster Hall Collection, comprised of materials related to American composer Stephen Collins Foster and deposited at the University of Pittsburgh in 1937, was the first research center for American music established at an institution of higher education.
