The Geneva Conservatory of Music’s library acts at a library for the HEM all of whose teachers, students and staff are entitled to consult and borrow the items kept there.

Housed in the street de Hollande 12, the library currently holds more than 70,000 documents. It keeps some 50,000 scores, including both standard editions of works for all instrumental and vocal settings – covering every period in the history of music – and large monumental collections, as well as a vast number of highly varied teaching methods and works. It also has almost 20,000 books on every field of musicological and teaching research, and a number of microform documents.

The library also provides access to the main online research and audio sites: the International Repertory of Music Literature (RILM), the International Repertory of Music Sources (RISM), the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the Naxos Music Library and the Swiss National Sound Archives.

The library is not only a teaching and research tool whose reputation extends well beyond Switzerland, but also an archive of the Geneva and Swiss music worlds (with details of composers and documents of historical interest). It includes valuable documents printed in the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, as well as several hundred original manuscripts, including works by Berlioz, Britten, d’Indy, Honegger, Martinů, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky. It also has various special collections, including the Dimitry Markevitch library on the cello and its history.

Online catalogue

Open Mondays to Fridays from 10 a.m. to 12 noon and from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Library director
Jacques Tchamkerten         

Librarian
Jolanka Tchamkerten

Assistant librarians
Dominique Baud, Nimrod Ben-Zeev