The Church Music Institute contains an extensive Library of sacred choral and organ music for evaluation and study to support the educational purposes of the Institute. The Library is unique in its effort to collect and preserve music for worship and study. Through its electronic resources, members can find appropriate anthems or organ music to use in worship from the convenience of their home or office. The choral collection includes an archive of thousands of catalogued sacred octavo anthems for adults and children with additional compositions added daily. Each anthem has been chosen for quality of text, music and function in worship by the professional staff of CMI.
Anthems from every stylistic period from the Renaissance through those most recently published are placed in permanent, acid-free folders for preservation, so that present and future generations may identify, study, and utilize them in worship. Additional choral music contained in the collection includes cantatas and oratorios, service and liturgical music, and sacred anthems by classical composers donated by universities, seminaries, and church music scholars. The Library of the Institute has a special interest in collecting and preserving sacred octavos of the numerous, outstanding composers associated with the Dallas/Fort Worth area. The organ collection includes music based on previously-existing tunes, including hymn tunes and Gregorian chants. Many works are chorale-preludes, and others are re-harmonizations, interludes, and arrangements with other instruments. Sample pages are being added. The collection is being built from libraries of scholarly church organists donated to CMI, online collections in the public domain, and newly published music provided by publishers.
