NEWS RELEASE, 4/11/97 Jean Gray Hargrove commits $4 million to UC Berkeley Music Library

by Jose Rodriguez

Berkeley -- Jean Gray Hargrove, Bay Area concert pianist and patron of the arts, has committed $4 million to the University of California at Berkeley for a new music library. Hargrove, Class of '35, has a long history of sharing the fruits of wise investment decisions made years earlier by her and her husband, Dr. G. Kenneth Hargrove, Class of '32, a well-known Berkeley physician who died in 1977. The Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library will honor the Hargrove family and serve students, music scholars, composers and performers into the next century. The multi-million dollar commitment is the cornerstone of a larger $10-million campaign for extensive, updated music library and performance facilities. "This commitment places Jean Gray Hargrove among the ranks of UC Berkeley's most generous friends, whose benevolence has transformed this campus," said Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien. "It also exemplifies the devotion of our alumni, whose support will be essential if Berkeley is to maintain its place as the nation's flagship public university." UC Berkeley's Music Department, ranked among the top departments in the nation, has been limited by its current facilities, which opened in the late 1950s. Since that time the collections of the Music Library have increased more than fivefold, the department's programs have expanded and diversified, and new technologies have transformed both libraries and instruction. The Music Library now contains some 160,000 volumes of books and printed music, 45,000 sound and video recordings, and extensive collections of manuscripts, microfilms and musical instruments. Among the treasures housed at Berkeley are the Wolffheim Antiphoner, an 11th-century Gregorian chant manuscript; Beethoven's sketches for one of his string quartets; the original manuscript of Stravinsky's ballet "Orpheus"; and the only known score of Alessandro Scarlatti's opera "LšAldimiro" of 1683, which received its modern premiere in the 1996 Berkeley Festival.