The Contemporary Music Centre houses the only comprehensive collection of Irish classical music in existence. It is a collection of works by some 130 Irish composers of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. It also contains information materials of all kinds from concert programmes, biographical data, photographs and press clippings to specialist periodicals and books. The sound archive contains recordings of twentieth- and twenty-first century Irish classical music in various formats including CDs, DVDs, records, cassettes and quarter-inch reels. An important resource within this archive is a collection of some two thousand recordings of orchestral, chamber and solo music broadcast by Radio Telefís Éireann (RTE), the Irish national radio and TV station, since its foundation in the 1920s.
The collection is strong for works dating from the 1950s to present day but includes works that date back as far as 1910.
Approx 4500 scores and 6500 recordings.