The Vittorio Giannini Collection at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts

ABSTRACT: After several decades of limited access, the musical manuscript collection of American composer Vittorio Giannini (1903–1966) has been processed by the Archives of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) and is available to researchers. A biographical sketch of Giannini, a longtime Juilliard faculty member who became one of the founders of UNCSA and the school’s first president, is followed by a brief history and overview of the collection, which includes evidence of over one hundred works in a wide range of genres. Materials pertaining to three early works— Lucedia , Giannini’s first opera, which received its first and only performances in 1934; The Scarlet Letter , a slightly later operatic effort whose premiere performance in 1938 featured his sister, the soprano Dusolina Giannini; and the I.B.M. Symphony (1938), the most ambitious of several works the International Business Machines Corporation commissioned Giannini to compose in the late 1930s—are described in some detail.