About this library

This library began with just piano literature from my lessons growing up and grew from there. Over the years it became something more deliberate than a pile of music. I started buying second and third editions of works I already owned, because I wanted to know why the editions of the Beethoven sonatas use the editors they do.

Today the shelves hold about six hundred scores, with Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and Chopin the largest groups, and about two hundred and fifty books, from Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis and Charles Rosen’s Sonata Forms to the letters of Brahms and Clara Schumann and the full New Grove.

What you’ll find here

• The catalog. Every score and book, searchable by composer, publisher, editor and date. Each entry also gives the title page as it reads, because title pages say a great deal about when and where an edition was made.
• Composer pages that gather everything in the library about one composer.
• Research notes, including listening guides, edition comparisons and notes on reading old scores.
• Publishers and a glossary, a small reference shelf for anyone trying to date or decipher an old edition.

A note on what is not here

Scores still in copyright are catalogued but not reproduced. Where a work is in the public domain, I link to scans at IMSLP.

Photographs live separately at Crossing Zero.

About the name

Crossing Zero was my initial concept for an industrial band in the mid-1990s. In the 2000s I used the name to form my S-Corp for data center migration work for a Fortune 100 company. Since then I have used it as my name and handle for my social media presence online.