The official unveiling of the Phillip and Patricia Frost School of Music’s high-tech library, the Marta and Austin Weeks Music Library and Technology Center, was cause for celebration. Faculty, friends, alumni and trustees-with mango martinis in hand-gathered outside the building during the dedication ceremony late January.
“This marks the third major contribution of the Weeks, and we are profoundly grateful,” William Hipp, dean of the School of Music, said in his remarks. “Very few schools of music can boast having a free-standing music library and technology center.”
The Weeks, longtime benefactors of the University, initiated their string of philanthropic contributions to the School of Music in 1998 with the L. Austin Weeks Center for Recording and Performance. Soon after, they created the L. Austin Weeks Music Scholarship Endowment, which provides financial assistance to more than 20 undergraduate students each year.
Dean Colson, chairman of the Board of Trustees, said he thinks highly of Marta Weeks.
“She is really one of those special people in the world,” Colson said of Marta Weeks.
“Marta is a wonderful human with a strong sense of ethics,” UM President Donna E. Shalala said. “She is a model for philanthropists.”
The Frost School of Music possesses one of the nation’s significant university music library collections. The new, 28,000-square-foot library also houses the music school’s extensive collections of media, from books, journals and videos that were previously in the Richter Library to scores and recordings that were in the Pick Music Library.
Shalu Patel can be contacted at
s.patel16@umiami.edu.