Posts from the Music Division

Work was an African American composer and arranger working independently and for CBS Radio in New York City. Many of his arrangements are held in the CBS Collection of the Library of Performing Art's Music Division.

This series of short videos will explore composer and sound artist Amacher’s work through conversations as a shared engagement across social time and distance.

In this episode, NYPL's Bob Kosovsky and Fredric Fehleisen of The Juilliard School discussed an early 19th-century portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven now owned by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

We have been looking to increase our holdings of scores (and parts) in our circulating scores collection for works by contemporary women composers across the full range of vocal and instrumental combinations. Here are some examples of newly available circulating material.

Classical music has been blessed with many composers of African descent, but history has not always remembered them. Here are just a few exceptional composers from the NYPL music collection that we invite you to discover and explore.

The gift will enable us to transform the physical card catalogs of 25,000 chamber music scores to an online record on the OCLC system, making them just as easy to find as any bestselling novel or biography.

Guízar was one of the first to bring Mexican music to New York and later paved the way for Mexican performers in Hollywood.

You're invited to look through our Annual Report and celebrate with us some of the things we accomplished this past year.

The Music & Recorded Sound Division holds a fascinating photo album documenting the 1910 performance by members of the Bohemian Club of a musical drama about human cave dwellers.

For every writer, there is a distinctive moment in which the crossroads of music and the written arts surfaces into a singular and synonymous condition.

Henry Cowell used and developed a range of techniques throughout his composing career. He was also one of the pioneering figures in the West exploring and promoting folk music and the music of non-Western cultures. This experience had a marked effect on his own output. His 'string piano' piece "The Banshee" ranks among his most innovative and striking works.

Over the course of the months that we were physically out of the building,materials continued to be ordered and processed. Here is a small selection ready to be shelved.

If music is galvanizing, it is also portable and shape-shifting. It can be stored away in memory and carried into new contexts, developing in new directions and picking up new associations.

A glimpse into the set and costume designs of the Music Division.

Used in talking dolls, phonographs and more, his use of celluloid is considered a major innovation in the recorded sound field.

His centuries old music is poignant in our time.

Do what you love!

Three inspiring audio interviews offer perspectives on the African American experience.

What we know today as country music is an amalgam of several kinds of music, ranging from the music of working-class Americans in the Appalachian region to Celtic folk songs and fiddle tunes. Collections within the Library's Music & Recorded Sound Division reveal just how it all came together, and the enormous impact of broadcast and recorded media.