Posts from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound

In this episode, Jonathan Hiam and Jon Samuels analyzed the Mapleson Cylinders and discussed the preservation and restoration of the many historical audio formats held by NYPL.

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.

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.

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.

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.

His centuries old music is poignant in our time.

Do what you love!

Now available for research at the Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at NYPL: a book on orchestration and orchestral instruments belonging to Thomas A. Edison.

Join us for concerts and installations that reflect the NYC accordion scene (yes, of course there's one!) and the role of the accordion in performance traditions across the globe.

Get a look at Aretha Franklin's ASCAP membership form, on which she reveals some of her background and tastes. It's also available in person at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Professor Ryan Ebright, an NYPL Short Term Fellow for 2017-2018, visited the Library for the Performing Arts to study the Meredith Monk Archive.

Newly available at the NYPL Music Division: The Otto Hess Photographs, a collection that includes images rare images of the record manufacturing process, as shown at the Varsity Records factory.

With materials from New York Public Library archival collections, a new exhibition celebrates the life of one the most important figures in classical music and increases awareness about the importance of sound archives and preservation.

A look at the White Studio photograph from the 1932 edition of the revue Americana.

New Release catalogs are useful today for researchers looking to determine the year a particular recording was released, and for the range of musical genres covered by a certain record label. While going through a section of EMI catalogs and brochures, we came across an interesting promotion for a geographically-themed LP series.

The Library for the Performing Arts’s exhibition on political cabaret focuses on the three series associated with Isaiah Sheffer, whose Papers are in the Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Anahid Ajemian and George Avakian put on an ambitious and eclectic concert series that blended the music and musicians of different worlds.

Organization, description, and presentation of sound is the theme for this exhibit, and listeners are offered a peek into how archival audio is made available to the public.