In Wednesday’s (2/5) New York Times, Michael Cooper reports that documents relating to the New York Philharmonic’s founding “are now available online … thanks to a new $2.4 million grant from the Leon Levy Foundation. It will allow the orchestra to continue to digitize the records in its copious archives going all the way back to its inaugural 1842-43 season.… The Philharmonic’s Digital Archives, which were first put online in 2011, already have 1.3 million pages of material from 1943 through 1970.… Each document was painstakingly photographed so it could be made available to music lovers, historians, sociologists and the simply curious. ‘It was sort of a little history sweatshop in here,’ said Barbara Haws, the Philharmonic’s archivist, as she gave a tour of the orchestra’s varied holdings, from yellowed newspaper clippings to an old score on which Bernstein had jotted down an unsettling dream. With the new grant, the Leon Levy Foundation will have given $5 million toward the project since 2007.… When the work is completed, the digital archive will contain almost three million pages—the orchestra’s entire archive through 1970, and all public documents after 1970.” Symphony magazine reported on developments at orchestra archives in its Winter 2012 issue.
Posted February 6, 2014
