New York Philharmonic Launches Rebuilt Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives

The New York Philharmonic Orchestra recently launched an overhaul of its Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives to make more of its rich history available to the general public.

Initiated in 2011 as the first archive ever created on the Internet dedicated to the musical and cultural history of America, the Digital Archives have been undergoing a five-year process of transformation to a cloud-based system. The relaunch was facilitated by the Leon Levy Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

With the new version, new capabilities have been introduced to enable more efficient use of the New York Philharmonic archives. It will be possible to search across different kinds of documents, linking information from concert programs, company documents, photos, and more.

Further additions include a more efficient procedure to request downloads of relevant archive materials, personal user accounts that allow you to build your own research collection, improved performance history tools with reports available for download, and increased access to mid-20th-century radio broadcast features.

The most significant new additions to the archive collection are 552 marked scores and 4,728 marked orchestral parts, which represent the biggest increase in this category since 2017

Highlights from the newly available materials include marked parts for Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, that have been performed over the decades by orchestras conducted by Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel, Alan Gilbert, and the Philharmonic’s new Music & Artistic Director, Gustavo Dudamel.

The collection also features material related to Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, such as parts used in performances conducted by Lukas Foss accompanied by contralto and civil rights leader Marian Anderson during the Philharmonic’s 1966 Concerts in the Parks series, and concerts on the Philharmonic’s 1976 Bicentennial tour under Leonard Bernstein, which also included singer William Warfield.

Another type of materials that are newly available to the public is orchestra music parts from the St. Matthew Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach, which were played in 1962 in concerts conducted by Bernstein parts from Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite, played since the 1980 and Music Director Emeritus Kurt Masur’s markings of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, his last marking before his death in 2015.

Now, The Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives holds over four million pages of archival documents, including more than 15,000 printed programs, 40,000 marked orchestra parts, conductor’s score markings by Leonard Bernstein, business records, photographs, and other public records from 1842 to today.

The New York Philharmonic digital archive is still expanding and is now used by close to 200,000 people every year, providing an insight into the development of one of New York’s iconic musical establishments through the eyes of musicians, music lovers, and scholars alike.