What You Can Find In A Music Archive
Some friends and I visited the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. After we went to the regular library, the staff gave us directions to the Lincoln Center, which I found was right across the street from Julliard. Front desk staff directed us to one floor, where coat check employees made sure we tagged and placed our purses and winterwear in the coat room. Then another staff member escorted us to the third floor, where we finished the process of applying for a temporary NYPL library card. It’s good for three months, though we would have to renew in person.
Why did we go to NYPL for the Performing Arts? Because I wanted to listen to an incomplete Jonathan Larson soundtrack for his musical Superbia. (We know Larson better for rent, but Superbia has lore behind its production.) The library, once you set up an account and provide proof that you have a library card — it can even be from another state— is more than happy to play these recordings. There’s a specific process, but my friends and I got a chance to go through the music twice. It was invigorating. A full soundtrack exists within the Library of Congress, but a trip to listen to that won’t happen for a while, for obvious reasons.
We found much more than recordings, however; one floor had sheet music dating back to a few hundred years. From folk songs to Disney’s Renaissance era to modern Broadway, if we wished we could flip through them while waiting for the elevator to the floor with audio archive access. Yellowing pages within certain books signified age, which made me admire the quality of preservation even more. It’s easy to lose work to time and entropy, more so if you have many people who don’t understand why to preserve them.
I am totally going back one day to photocopy some of that sheet music. While I joked that I should have gone to Julliard for college, since it’s obvious that the curriculum appreciates the arts, it was also nice to see a university that appreciates history. On that cold day, as 2026 barely had the chaos ball rolling, I got that one perfect moment of being in a place that understood me.
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