Yale Library Acquires Historic Video Interviews with Leading Musicians, Collection Will Be Digitized and Digitally Preserved

Yale Library is adding more than 250 interviews with major American musicians to its Oral History of American Music (OHAM) colle ction through a licensing agreement with New Music USA. The library will digitize and digitally preserve the interviews, making them available to students, researchers, arts organizations, and the media at Yale and around the world.

The acquisition includes more than 250 full-length artist profiles recorded between 1999 and 2020 in which the musicians and composers talk about their lives and works.

Featured artists include Bang on a Can founders Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe; Cuban American composer and conductor Tania León; two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning innovator Elliott Carter; Deep Listening founder Pauline Oliveros; jazz pianist and composer Carla Bley; former Yale faculty member David Del Tredici; Grammy-nominated Latin composer Gabriela Lena Frank; and avant-garde composer and performer Tyshawn Sorey.

Preserving music history

“This is an incredibly significant acquisition,” said Libby Van Cleve, director of OHAM. “These important figures in American music include many female, African American, and Latinx musicians. Some of them have since passed away, which makes preserving and providing access to their stories, in their own words and voices, even more critical.”

The video interviews were originally created for NewMusicBox, a first-of-its-kind online publication founded in 1999 and a program of New Music USA since 2011.

 Processing of the recordings is underway and should be completed by 2026 Van Cleve said. A collection of 108 NewMusicBox interviews previously acquired by Yale Library is available now. Members of the Yale community can immediately access the interviews.  Non-Yale patrons can create a free  Aviary  account via the Login button to gain streaming access. (Public access to some interviews may be limited based on permission granted by the artists.)

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Direct to Oral History of American Music (OHAM)