In September 2026, Harriet Hellman contacted the Music Library to inquire about donating old sheet music that had been passed down through the family of her late husband, Samuel. In Harriet’s telling he had wanted to send it to ºì¶¹ÊÓƵ because he had apparently read a story a decade or so ago in the New York Times about donating to the QC library (Note: I cannot find evidence of such an article). Normally the Music Library doesn’t accept sheet music donations, but Harriet was sure that these materials might be of historical interest, as the pieces were all about a century old and still in decent shape for research. In October, I scheduled a trip out to Southampton to view the materials at Harriet’s community medical practice, though did not get to meet her, as she was had to go upstate at the time. I assessed the materials and, though a small portion was in irreparably poor shape, ended up taking the vast majority of the items back to the Music Library.
Items from the Hellman Collection
When I was finally able to inventory the items and take a longer look at what we had acquired, it became clear that Harriet was right. The pieces covered a span from the 1890s through the 1940s, with many published just before WWI. These were largely piano and vocal tunes that, though relatively obscure today, were popular when the sheets were published: late-period ragtime and cakewalk, Tin Pan Alley hits, vaudeville numbers, and patriotic war jingles. While cataloging and accessioning these items, I found that for some of these items we may be the only institution that holds a cataloged copy of a particular score edition. Often the same piano/vocal score would be published with alternate covers featuring different performers known for renditions of the respective tune, as well as advertisements for other songs in the publishers’ respective catalogs.
Something I must note is that this collection contains a significant amount of racist material, including photos, cartoons, and song lyrics. American popular culture is replete with racism, among other forms of offense and structural oppression, and it would be ahistorical to obscure this aspect of the collection or to have rejected the materials because of what they contain and how that may reflect back on us now. For example, pre-jazz forms developed and nurtured by Black artists, such as the rag, were turned on their head in the hands of white songwriters churning out content for an expanding white audience. Paradoxically, then, this collection may be of interest both for how it reflects popular musical tastes of the time, as well as how these songs were presented and disseminated to the purchasing public in the era before sound recordings became widespread consumer commodities. Eventually, we would like to digitize this collection to make it more accessible and preserve the more fragile items within it. For now, the Hellman Sheet Music is housed in the Music Library’s Rare Materials Collection and anyone interested in exploring should contact us: musiclibrary@qc.cuny.edu