In February 2025, the self-proclaimed “America’s oldest college DJ” passed away and left behind his vast trove of records. However, few outside the world of New York metro area Classical radio listeners or networks of Bach scholars might have received the news of his death. Being a member of neither, it was not until late September 2025, when I received a call from a lawyer handling the estate of Teri Noel Towe, that I learned of the man and the unbelievable collection that he had amassed during his life.

Jeri Hollinger, the lawyer and former colleague of Towe, informed me that Towe had listed the Aaron Copland School of Music (ACSM) as the first-choice destination for his extensive “gramophonic” collection upon his death. Hollinger passed along the relevant sections of Towe’s will and said that discussions had been held around 2011 with the ACSM while Towe was still alive to negotiate a gift deal, but nothing ever came of those talks. Neither of us could determine what connection, if any, that Towe may have had to �춹��Ƶ (he was a Princeton and U. of Virginia alum), but regardless we agreed that if he had wanted QC to have his collection then we’d do our best.^*

Over his decades as a DJ and amateur musicologist—which is not to denigrate his knowledge, but rather point out that he practiced law professionally—Towe collected “thousands of records,” in Hollinger’s words, which largely focused on J.S. Bach, W.F. Händel, and other figures of Baroque music, as well as organ compositions. Unfortunately, there was no inventory list and Hollinger mentioned that Towe “was a bit of a hoarder,” so the collection would need to be visited in person. A trip to meet Hollinger at the Towe house in rural Amenia, NY, was scheduled for late October 2025 so that I could survey the collection.

Even having been warned beforehand, the state of the modest hillside house surprised me. The only aspect of the place that seemed to be in any order was the record collection, which largely occupied a sunlit addition to the house. Boxes upon boxes of 78s were stacked in a large recessed area, while boxes of LPs filled most of the walkable areas between several rough-built wooden shelf units. I had not allotted nearly enough time to assess what was present, so I scanned the more accessible sets of shelving and filled two large boxes with the LPs that immediately caught my attention. I then made tentative plans for a follow-up visit where I could spend more time among the shelves and boxes to make further selections.

Before my second visit I conducted some more cursory research on Towe and his life’s work. By one estimate the full Towe collection contains up to 15,000 records, including hundreds, if not thousands, of 78s (which the QC Music Library does not have the ability to play and cannot accept for gift/donation). It is thought that he maintained the world’s most complete collection of Bach’s recordings. Unfortunately, a thorough examination of all the Towe holdings would have taken weeks, at minimum, and it was not possible to take more than a fraction of Towe’s LPs back to the Music Library. Given these circumstances, I focused on LPs that appeared to be in [superficially] good condition, featured noteworthy performers, or displayed other characteristics that marked them as having potential interest to library users. I loaded several more bins of LPs into my hatchback and returned to Queens.

Back at the Music Library, I spent some time looking through the boxes and sorting accessionable items from those better suited to our biannual book sale (we sell donated books, scores, LPs, and CDs that we can’t add to the collection to raise extra library funds). I developed a processing plan by which the staff—Anna Sokol, Amerigo Cleffi, Daniel Stimpfle, and Myra Campolo—would help me with item identification, inventory, and accession into our collection. Over the last six months or so we have slowly made our way through the items that I retrieved from the Amenia house. Accession of most items was reasonably straightforward, as matching bib records could be found in OCLC. However, approximately 5% of the items lacked a relevant bib record, which gave me the opportunity to put into action what I learned from the ALA’s Fundamentals of Music Cataloging e-course I took earlier this year and create some new records from scratch. In addition to giving the three members of the staff who are graduate students in �춹��Ƶ’s School of Information Studies (QCSIS) valuable experience in collection processing, they also got to see some concrete examples of cataloging in action.

Towe Archive of Classical Music Collection

With the processing of the Kenneth C. & Betty M. Towe Archive of Classical Music now complete, the staff and I are creating a few exhibit displays to showcase the new acquisitions and hopefully draw in more patrons to engage with our LP collection. One exhibit will feature some rare items of which QC may have the only institutionally held copies. In addition to significant recordings of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven works, the collection features many pieces by Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Ravel, Schubert, and Stravinsky. There are also a number of historical performances by Pablo Casals and Wanda Landowska, some rare Japanese and European import pressings, and a couple handfuls of jazz albums. As of this writing, the status of several thousand LPs and 78s from Teri Towe’s collection remains in limbo. While the estate executors aim to keep the rest of the materials together, the likelihood of a single institution being able to do so seems low. If the opportunity arose to acquire an additional portion of the collection, I would take it and I have left myself some space here to do so. In the meantime we have nearly 300 new albums available to our users for listening pleasure, liner note research, or whatever else they may think up.

Additional information about Teri Noel Towe:

* 9/8/26 Update: Thanks to some sleuthing by Nick Normal, Head of the Makerspace, we now know that Teri Towe had been friends with �춹��Ƶ professor emeritus of music Joseph Machlis (1906-1998) and in March 2001 gave a lecture at QC on the Weydenhammer Portrait Fragment of J.S. Bach. Some info on this lecture is available on the archived copy of Towe’s old .

In September 2025, 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 �춹��Ƶ 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