MUS. Music and the Arts

The Aaron Copland School of Music Collection (formerly the Department of Music) consists of materials about the administrative, faculty and student activities of the Aaron Copland School of Music. The collection contains a wide-range of materials including correspondence, brochures, photographs, audio tapes, press clippings, and department course and event schedules. The bulk of the collection consists of personnel files of prominent department faculty.

Alfred Heinemann (1908-1995) was a German composer, concert pianist, and lecturer. The collection is comprised of Heinemann’s compositions from 1920 to 1964 and is in various stages of completion. The collection also includes notes on the compositions, lecture notes, programs from performances, correspondence, an audio recording of a performance of Heinemann’s String Quartet, and personal papers.

Artists’ books are works of art in the form of a book. This collection consists of 67 artists’ books created between 1976 and 2012. It includes works by famous artists like Chuck Close and Ed Ruscha as well as young emerging artists during the period.

Chapbooks are small books of poems, essays, or fiction. This chapbook collection consists of 200 volumes published from 2000 to 2019, and includes works by Queens College faculty member Kimiko Hahn and other writers and poets like Sandra Cisneros, Stephen Dunn, and Louise Glück.

This collection documents performing arts related events and programs associated with Queens College from 1938 to 2004. This includes activities from the early days of the college, such as the Orchestral Society and Choral Society; the Colden Center (founded in 1960); and today's the Kupferberg Center for the Arts. The collection contains photographs, invitations, memos, brochures, programs, and other printed ephemera.

Leo Kraft (1922 – 2014) was an American composer, educator, and author born in Brooklyn, New York. He taught music theory and composition at the Queens College School of Music, to later become the Aaron Copland School of Music, from 1948 to 1989. He was a key member in developing the music theory curriculum. Kraft composed many works of chamber music, and he also contributed orchestral, piano, vocal, and electronic music to his oeuvre.