A "New Deal" for American Composers: How the WPA Music Copying Project Added American Music to the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection

By Christopher Shultis


According to the Free Library of Philadelphia, where the collection is housed, "The Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music is the world's largest lending library of orchestral performance material." Ask any conductor with an interest in orchestral music: the Fleisher Collection is an indispensable resource. But it is important to note what happened with the collection because of the WPA Music Copying Project. The New Grove entry on Edwin A. Fleisher draws attention to the 2000 manuscripts of American composers copied by hand through this program as well as to the 650 Latin American orchestral works collected in the 1940s by Nicolas Slonimsky. How did they get there?