The Emanuel Winternitz Archive preserves the scholarly and curatorial legacy of Vienna-born musicologist Winternitz (1898–1983), one of the pioneering figures in the study of musical instruments and music iconography. Spanning manuscripts, correspondence, personal documentation, photographs, slides, publications, and extensive visual research materials, the archive offers an unparalleled view into the development of music iconography as a modern field of study.

Particularly significant are the archive’s vast collections of black-and-white photographic reproductions of artworks depicting musical scenes—many produced as working materials during Winternitz’s years at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. These images, alongside lecture slides and research files, document a methodology rooted in visual analysis and interdisciplinary inquiry. For Winternitz, paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, and decorative arts were not secondary illustrations to music history, but primary evidence capable of revealing performance practices, instrument construction, symbolic meanings, and the cultural life of music across centuries.

The archive, housed in room 3492 of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York,  also preserves the intellectual networks that shaped 20th-century musicology and museum scholarship. Correspondence with scholars, curators, and institutions traces the emergence of music iconography through international collaboration and exchange, while personal papers and unpublished materials illuminate the daily processes of research, teaching, and exhibition-making. The Winternitz Archive captures an entire way of studying music through visual culture. It reflects a mode of scholarship that moved fluidly between museum, archive, classroom, and publication, helping establish the interdisciplinary foundations upon which music iconography continues to build today.

Explore the Emanuel Winternitz Archive and discover how the history of music can be reconstructed through images, objects, and the visual record of sound.