The archives consist primarily of music (both manuscript and printed), correspondence, photographs, sound recordings, books, newspaper clippings, printed programs, drawings, and engravings. They span years from the Middle Ages to the present, and include documents of composers, musicians, and literary figures, among others. The music in the collection includes holograph scores or sketches, both published and unpublished, as well as a number of copyists' and printed scores, transcriptions, and arrangements by composers and musicians such as Beethoven, Bloch, Brahms, Chopin, Franck, Mendelssohn, Puccini, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schoenberg, Webern, and many others. Also included is historically important correspondence, such as letters of Metastasio and Handel. Some composers (Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, for example) are represented by numerous manuscripts. A sample of other composers, musicians, and literary figures that are represented by both music and nonmusical materials includes George Auric, Johann Sebastian Bach, Béla Bartók, Hector Berlioz, Georges Bizet, Pierre Boulez, Anton Bruckner, Charles Burney, Feruccio Busoni, Claude Debussy, Frederick Delius, Federico García Lorca, Hermann Hesse, György Ligeti, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Marice Ravel, Rainer Maria Rilke, Frank Wedekind, Kurt Weill, and Gioseffo Zarlino.