Inside The Cleveland Orchestra’s 100-Year Archives

Unless you’ve toured the orchestra’s archives, you cannot fully appreciate its scope. Stored in the lower levels of Severance Hall are thousands of recordings on every medium from wax pressings and reel-to-reel tape to digital formats and video, preserving events of all types from almost every year of the orchestra’s now 100-year existence. And that’s just the audio collection. In addition to recordings, the trove also includes a wealth of physical objects and artwork as well as print material such as program books, photos, musical scores, and historical documents.