The Gottfried Galston Music Collection and The Galston-Busoni Archive includes manuscripts (musical and literary), letters, photographs, programs, musical scores, newspaper clippings, and other items of memorabilia documenting the lives and careers of both Gottfried Galston and Ferruccio Busoni. The materials making up of the Galston-Busoni Archive were collected by Galston and cover a period from 1897 to 1927. Included in the Busoni memorabilia are sixteen musical manuscripts and four literary manuscripts, as well as an extensive collection of letters and photographs. Some items in the collection of Galston memorabilia are truly unusual, such as the two silver medals awarded to Galston for his performances at the Paris Conservatory in 1907 and 1909, and the plaster casts of the hands of pianists - Anton Rubenstein, Ferruccio Busoni, and Gottfried Galston. Other items of significance to students of piano and music history are the Studienbuch, Galston's musical and literary record of his five historical programs of Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms, and Chopin, and his manuscript edition of 140 of Johann Sebastian Bach's works, called Helen Galston's Klavierbuchlein. Prepared during the last years of his life, this work represents the culmination of Galston's lifelong devotion to the music of Bach.

The Galston Music Collection consists of about 1500 scores for piano (including some for two pianos and piano with orchestra), plus 102 miniature scores and thirty-one books on musical subjects. The large collection of piano music covers the major repertoire for virtuoso pianists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including many first editions of music by composers of this period. Heavily emphasized are the works of Bach, Liszt, and Busoni, with both original works for piano and transcriptions by Liszt and Busoni.

(These excerpts are from Pauline Shaw Bayne's book, The Gottfried Galston Music Collection and the Galston-Busoni Archive, which serves as an introduction and preliminary catalog for this collections. Researchers may wish to refer to this book, available in Rare Books, for a complete description of the collection's contents.)

The contents of this collection and finding aid have been updated as 2018-2019. All missing or omitted items noted at that time have been marked with [missing].