The Emma L. Ashford collection is comprised mostly of music composed by Mrs. Ashford, as well as by others. Mrs. Ashford’s music is in both manuscript and printed form. Most of her works contained in this collection pertain to Vanderbilt University. All the printed works of other composers in the collection relate to Vanderbilt.

The Alfred H. Bartles Papers (1874-2015) were donated to the Anne Potter Wilson Music Library from 2008-2015. A native of Tennessee and a former George Peabody College student, Bartles was active in New York, Germany, and Tennessee as a composer, arranger, cellist, pedagogue, and jazz pianist. His varied compositional output illustrates this mixture of influences, and reveals him as one of the first in a generation of composers equally at home in the Classical and jazz genres.

This collection contains the musical score for Cortex and ankle: songs after texts of Christopher Middleton, by Michael Hersch.

This collection contains manuscripts, photographs, scrapbooks, and realia related to Jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie. The photographs are particularly extensive, and include snapshots Gillespie took while on tour. This collection was purchased through the NMAAM-Vanderbilt University Collections Initiative.