The records of the USC Thornton School of Music consist of correspondence and memorandums, programs, clippings, and printed ephemera that document much of the School's activities from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 21st century. Included are the papers (generally incomplete) of some of the School's notable personnel, including Max Swarthout, Raymond Kendall, Ellis Kohs, Pauline Alderman, Walter F. Skeele, and Ralph E. Rush; records of academic activities; records of student and alumni organizations, including Phi Phi and the Friends of Music; scrapbooks of press clippings and press releases documenting the activities of the School's faculty and students for most of its history; and correspondence and related materials documenting non-USC activities in which the School participated, such as the Eisteddfod and the Metropolitan Opera National Council western regional auditions.

The collection also includes 106 gigabytes of concert audio recordings as well as PDF files and still images of concert programs ranging from 1949 until 2017. Most of these sound files were part of a donation made on behalf of the USC Thornton School of Music by retired School sound engineer Ted Ancona in 2017. Claude Zachary, University Archivist, supplemented the files by copying files from CDs from the Thornton School's archival files.