The collection of 40 volumes features 25 dated diaries, logs, and notebooks written by composer Burrill Phillips, documenting a large portion of the last 20 years of his life. Addressing day to day activities and concerns of life in western New York and in Berkeley, California, as well as travel, entries are only intermittently concerned with musical activities and composition, except for volumes described as such. Six volumes of diaries and writings by his wife, lyricist Alberta Phillips, and nine volumes by their daughter Ann Phillips Basart, both overlap and supplement the period covered by those of Burrill Phillips. One volume begins with entries by the husband of Ann Phillips Basart, composer Robert Basart. The collection does not contain manuscript or printed musical notation.

Burrill Leroy Phillips, composer and pianist, was born in Omaha, NE, on November 9, 1907 and died in Berkeley, CA on June 22, 1988. His theory and composition teachers were Edwin Stringham at the Denver College of Music (1928–1931) and Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers at the Eastman School of Music, where he earned a BM in 1932 and an MM in 1933. He was a faculty member at the Eastman School of Music (1933–1949, 1965–1966), the University of Illinois (1949–1964), the Juilliard School (1968–1969), and Cornell University (1972–1973), as well as served as visiting composer at other universities and as Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Barcelona (1960–1961). His early compositions were considered to have been written in a distinctly American idiom.

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Collection is open for research.