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Archive: December 2009 (7 Posts)

Woman with dark hair, fancy dress and pearls with eyes closed and mouth slightly open, singing

Happy Holidays from the Music Division!

Posted by: Pat Padua

Imagine what the holidays were like in the years before there was such a thing as Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Sing along to “I’ll be home for Christmas.”  Sense the wonder and joy – and perhaps a bit of fear – in children’s hearts when you tell them that magical disembodied voice is  Santa Claus …

Woman with dark hair, fancy dress and pearls with eyes closed and mouth slightly open, singing

Jazz Collections at Library of Congress

Posted by: Larry Appelbaum

The discovery five years ago of the Thelonious Monk-John Coltrane 1957 Carnegie Hall concert tapes focused attention on the deep jazz collections here at the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2005/05-090.html). The tapes, found while preserving the Voice of America Collection, were subsequently issued by Blue Note Records and became a sensation in the jazz world. Since …

Woman with dark hair, fancy dress and pearls with eyes closed and mouth slightly open, singing

Songs for the Solstice

Posted by: Pat Padua

The winter solstice arrived at 5:47 pm Eastern Standard Time Greenwich Mean Time. As the East coast digs out from a major snowstorm,  let us bundle up by the fire and sing and dance to songs of winters past. From the Historic Sheet Music Collection, 1800-1922, come several indicators of the amorousness with which a …

Woman with dark hair, fancy dress and pearls with eyes closed and mouth slightly open, singing

From Zero to Sixty in Four Bars

Posted by: Pat Padua

If you happened on the holiday classic In the good old Summertime recently, you might have noticed a scene where the great Buster Keaton trips and shatters what he thinks is a precious Stradivarius. Fortunately, it’s only a movie.  Even more fortunately, those lucky enough to nab tickets for tonight’s concert in the Coolidge Auditorium …

Woman with dark hair, fancy dress and pearls with eyes closed and mouth slightly open, singing

You say it’s your birthday

Posted by: Pat Padua

When we’re not awarding honors to Knighted former Beatles, we in the Music Division are caretakers of one of the great performing arts archives in the world.  It’s an embarrassment of riches, and a lifetime could be spent studying just the online collections in the Performing Arts Encyclopedia (the website formerly known as I Hear …

Woman with dark hair, fancy dress and pearls with eyes closed and mouth slightly open, singing

Meet the Music Division!

Posted by: Pat Padua

I was going to launch In the Muse, the Performing Arts Blog, with an introduction to the rich collection of what is one of the premier Performing Arts archives in the world.  I was going to guide you, the reader, into the deepest recesses of the Performing Arts Encyclopedia, and highlight the world-renowned concert series  in …