The following is a guest post from Music Reference Specialist Sam Perryman. Some people know that the Music Division is home to the National Negro Opera Company Collection. They also know that, while it’s not the first African American opera company, it was one of the largest. It was founded and managed by Mary Lucinda …
February is Black History Month! The Music Division has all the resources you need to explore and appreciate African-American contributions to the performing arts year-round, not only in February.
This Saturday, March 2, at 11:00am in the Jefferson Building’s Coolidge Auditorium, I look forward to participating in a special program dedicated to 20th-century composer Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979). One hundred years ago, in 1919, Clarke’s Viola Sonata was a close runner up to receive Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge’s Berkshire Prize at the second annual Berkshire Festival …
The following is a guest post from music archivist Anita M. Weber. Milton Berle, who lived to be 94, did it all. He was a child actor and juvenile dancer who became a vaudeville emcee, stand-up comic, and Friars Club roastmaster. He acted on radio, stage, and screen. He wrote song lyrics, novels, short stories, …
On this Saturday, February 23rd at 11am, yours truly, Paul Sommerfeld, will offer a #Declassified talk in the Mary Pickford Theater focused on the film music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. A screening of Captain Blood (1935), one of Korngold’s earliest film scores, will follow at 12pm. In this interactive #Declassified event, I’ll be focusing on how Korngold’s …
On February 12, 2019, our nation observes the 210th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States. Let’s see the variety of ways President Lincoln appears in the Music Division’s collections!
Sunday February 3 gives us the opportunity to remember one of the first important songwriters in jazz, Lillian Hardin Armstrong. She was born on that day in 1898 in Memphis and may be best known as Louis Armstrong’s second wife and writer of some of his enduring classics, such as “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” which …
Multiple news articles have heralded the many works and publications that entered the public domain on January 1st of 2019. Pieces of music, novels, and films alike have become available within the United States without copyright permissions. With the changes in copyright status, I wondered exactly how much of the Music Division’s substantial collection of …
The following is a guest post from music archivist Anita M. Weber. At a recent production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent, the sight of renowned Austrian-American actor Rudolph Schildkraut depicted on stage reminded me of the four remarkable scrapbooks in the Music Division that document the careers of Rudolph (1862-1930) and his son, fellow actor Joseph …