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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 …
Posted in: Holidays
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 …
Posted in: African American History, Jazz, Special Collections
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 …
Posted in: Sheet Music
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 …
Posted in: Concerts and Events, Musicians
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 …
Posted in: Birthdays, Composers, Sheet Music, Special Collections
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 …