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Posted by: Cait Miller
The following is a guest post from Music Archivist Chris Hartten. Laurence Picken (featured at right as our Pic of the Week!) first made his mark in academia as a scientist, but here in the Music Division we remember Picken as an eminent musicologist who spent nearly sixty years studying the musical traditions of East …
Posted in: Asian American History, Pic of the Week, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
When I first heard about the new French film, Mozart’s Sister, I immediately marked November 4th on my calendar, because Rene Feret’s new film opens at DC’s E Street Cinema today! Feret has made clear that the film is largely fiction, with historical roots in the Mozart family dynamics and women’s status in 18th-century Austrian …
Posted in: Composers, Film Music, Special Collections, Women in Music
Posted by: Cait Miller
The following is a guest post from Senior Music Specialist Ray White. Sixty years ago, on October 15, 1951, America met Lucy and Ricky Ricardo for the first time. She was a housewife with dreams of a career in show business, and her bandleader husband was as determined to keep her out of show business …
Posted in: Exhibitions, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s new documentary, “Prohibition,” aired this week on PBS and I’m sure that many of you have seen it already (if you haven’t caught it on TV yet, you can watch it online here!). In the film, Burns and Novick explore the rise and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to …
Posted in: Pic of the Week, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
The following is a guest post from Music Archivist Chris Hartten. George Antheil radicalized musical composition in ways that few before him had ever attempted. Born at the turn of the twentieth century in Trenton, New Jersey, Antheil traveled to Europe in 1922 to pursue “ultra-modernist” composition with financial support from arts patroness and Curtis …
Posted in: Composers, Guest bloggers, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
The following is a guest post from 2011 Junior Fellow Jarek Ervin. My name is Jarek Ervin, and I spent my summer working as a Junior Fellow for the Music Division at the Library of Congress. During the year, I am a graduate student studying Music History at Temple University. My research is mostly focused …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
The following is a guest post from 2011 Junior Fellow Dana Barron. The familiar titles were there: Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Puccini’s Tosca, Wagner’s Parsifal. Others were slightly less well known: Lighthouse by Peter Maxwell Davies and Castor et Pollux by Jean-Philippe Rameau. And some were downright obscure: La morte di Oloferne, the sole surviving …
Posted in: Guest bloggers, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
I could hardly let the would-be birthday of eminent conductor Serge Koussevitzky go by without a blog post! Born in 1874, Koussevitzky began his musical life as a performer. He studied numerous instruments, though excelled at the double bass – he even composed a concerto for double bass, which he premiered in 1905. In the …
Posted in: Birthdays, Special Collections
Posted by: Cait Miller
It’s July 7 – Gustav Mahler’s 151st birthday! Instead of highlighting manuscripts or correspondence by Mahler, I’d like instead to point out another composer/conductor’s commentary on Mahler, as provided in one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concert scripts, Who is Gustav Mahler? The script, along with all other scripts for the Young People’s Concert broadcasts, …
Posted in: Birthdays, Composers, Special Collections