The following is a guest post by Senior Music Specialist Loras John Schissel. We are pleased to announce the acquisition of a collection of rare John Philip Sousa materials donated by the well-known educator and Sousa researcher Christopher Dodrill. The collection includes many first editions of Sousa’s marches and concert works in mint condition. …
The following is a guest post written by Theater Specialist Walter Zvonchenko. Thanks to the generosity of Mrs. Yanne Norup Schmidt and Mr. Kristian Schmidt, the Library of Congress soon will release a website dedicated to the life and work of Swedish theatrical producer Lars Schmidt [1917-2009]. Schmidt was born in Uddevalla near Gothenburg in …
DC dwellers and tourists should be aware that the Library of Congress is presenting “Pride in the Library,” a special pop-up exhibit that showcases items from the Library’s collections that feature LGBTQ+ creators and representations of LGBTQ+ life in America and around the world. Come to the Jefferson Building Friday and Saturday between 10 a.m. …
Every so often we read about the discovery of some long-lost manuscript in the crypts of an archive, or the unearthing of a heretofore missing missive found locked in a trunk in somebody’s attic. At the Library of Congress we encounter these proclamations more frequently than you might think, usually in the world of special …
The following is by retired cataloger Sharon McKinley. The sinking of the Lusitania was one of many rallying events of WWI. Interestingly, the ship was sunk two years before the United Sates entered the war: on May 7, 1915. She was a civilian ship of the Cunard line, but was carrying some war materiel along …
On May 9, 1567, one of music history’s most revered composers was born – Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi. To look at the whole of Monteverdi’s exquisite compositional output is to understand the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque era in music. Some of the most exciting early printings in our collections include early editions …
The following post originally appeared on the Copyright: Creativity at Work Blog and was written by George Thuronyi of the U.S. Copyright Office. As a teenager during the 1970s, I put on my bell-bottom pants and shiny shirt to groove to the latest disco hits. I was not alone. Disco culture was highly popular and …
In January of 2016 the Library of Congress acquired a holograph manuscript and a copyist’s manuscript (with composer edits and annotations) of Franz Liszt’s Den Cypressen der Villa d’Este. These two manuscripts are earlier incarnations of the first threnody from the final volume of the Années de pèlerinage. The troisième année was published in 1883, with …
The following is a post from the Library of Congress Blog by Wendi Maloney. The Library of Congress will honor Juan Felipe Herrera, who is concluding his second term as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, with celebratory events on Wednesday, April 26. The events will be streamed live on the Library’s Facebook page and its YouTube …