This is a guest post from Head of Acquisitions & Processing Vin Novara, with Senior Music Specialists Mark Eden Horowitz, Kate Rivers, and Ray White. Nick Hornby’s book “High Fidelity” (1995) features an entertaining look at the quirks of people who intensely collect on music. Top five lists feature prominently throughout the work. As …
This autumn, many of Washington, D.C.’s arts and culture venues are collaborating to present the Shakespeare Everywhere Festival. The Library of Congress is pleased to participate in this gathering of theatrical productions, concerts, lectures, and educational events on offer through December 31, 2023. Bibliophiles and music lovers can experience two special events as part of …
Dutch composer, pianist, and teacher Louis Andriessen (1939-2021) passed away on July 1, 2021. He is connected to the Music Division through his 1993 Koussevitzky Music Foundation commission.
We were saddened to learn of the passing of composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski on June 26, 2021. He was an extraordinary figure in the musical world, perhaps best known for his piano music—his monumental composition The People United Will Never Be Defeated is surely one of the most significant variation sets of the last …
The Music Division has commissioned new works of music since 1925, and this post celebrates the artistic contributions of commissioned composers from the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander American Heritage Month, May 2021.
The following is a guest post by virtual artist-in-residence, violinist Jennifer Koh. I am honored to be a virtual artist-in-residence at the Library of Congress. For the program that was streamed on November 19, 2020, I included works that engage with the question of who we are during this time of COVID. Beethoven Sonata No. …
The following is a guest post by composer Igor Santos. confined. speak. is a 15-minute work for violin and piano commissioned by the McKim Fund in the Library of Congress. It was written for Ensemble Dal Niente members MingHuan Xu and Winston Choi and was recorded in Chicago on October 27, 2020, for a virtual …
The 2020-2021 season of Concerts from the Library of Congress will be all-virtual, in an unprecedented move to safely offer music and lectures to the public. The times require creative approaches from artists and presenters to responsibly offer programs, and we are doing what we can to provide remote access to the music and resources …
My experience reading works like Cervantes’ Don Quixote or Boccaccio’s Decameron always leaves me with a sense of déjà vu. How is it that people who lived so many centuries ago can still sound so modern, so relevant? While there is a “liter-heiry” influence of these writers to be felt in recent works, it also …
