Now that it’s National Hispanic Heritage Month from September 15-October 15, let’s dig in with Music Division commission firsts by country! Part 1 of this two-part series includes commissioned composers from North America and the Caribbean.
The following is a guest post from Senior Music Specialist Susan Clermont. When she was 40 years of age, Venetian virtuoso singer and gifted composer Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677) published her seventh book of musical compositions titled Diporti di Euterpe (The Pleasures of Euterpe) in 1659. Only two complete copies of this imprint are extant today – […]
One year ago, I published a blog post declaring my excitement about a one-year countdown to Clara Schumann’s 200th birthday and highlighted Schumann’s manuscript cadenzas from the Library’s Whittall Foundation Collection, material that is digitized and available online. Now, finally, Clara’s big day has arrived! 200 years ago, in Leipzig, Germany, Marianne Tromlitz gave birth […]
In 2007, the Library presented back-to-back concerts with two quintessential New Orleans pianists Henry Butler and Allen Toussaint. Mr. Toussaint was in the news recently because his legacy studio recordings, long thought lost in the flood from Hurricane Katrina, turned up at a swap meet in Torrance, California. Toussaint wrote, arranged and produced many hits […]
On Friday, August 23, 2019, the music community lost a giant – Mario Davidovsky. Mario Davidovsky’s relationship with the Library of Congress Music Division began with three commissioned works at very different stylistic points in his career, and culminated in placing his papers on deposit in 2013.
Discusses the story behind two copyright deposit versions of the theme for Star Trek: The Original Series.
In June of 1996, the Library of Congress presented a “Big Band Bash” at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington DC. Over the course of a weekend, it offered a rare opportunity to present concerts by three important L.A.-based jazz composers and their orchestras: Buddy Collette, Gerald Wilson and Benny Carter. Each composer was offered a […]
Concerts from the Library of Congress returns for a 95th season, packed with an impressive and richly diverse roster of more than 95 free events, including concerts, lectures, films, panels, conversations with artists and more. 2019-20 is a year of visionary legacies. In February we begin an adventurous and in-depth Beethoven at 250 festival that […]
Taylor McClaskie is one of the Music Division’s summer 2019 interns. She is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Case Western Reserve University and is currently writing a dissertation on music and environmental activism in 1980s America. During my time in the Music Division I have been helping to process and catalogue unpublished popular music […]
The following is a guest post by Library of Congress Jazz Scholar Aaron Diehl My visit to the Library of Congress in March was not my first introduction to its collections. In late 2016, jazz curator Larry Appelbaum kindly welcomed me to the Library in advance of a program I was creating featuring the music […]