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Posted by: Pat Padua
Composer Arnold Schoenberg was born on this date in 1874. The Music Division is home to the Arnold Schoenberg Collection. Highlights of this collection include a correspondence between Schoenberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern; a Wassily Kandinsky letter (Schoenberg exhibited his paintings with the Blue Rider group in 1912) that deals with …
Posted in: Birthdays, Composers, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
“You probably know the one about the two monks, but I’ll tell it anyway.” –John Cage, Indeterminacy. Sunday, September 5th marks the birthday of two legendary Americans: outlaw Jesse James and composer John Cage. The astonishing range of Cage’s works is just hinted at by the names of the diverse artists he worked with: choreographer Merce Cunningham; pianist David Tudor, …
Posted in: Birthdays, Composers, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
This is the last of a series of blog posts by this year’s Pruett Fellows. The following post is by Catherine Hughes, Graduate Student in Musicology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For my independent research as one of the 2010 Pruett Fellows from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I …
Posted in: Composers, Guest bloggers, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following blog post is by Mark Zelesky, recent graduate of the School of Library and Information Science, Louisiana State University. During our internship, my colleagues and I in the Junior Fellows internship discovered several items that highlight the diversity of materials collected by the Library of Congress. For ten weeks, we processed materials from …
Posted in: Composers, Guest bloggers, Musicians, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following blog post was written by Daniel Walshaw, Music Division. Wild, passionate, perspiring, and, above all, human – words not typically associated with a man clad in a tuxedo performing great works of the classical repertoire. However, it is nearly impossible to describe the extroverted music-making of Leonard Bernstein without using at least one of …
Posted in: Composers, Guest bloggers, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
Pianist, bandleader, composer, William “Count” Basie was born on this day in 1904. Some of the greatest names in jazz passed through his band, from tenor legend Lester Young to singers like Bille Holiday, Jimmy Rushing, and Joe Williams, just to name three. Basie’s career spanned fifty years and did not shy from whatever music happened …
Posted in: African American History, Birthdays, Composers, Jazz, Musicians, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Ryan Ebright, Graduate Musicology Student, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. As one of the three Pruett Fellows from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill working in the Music Division this summer (more information about our work for the Library can be found in a previous post …
Posted in: Composers, Guest bloggers, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The Mid-Atlantic United States has been hit with a series of furious rainstorms this summer, and this gray day in Washington is no exception. We hope that instead of walking between raindrops and dodging cupcake-sized hail, you, gentle reader, choose to stay inside, cuddle up by the Steinway and sing a few songs – just …
Posted in: Composers, Sheet Music, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
This post is excerpted from an article written by James Wolf, Digital Conversion Specialist, Music Division. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (named after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge) was born in Croydon, England on August 15, 1875. Coleridge-Taylor studied with Charles Villiers Stanford, and at the suggestion of Edward Elgar, was commissioned to write a piece for a …
Posted in: African American History, Birthdays, Composers, Special Collections