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Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post from retired cataloger Sharon McKinley. I’ve always enjoyed living vicariously through the Music Division’s special collections. Staffers who work in the Acquisitions and Processing Section become quite intimate with the collections they process. The rest of us are more likely to happen upon wonderful finds by serendipitous means. The …
Posted in: Exhibitions, Guest bloggers, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Daniel Walshaw, Music Division. Danny Kaye’s contributions to American culture and entertainment are unmatched. He mastered nearly every aspect of show business – stage, film, television, radio, recordings, and even orchestral conducting. Despite his demanding performance schedule, he was also one of the most generous celebrity humanitarians donating …
Posted in: Exhibitions, Film Music, Guest bloggers, Women in Music
Posted by: Pat Padua
I recently toured the Archives of American Art’s new exhibit, “Six Degrees of Peggy Bacon. ” The exhibit riffs on the idea of “six degrees of separation” popularly associated with actor Kevin Bacon, and uses as its central figure New York artist Peggy Bacon, who is little remembered today but was a well-connected member of …
Posted in: Composers, Exhibitions, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The Music Division is proud to announce a new exhibition in the lobby of the Performing Arts Reading Room. Choreographers have long used the medium of dance to express America’s cultural diversity. Politics and the Dancing Body also explores the way choreographers employ the body as a tool in the fight against injustice. The exhibit …
Posted in: Dance, Exhibitions, Pic of the Week, Special Collections, Women in Dance
Posted by: Pat Padua
The following is a guest post by Senior Music Specialist Ray White. Lucille Ball was born one hundred years ago, on August 6, 1911, in Jamestown, New York. Her career took her from very inauspicious beginnings—she was dismissed from drama school as a teenager by instructors who declared that she had no future as an …
Posted in: Birthdays, Exhibitions, Guest bloggers, Musicians, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
The Music Division is proud to announce Coast to Coast: The Federal Theatre Project 1935-1939, a new on-site exhibition that presents materials from one of our most popular collections. The Federal Theatre Project was established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt under the Works Progress Administration, and marked the only time that the United States federal government …
Posted in: Exhibitions, Special Collections
Posted by: Pat Padua
This post is adapted from notes by Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, Exhibition Curator, Music Division. The exhibition As the Old Sing, So the Young Twitter takes its inspiration from the musical and verbal relationship between birds and flutes. In the often archaic definition of words like “twitter,” “chatter,” “record,” and “warble” are links between birdsong and human music …
Posted in: Exhibitions, Musical Instruments, Special Collections