TheLibrary of Congress Hits the Road: Part I

By Marion Lignana Rosenberg

The musical treasures at the Library of Congress boggle the mind. They range from the world’s largest flute collection, with instruments wrought of gold, ivory, jade, crystal, and other precious stuffs, to a ravioli recipe in the hand of Nicolò Paganini. Five ruddy instruments crafted by Antonio Stradivari of Cremona exert a hypnotic pull on visitors to the Library’s Whittall Pavilion.

When not played by the likes of the Budapest and Juilliard Quartets (former

ensembles-in-residence at the Library), the Strads rest invitingly alongside an Amati violin and Fritz Kreisler’s Guarneri, yards away from a rare life-portrait of Beethoven, and a stone’s throw from the Coolidge Auditorium, where Martha Graham and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring (commissioned by the Library of Congress) had its world premiere in 1944.

Copland’s score, inscribed “A Ballet for Martha,” is itself part of the Library’s Aaron Copland collection (400,000 items strong). Visitors to the Library’s Music Division can examine an astonishing range of objects, from Beverly Sills’s scrapbooks to a volume of piano music bound for the use of Nellie Custis, the granddaughter of George and Martha Washington.

The Library’s mission, “to make its resources available . . . to the American people,” takes a bold and democratic turn this year in a new series of initiatives. A sampling of its peerless collection will travel across the United States in tandem with the elevenstop Song of America tour by baritone Thomas Hampson, the first of several Library-sponsored programs designed to celebrate “Creativity Across America.” From St. Paul to Fort Worth and West Palm Beach to San Jose, young people in grades K-12 and their instructors will have the opportunity to learn about the history and variety of American song and of the great public institution in which so many of the nation’s cultural treasures reside. Joined in several cities by U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Hampson will perform and visit schools, acting as the Library’s ambassador to the nation it serves. This is the first time that the Library has mounted such a multifaceted tour, involving concerts, exhibits, and hands-on workshops.

Established in 1800 as a reference institution for the United States Congress, the Library’s original contents were destroyed by British troops during the War of 1812. Thomas Jefferson offered his own wide-ranging collection of 6,487 books as a foundation for the new Library. His openness and curiosity came to inspire the sweeping collecting policies of what is now the largest library in the world and helped make it the repository of creativity in the United States. The Library of Congress today contains some 130 million objects in more than 450 different languages on more than 530 miles of shelves. It is “open to those above high school age without charge or special permission.” Along with 29 million catalogued books and 58 million manuscripts, the Library possesses the world’s largest collection of sheet music and sound recordings.

The Performing Arts and Music Division, the Recorded Sound Reference Collection, and the American Folklife Center are open five or six days a week. Library stacks are closed, but division reference collections can be browsed during reading room hours. Those unable to travel to Washington, D.C., can conduct research on the Library’s Web site or by mail. Millions of documents, images, and sound and video recordings are freely available on the Library’s Web site, on which the performing arts are richly represented (see inset). In 2004, the Web site received more than three billion hits.

Not surprisingly, the LOC’s holdings in American music are incomparably strong, encompassing more than five million objects. The complete score to Porgy and Bess in George Gershwin’s tidy, confident hand; Jerome Kern’s chicken scratches, from which the grave beauty of Showboat’s “Ol’ Man River” emerges: Such treasures take the breath away of even the most unsentimental researchers. The more than 500 named collections in the Music Division include the Irving Berlin Collection, 750,000 items comprising personal papers and business records; and the Leonard Bernstein Collection, 400,000 items ranging from Bernstein family holiday cards to manuscripts and annotated typescripts for the maestro’s unforgettable Young People’s Concerts.

The Library’s online offerings include 19th-century wax cylinder recordings of Omaha Indian music and 1930s blues and gospel performances from Georgia’s Fort Valley State College Folk Festival. There are Emile Berliner’s recordings of Sousa’s Band and Victor Herbert’s 22nd Regiment Band, dance (and anti-dance!) manuals from the Colonial era to the present, and hundreds of sheet-music compositions relating to Abraham Lincoln’s presidential campaigns, the Civil War, and Emancipation. Again, many of these treasures are available online for viewing or listening from virtually any Internet-connected computer on the planet.