The story of Coolidge Auditorium, on the Library of Congress, is one among American ingenuity, cultural integrity and a century of free live shows.
The Dalí Quartet, accompanied by Ricardo Morales on clarinet, performs in the course of the Library of Congress’ Stradivari live performance in Coolidge Auditorium in 2023. The Library was given a uncommon set of Stradivarius devices in 1935.
Shawn Miller/Library of Congress
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Shawn Miller/Library of Congress
The yr is 1925. The Nice Gatsby is printed, the jazz age is swinging, and on October twenty eighth, a brand new live performance corridor opens at an unlikely spot — the Library of Congress, in Washington D.C. If solely its cream-colored partitions may speak. For 100 years, performers of all stripes have graced the Library stage, from classical music luminaries like Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky to Stevie Marvel, Audra McDonald and Max Roach. Right this moment, it stays one of many capitol metropolis’s most stunning, finest sounding and maybe finest stored secrets and techniques.
The thought for a live performance corridor on the Library of Congress didn’t stem from congress. It got here from philanthropist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge — and one bespoke piece of bipartisan laws. “She was indefatigable and intrepid,” says Anne McLean, senior producer for live shows on the Library, “a outstanding lady, six toes tall, an excellent pianist.” McLean is sitting with me on the stage, overlooking the empty auditorium. To mark the centennial, celebratory live shows and commissions have been heard within the corridor all yr. However not now. The federal government shutdown has compelled the corridor to shut its doorways, and until a deal is reached earlier than Tuesday, it will be closed on the anniversary itself.
Coolidge was born right into a rich Chicago household in 1864. She studied music, traveled overseas, married a Harvard-trained orthopedic surgeon and, in 1924, got here to Washington to determine a foothold within the nation’s capitol. She approached Carl Engel, the Library’s music chief, about the potential for including a small live performance corridor to the Library’s voluptuous — and voluminous — Thomas Jefferson constructing, designed after the Paris opera home and accomplished in 1897. You possibly can’t see the corridor from the skin, because it’s tucked contained in the constructing’s Northwest Courtyard.
In 1924, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge wrote her first test to the Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, to start the development of a brand new auditorium.
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Wanting to get began, Coolidge wrote a test for $60,000 to the Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, on Nov. 12, 1924. And but there was no authorized mechanism in place for a civilian to make such a financial present to the U.S. authorities. Congress labored shortly, taking solely somewhat over a month to go a invoice permitting such a contribution.
It took lower than six months to construct the corridor itself — the intimate, 485-seat Coolidge Auditorium, with its heat exact acoustics. “There are lots of secrets and techniques to it,” McLean says. “The again wall of the auditorium is barely shaved to be concave and very conscious of string sound. Beneath the stage is hole. However that hollowness is an element, as is the cork flooring, which was very uncommon for its time.” McLean says the sound blossoms within the corridor. Eager to unfold the sound far and broad, Coolidge even had the constructing wired for the comparatively new medium of radio. She added to her preliminary sum to determine a fund for the commissioning of recent music. Engel dubbed her “The Fairy-God-Mom of Music.”
Development of Coolidge Auditorium, on the Library of Congress, started in Could, 1925. It was completed in time for the very first live performance on Oct. 28 of that yr.
Library of Congress
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Library of Congress
Coolidge was well-connected and fiercely advocated for music. In 1944, she took to the native Washington airwaves with one other daring thought. “I may want for music, the identical governmental safety that’s given to hygiene, training or public welfare,” she mentioned over WTOP. “How great, if we may have within the cupboard, a secretary of tremendous arts.”
Coolidge by no means obtained her want, however what she had already created was arguably extra vital — a dwelling, respiratory live performance corridor that serves as a cultural beacon — preserving historical past and cultivating new music by commissions.
The Martha Graham Dance Firm performs the world premiere of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring on the stage of the Coolidge Auditorium on Oct. 30, 1944.
Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Basis Assortment / Library of Congress
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Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Basis Assortment / Library of Congress
Maybe probably the most well-known fee grew to become one among America’s most iconic items of music. Aaron Copland‘s ballet Appalachian Spring, written for dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, acquired its world premiere at Coolidge Auditorium on Oct. 30, 1944. “I feel individuals knew what they have been listening to,” McLean says. The ballet would win the Pulitzer prize for music the next yr, together with the New York Music Critics Circle Award. It is exhausting to think about a full ballet produced on Coolidge’s modestly-sized stage.
“Now that you just’re sitting on it, you’ll be able to see how very small it’s,” McLean observes. “There’s little or no fly area for anybody to make an entrance, a lot much less dancing and main choreography. And the place you see the entrance row of our seats, that was the orchestra pit. It solely may match 13 individuals.”
And the commissions hold coming, thanks partially to beneficiant girls who adopted in Coolidge’s philanthropic footsteps. Composers commissioned for the one hundredth anniversary embody MacArthur fellows Tyshawn Sorey and Vijay Iyer, plus Pulitzer winner Raven Chacon, George Benjamin and the digital artist Jlin. Pulitzer-winning composer Tania León had her personal world premiere earlier on this one hundredth anniversary season. Para Violin y Piano was commissioned by the Library’s Leonora Jackson McKim Fund, an endowment targeted on items written for violin and piano.
On stage at Coolidge Auditorium, violinist Jennifer Koh and pianist Thomas Sauer play the world premiere of Tania León’s Para Violin y Piano.
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Library of Congress
“My expertise within the corridor is, in a means, transcendental,” León says. “It is like touching the previous into the current. And the honour to be included within the roster of the entire composers may be very highly effective.” That roster of composers who’ve been commissioned by the Library is spectacular — from Stravinsky’s ballet Apollon Musagète (1928) and Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5 (1935), to Jennifer Higdon‘s Viola Concerto (2015), which gained a Grammy.
Located contained in the Library of Congress, Coolidge Auditorium advantages from the Library’s substantial acquisitions. Within the mid-Nineteen Thirties, one other philanthropist, Gertrude Clarke Whittall, gave the Library a set of uncommon Stradivarius devices. On the time, such a set of uncommon string devices was distinctive at a public establishment within the U.S. “Once they have been first acquired, there wasn’t a resident ensemble. And the idea was, ‘How will we hold them in nice form?’ In order that they have been sometimes hiring musicians to play them for $2.50 an hour,” McLean says with fun.
Starting in 1940, the Library did not have to fret about hiring musicians off the road. The famend Budapest String Quartet, fleeing World Battle II, grew to become the primary such ensemble to take up residency at Coolidge Auditorium. The group stayed for 22 years. The Juilliard Quartet picked up the mantle in 1962, routinely taking part in the valuable devices in 560 live shows over a four-decade span.
The Budapest String Quartet at Coolidge Auditorium in 1938. The group was the Library’s first ensemble in residence and performed there from 1940 – 1962.
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As of late, the Strads might be performed by any string quartet booked for a live performance on the Library. However McLean says there is a catch: The musicians want to indicate up a pair days early to discover ways to management them. “The key of the devices is that they’re like racehorses, they’re thoroughbreds, and so they can get away from you if you do not have an opportunity to get used to them.”
Cellist Daniel McDonough and his bandmates within the Jupiter String Quartet obtained used to them once they performed the Strads on the Library earlier this yr. I requested McDonough if taking part in one of many devices was something like discovering your self behind the wheel of a Ferrari.
“Sure, the automotive analogy is an efficient one,” he says. “Generally I say it has a fifth gear. These devices, as a result of they have been performed for lots of of years and since they’ve aged and grown into themselves so fantastically, have a sort of ringing tone that I feel no different instrument [has].” McDonough performed the “Castelbarco” cello, constructed by Stradivarius in 1697.
The “Castelbarco” cello, made by Antonio Stradivari in 1697, is likely one of the few remaining Stradivarius cellos that has not been modified by chopping down the scale of the instrument.
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“One of many issues that is distinctive about that instrument is it is one of many few remaining Strad cellos that is not minimize down,” McDonough observes. “It is larger than devices in later years, when the cello grew to become extra standardized in its sample and dimension. So it has a giant bass sound.” The rationale why some cellos have been trimmed down in dimension, McDonough provides, was to make virtuoso taking part in simpler.
Together with the Strads, 5 in all, the Library homes some 26-million different musical objects — 1700 flutes and woodwinds, unique manuscripts and memorabilia — a few of that are displayed at every live performance.
Among the many library’s huge assortment of devices is the crystal flute as soon as owned by President James Madison, which Lizzo performed whereas visiting the Library in 2022. The instrument, given to Madison in 1813, was rumored to have been rescued from the White Home a yr after the British set fireplace to the constructing.
Shawn Miller/Library of Congress
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Shawn Miller/Library of Congress
At a Kronos Quartet efficiency final yr, Susan Vita, chief of the music division, who has since died, advised the viewers earlier than the present that the Library’s holdings have been about to get somewhat bigger. “We’re elated to announce,” she mentioned from the Coolidge stage, “that the Kronos Quartet archive can be coming to the Library of Congress.” After that announcement, Kronos launched right into a live performance of American music, capped with its beloved model of “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix.
Kronos founder and violinist David Harrington has lengthy been a fan of the Library. “The Coolidge Auditorium is a mythic, iconic place for music and musicians,” he writes in a ahead to an upcoming ebook concerning the one hundredth anniversary. He first discovered of the corridor in 1975 when his instructor gifted him a 1940 live performance recording by pianist and composer Béla Bartók and violinist Joseph Szigeti taking part in Beethoven‘s “Kreutzer” sonata. The 2 Hungarians had fled war-torn Europe. “There may be an urgency and completeness mixed with a wonderful freshness in each be aware they performed on April 13, 1940,” Harrington writes. “All over the live performance it was clear that this efficiency was a journey, a significant examination of tradition and expression distinctive in recorded historical past.”
Whereas Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge envisioned her corridor primarily for classical chamber music, the venue has performed host, even early on, to a broad vary of types. In 1926, simply over a yr after the corridor opened, Black composer R. Nathaniel Dett introduced within the 80-voiced Hampton Institute Choir to sing spirituals and Christmas carols. Music by W.C Useful was featured within the corridor’s first jazz live performance in 1929, and in 1938, early jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton took to the stage, together with folklorist Alan Lomax, to sing and inform some R-rated tales of his life and instances. In 2006, an enormous set of the Jelly Roll Morton recordings, over 9 hours, made on the Coolidge stage, gained two Grammys – for finest historic album and finest liner notes. It is an interesting oral historical past of the daybreak of the jazz age.
Grammy-winning jazz vocalist and songwriter Gregory Porter greets the viewers at Coolidge Auditorium at his live performance on March 8, 2014.
Kimberly T. Powell/Library of Congress
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Kimberly T. Powell/Library of Congress
In 1940, the corridor celebrated the seventy fifth anniversary of the thirteenth Modification with a collection of live shows that includes Black artists and music, with soprano Dorothy Maynor, tenor Roland Hayes and guitarist Josh White, who joined the acclaimed vocal group, the Golden Gate Quartet. In 1993, the Library acquired the Charles Mingus assortment and marked the event with a efficiency by his large band.
“We’re grateful to have the ability to current unbelievable musicians from many walks of life, many genres,” McLean says. Throughout the top of the pandemic, when the corridor was closed, the Library launched a collection of video shows, from Cuban vocalist Daymé Arocena and Argentine pianist-composer Pablo Ziegler to the New Orleans-based funk, rock and soul group Tank and the Bangas.
For a century, the partitions of Coolidge Auditorium have soaked up the tune and the spirit of numerous musicians from throughout the globe — from that very first live performance, with its commissioned piece by Charles Martin Loeffler to Bartók’s impassioned taking part in to Stevie Marvel accepting the Library’s Gershwin Prize. The corridor that Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge constructed represents a historical past of American ingenuity, a free and public cultural useful resource, unmatched in its holdings.
“The place itself is resonant with tales like this,” McLean says. “The stage the place you might be proper now has been stuffed with nice music and nice musicians for 100 years, and we hope one other hundred.”