AMS: AMS/LC Lectures

The American Musicological Society and the Music Division of the Library of Congress are pleased to announce the first in a series of lectures highlighting musicological research conducted in the Division’s collections.

The initial talk, delivered on 26 March 2008, features Judith Tick, who spoke about aspects of her work on Ruth Crawford Seeger in a lecture entitled “Ruth Crawford Seeger, Modernist Composer in the Folk Revival: Biography as Music History.”

Open to the public, the program was held in the Library’s famed Coolidge Auditorium in the Jefferson Building.

The Music Division is pleased to offer the Coolidge Auditorium as the venue for the AMS/LC Lecture Series. Named after one of the Music Division’s most important patronesses, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the auditorium is the result of her collaborations with Carl Engel, Chief of the Division from 1922 to 1934 (Engel would become president of the American Musicological Society three years after he left his post as Chief). Mrs. Coolidge, herself a talented musician and devotee of contemporary composition, worked with Engel to build an auditorium in a style “of severe and chaste beauty” rather than “ornate display.” On Nov.12, 1924, she presented him with a $60,000 check for its construction, and just slightly less than one year later, the Coolidge Auditorium offered its first performance. Now world-famous for its magnificent acoustics, the Coolidge is home of the Library of Congress Concert Series and has served as the site of music festivals, lectures, and symposia. Many landmark works commissioned by Mrs. Coolidge and by the Library’s foundations have premiered there, among these Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète, Ravel’s Chansons Madécasses, Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children, Rorem’s Evidence of Things Not Seen, and string quartets by Bartók, Schoenberg, Britten, and Prokofiev. Perhaps best known of all Library commissions is Martha Graham’s ballet Appalachian Spring, with its score by Aaron Copland, first performed in the Coolidge in 1944. Among the many stellar figures on the artists’ roster of the Coolidge Auditorium are Béla Bartók, Joshua Bell, Leonard Bernstein, Dave Brubeck, Savion Glover, Leontyne Price, Rudolf Serkin, Bobby Short, Igor Stravinsky, and the Budapest and Juilliard String Quartets.

“Shortly after the death of the musicologist Charles Seeger, his children gave his papers and those of their mother, the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, to the Music Division of the Library of Congress,” said Tick. “Without yet knowing what to look for or why, I mad-dashed through one box after another. The boxes contained manuscripts of unpublished songs and chamber music, typescripts of unpublished scholarship on American folk music, Christmas card-photos of the Seeger family, unfinished thank-you notes, grant applications, and personal diaries through which an obscure artist and woman spoke directly to my scholar’s instincts and feminist heart.

“I would return to these documents many times, and I ended up editing some of the unpublished scores. As time passed, the documents slowed me down into considering the relation between narrative truth and historical truth. They said to me: ‘Handle us with care. We are combustible. We set off chain-reactions. One thing leads to another.’ Through music to life; through a life to history. The goal of my lecture is to revisit content and process in practicing musical biography in relation to Crawford Seeger’s legacy. Music validates a composer. Our experience of that music shapes the questions we ask about a composer’s life. As life and art intertwine, so biographical narrative illuminates the history of culture.”

The series will continue with lectures by Annegret Fauser (on former Music Division Chief Harold Spivacke) and Jeff Magee (on Irving Berlin) in fall 2008 and spring 2009, respectively. The AMS Communications Committee and the LC Music Division are preparing a nominating procedure for additional lectures; all members of the Society who have used the Music Division’s collections will be welcome to submit lecture proposals. Initial plans for the series were made by Carol Oja, past chair of the Communications Committee, and Denise Gallo at the Music Division of the Library of Congress.

Further details of the series will be forthcoming soon! For now, if you're interested in any aspect of the series, please contact Bob Judd and let him know.