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MUSICAL TREASURES AT
  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (Part 1)
    - On Safari with Jon Newsom,
         Chief of the Music Division
 

by Christopher M. Wright
© 2004 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved

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Chris: How many items does the Music Division have in its collection?

Jon: Depending on how you count, 10 million or more. It's probably the largest music-related collection in the world in terms of sheer size and, in many regards, in terms of richness.

Chris: Do I have to be an elected representative to use the Library of Congress?

Jon: No, the Library of Congress is the greatest public library in the world. It's for everybody. You don't have to be a congressman or even have a letter of introduction from one. Just show up with a picture ID. We're eager to have music adventurers comb through our collections. There's a lot of great material here that nobody's gone through carefully yet. There are books waiting to be written from what we have.

Chris: Like what?

Jon: If you really want an adventure, examine the records of the copyright office. A researcher came in and used those records to compile a bibliography of Yiddish American popular songs. Irving Berlin and others who became world famous started out writing for the Yiddish theater. So the book essentially traces the roots of Tin Pan Alley, the first great engine of sophisticated American popular song.

The copyright collection is the greatest treasure in the library. We've never thrown anything out. It's an unedited cross-section of all types of music. Just from copyright alone, which for music began in 1831, we have sheet music going back 175 years. We also have all the sound recordings submitted to the Copyright Office since 1978, the year they became copyrightable. We've got handwritten manuscripts of George Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Louis Armstrong, and many others.

Chris: I read that somebody discovered 18 forgotten Louis Armstrong songs by going through the copyright records.
 

Jon: That's right. We have another treasure here that's truly unique. The Library has been involved in the commissioning and performing of new music since 1925. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge came from a wealthy family and was a fine musician in her own right. She supported chamber music concerts and new music at her home in Massachusetts. Then she established a permanent foundation and built the Coolidge Auditorium here at the Library, which we'll go see later. The concert series started with premieres of new works from Stravinsky, Ravel, Bartok, Schoenberg and Hindemith. The activities of the Coolidge Foundation continue to this day.

Schoenberg received three important commissions from the Library of Congress. We also commissioned Copland's 'Appalachian Spring' which was first danced here, in the Coolidge Auditorium in 1944 [Amazon link below - listen to samples] . It was a moment of real magic and probably the most famous musical event that happened here. The world sat up and took notice. Here was an American writing uniquely American music. Our Copland website has all his sketches for the dance and you can leaf through them as you're listening to the music. It was choreographed by the great Martha Graham who was an equal partner in creating this memorable American classic. It's an adventure for anyone who loves this piece to see how Copland worked it up and to read his notations in his own handwriting.

We put a lot of effort into establishing durable relationships with these composers and getting them to think of the Library of Congress as the best permanent home for their work, so we ended up with a lot of the manuscripts not only from these premieres but also from subsequent works. The Coolidge manuscripts are truly great resources - a great, exciting part of our collection.

Chris: I'll want to hear more about how the Library builds relationships, but first let me ask you, how did the Library start its record collection?

Jon: Our first adventure in recorded sound was the Archive of Folk Song which we created in 1928 to make and collect field recordings of then unknown folk artists across the country whose music would not otherwise have been preserved. This led to the discovery of the great blues artist Leadbelly. We also started taking oral histories from important musical figures like Jelly Roll Morton. He sat down in our Coolidge auditorium and just talked and played. Some of the sessions have been reissued on Rounder Records [Amazon link below - listen to samples]. We also did field recordings of native Americans, coal miners, and other musicians. We have some on 78's and even wax cylinders.

Chris: Wax cylinders, no kidding! That reminds me of Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation Series' set far in the future where nobody lives on Earth anymore, and all that's left here is a big library. The only problem is nobody can use half the items in the collection because the devices needed to play them disappeared centuries earlier. But I digress. Do you wait for new acquisitions to come in over the transom or do you go out and look for them?

Jon: This is an important part of the story of what we do here. We don't just wait for people to call us up. We seek them out and get to know them over time. One of my predecessors became personal friends with Ira Gershwin after George died. Trust was built up and that's how we got George Gershwin's manuscripts. There's a personal story like that behind every collection we have here. We view building relationships as the secret of our success. Many composers and jazz artists would not have left their papers to the Library of Congress had they not felt we would take good care of their legacy. The Music Division has an ongoing culture where the staff continues to develop personal relationships with potential donors. Many of our donors are afraid that our collection is so big that they will simply get swallowed up and never be heard from again. But we pride ourselves on reaching out beyond the giants of music, to lesser known figures, the ones that provide the mortar between the bricks.

There are very few institutions in the world who do what we do. We collect things, which preserves them forever. But we also have the music-making component, which no other library in the world has. We commission performances and new works. That brings in composers and performers, who learn about what we do and then let others know about it by word-of-mouth. So the whole thing is self-generating. We're constantly playing with this wonderful network - it's so important to what we do - and that's why the Library is such a special place.

So some of what we end up with may look like serendipity, but it's not. Ira Gershwin liked to hear David Raksin the film composer play the piano and had David play at private parties in Ira's home. Ira introduced David to my predecessor whom I mentioned and, as a result, David became part of the Library of Congress family. David knew Gerry Mulligan and recommended that Gerry leave his papers with us. It all ties together. I stress that to every new person on the staff here. Every new connection they make will help keep the family going.

Chris: What family members have you met personally?

 Jon: I've had a close working relationship with Frederick Fennell since 1970. One of my favorite moments was doing an oral history with him of his childhood in Cleveland. He gave us some wonderful photos of his family's summer place - Camp Zeke they called it. He told me about the patriotic music that was played there. The whole idea of the encampment was to bring American history alive by living as people lived in earlier times. The main headquarters was a copy of the field tent used by General Meade at Gettysburg during the Civil War. Fennell was only seven years old when he started playing in the fife and drum corps his family organized. He told me that the first time he heard fife and drum music he rushed into the middle of the players, he was so excited. Fife and drum really 'wiped him out', to use his terms. Of course, Fennell went on to become a giant of wind and brass music.

Chris: You mentioned Gerry Mulligan earlier. Did you meet him?

Jon: Gerry was one of my favorite people. He called us on David Raksin's recommendation, as I mentioned. I spent a wonderful afternoon with Gerry. He was one of the most enjoyable people I've met. He had a rough life. He wanted people to know he had a drug problem which he licked, as very, very few people are able to do.

 Former President Clinton, who plays the saxophone, asked all the great saxophonists including Gerry to play for Clinton's first inauguration in 1993. So I got to see Gerry again. But Gerry didn't just play a beautiful baritone saxophone. He composed major works for 50 years before he died. We got his papers but the process is still ongoing. His wife, Franca, continues to give us material and we're working on projects that would never have occurred had there not been an initial spark of mutual interest at the beginning. He made some tapes about his life with help from Ken Poston, an excellent jazz musician and scholar. We've got all of those tapes and we're working on them now. They're a first-person autobiography by a very articulate guy. The first hour of this is on our Mulligan website and the rest of it will be unfolding over the next several years. There'll be a book coming out of it eventually.

Chris: Who else have you met?

Jon: Elliott Carter was sending in manuscripts before I got here in 1966. One of my first projects was to organize all of his papers, a lot of which were written on fool's cap, really bad paper. We microfilmed them, which is a very good archival medium. All of his sketches are date-stamped, so it's an incredible archive for studying the creative process of a musician. I always felt he deserved a lot of support from this institution. He's had some commissions from us. One that I'm very proud of is his piano quintet that he wrote for the Arditti Quartet and Ursula Oppens. This was a major piece he had been wanting to write. That's part of what this institution is all about. Some composers aren't able to write a piece unless someone says, 'here's the money, here's the place, here are the performers, and it's all going to come together.' That's what we provide.

 Chris: Relationships can be tricky. Does everything always go so well?

 Jon: Working with donors can be frustrating, at times. We've had artists decide to sell or give part of their collection to other institutions. So we have competitors, but I've never felt that being ruthlessly competitive and trying to get something away from another institution is productive. There are plenty of stories about places that do that. It's much better, from our perspective, when you know a collection is going to be split, to establish a working relationship and collaborate with each other.

 Chris: What are some examples of that?

 Jon: We have an excellent relationship with the Smithsonian and sometimes our donors are pleased that their material will be showcased in both institutions. We just had an exciting collaboration with the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna. They scanned our entire collection of correspondence and papers from several composers and will put it all up on their website. We've got letters and papers from Copland, Gershwin, and Brahms, to name a few. This is a treasure trove, one of the best collections where it's still possible to discover new things. For example, we have the letters of Aaron Copland to Leonard Bernstein in the Bernstein collection and the letters of Bernstein to Copland in the Copland collection. We have both sides, so you can reconstruct the dialogue they were having about their music.

Part 2 - Jon Newsom shows us a few of his favorite items from the collection

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© 2004 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved - This material may not be republished, rebroadcast, rewritten, redistributed, resold, or manipulated in any form.

Copland's 'Appalachian Spring'

Jelly Roll Morton - Library of Congress Recordings on Rounder