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MUSICAL TREASURES AT
  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (Part 2)
    - 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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AMAZON LINKS TO MUSIC REFERENCED BELOW

Chris: Thanks for agreeing to show me some of your personal favorites from the Music Division. You've got your camera slung over your shoulder. I should have worn my 'Indiana Jones' hat. Where are you taking me first?

Jon: The first thing I want to show you is a Spanish choir book from about 1500. It comes from that critical period when Christian Spain began to purge foreign elements that had seemingly been living together in harmony - the Moors and the Jews. There is wonderful evidence of the three peoples in the artifacts from that period: the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian cultures. This book is an antiphonary, which means it was used by the monks to sing the Offices. It’s not for the congregation. This first page has brilliant ornamental designs around the initial letter. The designs are of that abstract kind you see in Islamic culture, which had a strong influence on Spanish culture. It's just a beautiful page.

Chris: All this fine filigree is definitely Islamic. The book must be three feet tall. Is it all hand-drawn or typeset?

Jon: It was all done by hand. This is probably calfskin, vellum. A fairly large animal went into the making of these big pages. The reason these books were so huge is because it was made before the widespread use of music printing—there were no Xerox machines back then—and you had one big book to be shared by the whole choir, which gathered around it.

Chris: I notice you're turning the pages with your bare hands. One thing I'd heard is that the Library handles its rare items with special gloves.

Jon: Our conservation office told us that gloves can make you clumsier. It's easy to catch an edge with a glove and possibly cause more damage that way. Mainly, you want to make sure your hands are clean, dry, and not oily.

Chris: I see the music notation is ancient and doesn't look like what we have today.

Jon: The notes are called 'neumes'. There may be single pitches, or groups of pitches connected by the ligatures characteristic of early chant notation. There are no rhythmic markings, but the singers understood the melodic formulas of which this music consists and which the neumes articulate.

Chris: How did this find its way to the Library of Congress?

Jon: I don't know, but we probably got it from an honest and sensitive antiquarian dealer who could have made a lot more money by tearing it apart and selling it page by page. This managed to survive in one piece.

Chris: Where are we going next?

Jon: We have priceless handwritten manuscripts from many of the great composers - Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, everyone of whom you've ever heard. The inheritors of these manuscripts passed them on until the two World Wars and upheavals forced them to sell them.

I like to show manuscripts that tell a story. Here’s one. Brahms wrote his Violin Concerto Op. 77 for the great violinist, Joseph Joachim. [Amazon link below - listen to samples] There were passages that Joachim thought were too difficult or could lie more easily under the fingers if written differently. So this passage from the third movement has some alternate readings, called ossia, which Joachim thought would produce the same effect that Brahms wanted without his having to twist his fingers into uncomfortable knots. You can see them in the score and in this other manuscript, the solo violin part which was written out by a copyist for Joachim to play from in concert. The story doesn't end there, however. Here's the published version that Jascha Heifetz owned and we see his take on Joachim's ossia: "lousy". So we have Heifetz' opinion! Of course, Heifetz could play almost anything and it certainly sounded much better to him the way Brahms wrote it. And I’m sure Heifetz was proud to show that what was too hard for Joachim wasn’t too hard for him!

And there are other manuscripts that illustrate that performance is an ongoing story. You can follow from annotations the mind of the performer working over a piece. We have the Budapest Quartet's copies, among others, of Beethoven’s string quartets. [Amazon link below - listen to samples] They played this music for practically their whole lives and you can see them wrestling in their marked-up parts with the best way to articulate the composer’s intentions. We collect this kind of thing because it gives insight into performance practices, in some cases before the age of recorded music. The Heifetz copy I showed you starts with his youth and continues to reflect his concerns into the age of sound recording. Here are his notes about microphones being placed too far away. I'm sure he owned this printed score and part from the time he was a teenager and it accumulated his markings from his student days until the last time he played it.

Next, we have a manuscript from Gershwin.

Chris: I visited the Gershwin room at the Library not too long ago. It had some fascinatin' rhythm - some of his letters and that cool custom-made desk where he worked on large scores.

Jon: Here's the beginning of Act II of 'Porgy & Bess' [Amazon link below - listen to samples] where Porgy sings that famous tune 'I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'. It goes: 'got my gal, got my song, heaven de whole day long—no use complainin'—got my gal.' The 'no use complainin' phrase wasn't there originally. It's an afterthought, an interesting little twist that shows you a moment of creative insight. This is always fun to find in a manuscript. Here is George's original pencil score where he added it later. There's the creative mind, always trying to make it a little bit better and sometimes the addition becomes the most characteristic thing about the piece. That's a favorite spot for me.

Another favorite of mine is the manuscript of Bach's Cantata No. 10—his German Magnificat: "Meine Seel’ erhebt mein Herren" ("My Soul doth Magnify the Lord"). [Amazon link below - listen to samples] Here you see where he wrote out the original melody and added the characteristic turn that everyone knows and loves, when it goes down to G. And the turn shows up in the next sequence, too [a sequence is a parallel passage starting on a different note]. So, original manuscripts can sometimes show that when great composers write out their music, they are never on automatic pilot. They're always looking for ways to polish it and make it just a little better. Sometimes they get a flash of inspiration—like Bach and Gershwin—and add just the right touch, maybe the thing that people remember most about the piece.

Chris: It's been said that great music is not written, it's re-written. Why are these manuscript pages in plastic sleeves but the choir book was not?

Jon: This Bach manuscript was just in a folder when I got here more than 35 years ago. It was so fragile you were afraid to turn a page. Bach used very poor paper and very poor, corrosive ink, so the manuscripts had to be treated. The ink was made out of oak gall and ground-up iron filings. The combination makes nice black ink but very bad acid that, over time, can burn holes right through the paper. You can end up with confetti. Our conservationists de-acidified the ink and paper so it would stop eating itself up. Once that was done, little mends were made in the holes. Then the pages were put in inert mylar sleeves that support the fragile leaves of paper on both sides so that you can lift them up. It also keeps finger oil from getting into the paper, oil that you can never get out.

Now here's another 18th-century manuscript, this one from Haydn. It’s not in mylar because it's on very good paper that was deemed sufficiently strong to withstand gentle page-turning. This is the slow movement from Haydn's famous 'Surprise' Symphony. Do you remember that? [Amazon link below - listen to samples]

Chris: I sure do. It was one of my favorites as a kid. I liked the way it woke people up who were sleeping during the concert.

Jon: This is that movement, but you can see it's missing something in this version. It's missing the surprise. Here's a good indication that Haydn first wrote the symphony without the surprise. Haydn had a wonderful sense of humor and perhaps thought that this movement, which has an impish quality, could be made more impish by adding a sudden forte, when least expected.

Chris: That's the perfect example of what you said earlier about the afterthought becoming the thing that distinguishes the piece.

Jon: Without the surprise—the wham—it’s just, ho hum, another great Haydn symphony. But the surprise is what people remember—for better or for worse. Let's look at one more manuscript.

This is Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, now in the standard repertoire. [Amazon link below - listen to samples] This illustrates why it's always good to have the original to go back to. This was published and performed in Bartok's lifetime. Then, about twenty years ago, Sir Georg Solti - one of those enlightened conductors who have used the Library of Congress to find out stuff - was alerted to a problem when one of his percussionists questioned a metronome marking in his part. In researching the origin of the problematic discrepancy between the percussionist’s part and the printed score, Solti made a very significant discovery by consulting the original manuscript in the Library of Congress. The published score has the tempo as quarter note equals 70 beats per minute at the beginning of the second movement. Well, you can see in the original manuscript that it's supposed to be 90. What had happened was that the published score was engraved, not from this manuscript, but from a copy. The top of the page on the copy had been trimmed, turning the '9' into a '7'. That's a big difference - 70 is not 90. That had eluded all performers up to that point. It's an important example of why original manuscripts really do matter from time to time.

Chris: You're taking me down a long hallway. We're down in the basement. Is the Temple of Doom around the next corner?

Jon: No, just the Miller Flute collection. Dr. Dayton Miller was a professional physicist in Cleveland and an amateur flute lover. He died in 1941. He started playing the flute as a boy when his father gave him a family heirloom, a Revolutionary-era fife - which he broke. That was his first instrument. Perhaps to make up for his juvenile misdeed, he spent the rest of his life collecting every kind of flute he could get his hands on. His collection includes original models of the Boehm key-system that is used today for flutes and other wind instruments. His collection is now the greatest collection of any one kind of instrument in the world. He didn't have a huge salary. But in his time, before anyone valued antiquarian instruments, he was able to gather things of this sort at ridiculously low prices that other people thought were useless. He was probably on every junk dealer's sucker list. Today, with more than 1,600 specimens, his collection traces uniquely the development of the flute in the West, and has many fine specimens from other parts of the world.

Chris: He'd be all over eBay today.

Jon: He ended up with some very unusual flutes. This one is made out of a single piece of jade. Beautiful, isn't it? This one over here looks like a plain old walking stick from a distance, but you can pick it up and play it. The keys are nicely disguised in the carvings. That brings us to a large collection from Paris in the early 19th century, when glass was a very 'with-it' material for making flutes. Claude Laurent made these instruments for wealthy amateurs. They were too heavy to interest professionals, but if you had money and wanted to show it off, you could get one of these carved crystal flutes. Laurent made this one as a present to President Madison. We have recordings of modern performances on it.

Now here are the Boehm instruments. It took a lot of trial and error to develop a perfectly chromatic instrument and there were a lot of variables - the placement and the size of the holes to get the right tone but still accommodate by the judicious placement of keys the limits of the human hand.

Chris: Can all the flutes here be played?

Jon: No. Here you see some fairly typical damage. Whenever you insert metal into wood, as makers did in head-joints at the time this flute was made, the wood always ends up the loser. The wood doesn't flex when the metal expands, for example, and tends to split. These cracks are inevitable, given the irreversible effects of time, temperature, and humidity and the laws of physics. You can't play these anymore. Miller was smart enough to realize that you couldn't fix some instruments without destroying their historical value. Even though they're broken, you can still see the way they were meant to be. But once you start fiddling around and replacing keys or filling holes, you might as well throw it away.

Here's a flute Miller made for himself out of a 22-carat gold tube he got from a jeweler. That's a story in itself. We have the correspondence. These cylinders were not meant for making flutes. Jewelers cut them up into rings. The first cylinder was warped. The second one was OK but Miller damaged it himself, so it had to be melted down and replaced. Nobody can explain why he was so insistent about making this flute.

Maybe he thought it would sound better if it were made out of gold instead of silver. That's an idea that dies hard—that the material from which the tube is made is important to the sound - but it isn't true. Unlike a violin, for example, which vibrates with its strings, the sound of a wind instrument is largely a matter of air moving—vibrating—through the tubing. The air doesn’t care if the tubing is glass, gold, silver, cherry-wood, or plexiglass. Your eyes might think a gold flute sounds better than a silver one, but it’s all the same to your ears, unless you’ve paid the kind of money Miller paid for this beauty.

The star of the Miller collection is this flute owned and played by Frederick the Great in Germany. Frederick was a music lover and a composer himself. He had a very serious music operation going on at court. He could afford the very finest musicians and he got them: among others, C. P. E. Bach and Joachim Quantz, who made this great instrument. Dr. Miller didn't get a bargain on this flute. It's an important historical instrument, both because it belonged to Frederick the Great, and because it's a superb example of the Baroque one-keyed flute that Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries wrote for. It can't be played now because there's a hairline crack in the head joint. We have replicas of the head joint that can be used to play with the rest of the instrument. The general rule today is, if you want to find out how an old instrument sounds, make a replica. It'll sound better than the original and you won't have to destroy the original in fixing it.

Chris: My map tells me we're getting close to the hidden treasure - about $25 million worth of Stradivarius violins. [Amazon link below - listen to samples]

Jon: Yes, we have five. They were a gift of Gertrude Clarke Whittall in 1935-36. She was horrified that a quartet of Strads was kept in an exhibit case in Oxford where nobody could touch them. She bought them and five other instruments and gave them to us to start a chamber music series. Through Mrs. Whittall’s largess, the Library of Congress became the birthplace of chamber music in America. Americans were not familiar with this kind of music before our chamber music series started. We have historic recordings from the Budapest Quartet playing on the Strads here at the Library. The performances were syndicated for national broadcast in 1938, the first time chamber music was widely heard in America.

We're now standing in the Whittall Pavilion in the old copper-domed Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. Along with the Strads, we have an Amati and Fritz Kreisler's Guarnerius. We have the Betts, which is probably the most famous Stradivarius because it's in relatively pristine condition. It's had fewer repairs over the centuries than virtually any other Strad, so more of what you see and hear is actually what Stradivarius made himself. The Guarnerius owned by Fritz Kreisler is also famous. He made most of his recordings on it and it's very much a part of the sound people associate with Kreisler.

Chris: How do you know the Strads are worth $25 million?

Jon: It's just a guess. We haven't had them appraised and there are very few comparable instruments that go on sale, particularly with the combination of a great maker and the association with a well-known artist who owned it.

Chris: Should I really tell people you've got all this loot sitting in glass cases unattended?

Jon: We want people to come look at them. Just as we want artists to play them in concert. These display cases were made recently and they're more than bullet-proof. There's no way you could get through them. You could take an automatic weapon, maybe even a small bazooka, and it would bounce off this stuff. The wall behind them is solid granite because the Pavilion is set in a courtyard and backs up to one of the walls of the main building.

Chris: Someone is always looking for the secret of what made the Stradivarius violins so great. Every once in a while, you see stories in the news - It's the varnish. No, it's the way the worms ate tiny holes in the wood....

Jon: People who understand these instruments do not take those reports seriously. There are a lot of elements that go into the art of violin-making. You can no more make a great instrument because of the varnish than you could make a great car by using a certain kind of car wax. Stradivarius studied under Amati. We had a demonstration here recently when Miles Hoffman played all of the instruments for an NPR feature, and before we were through I was convinced that the Amati might be the most beautiful sounding of all of the violins. Amati, great as he was, couldn't teach Stradivarius everything or Stradivarius would have been making great instruments right off the bat. He was forty before he hit his stride.

Chris: The secret is there is no secret?

Jon: Not quite. There are lots of secrets... thousands of secrets. There's so much that went into making these instruments. There's nothing better than a Strad, but there are also many fine young violin makers today. A good ear would have a hard time choosing a Strad from many modern instruments in a blindfold test. People plunk down millions for a Strad but the fact is they're paying for the name.

They don't have just one possible sound. Before each artist uses one of them in performance, we usually have a luthier come to adjust them, which requires sticking a tool down through that little f-hole to move the soundpost ever so slightly. It can make the difference between sounding scratchy and bing! -that's just it. The sound can also be adjusted to suit the taste of the performer.

Chris: The post runs from front to back?

Jon: Yes. See that bridge supporting the strings? It's pushing down on the top of the instrument with enormous force. The soundpost is underneath the bridge, between the top and bottom of the instrument. We tried to have members of the Julliard Quartet trained to do their own adjustments but they wouldn't touch it. If you slip and knock the post out, that instrument will be in the hospital for a year. Those strings can push the bridge right through the top if there is no counteracting force from the soundpost. There's a lot of tension - the engineering here is pretty tricky. When you put them away, you lower the tension slightly but not too much, because the bridge might slip.

People think these instruments will deteriorate if they're not played. That's not strictly true. They do need to be checked regularly to make sure a string hasn't broken, that the temperature and humidity in the case are still OK.... That kind of routine care and maintenance is probably what really counts. Playing them doesn't make much difference. But things do age. Eventually, somebody - not me and not anyone living today, I hope - will have to take a look at one of these instruments and say 'it's gone, it can't be played anymore.' This is wood; it doesn't last forever no matter what you do.

Chris: That ties in to what you were saying earlier about the flutes - metal and wood, wood always ends up the loser.

Jon: The Strads are very fragile. They're very light ... frighteningly light. Think of all that tension in a complex structure of wood and glue. The scroll, which holds the pegs, is another area where we have trouble. An old crack in the scroll of the Amati began to open up and we were afraid to tune the instrument. It has been repaired and sounds wonderful. The strings nowadays, of course, are metal-wrapped. Some people still use cat-gut and it sounds nice, but you have to tune it frequently. Despite the problems, hopefully electronics won't completely overwhelm us and people will still be making music in the future on instruments of metal and wood—even with cat-gut strings—not just computer parts. Let's push on to the Coolidge Auditorium.

Chris: I've been to many performances in the Coolidge and I want to hear more about it. Lead on.

Jon: Now we're in the historic Coolidge Auditorium in the Library's main building where so many great works, such as Copland's Appalachian Spring, the most famous commission of our patron saint, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, have been premiered.
 

Chris: You mentioned Stravinsky, Ravel, Bartok, Schoenberg and Hindemith previously.

Jon: I must say that, along with Serge Koussevitzly, Mrs. Coolidge was the greatest patron of music in the twentieth century. By comparison to Carnegie, Rockefeller, or Pierpont Morgan, she didn’t have the greatest fortune, but she knew music and spent her money with vision. The result was some of the greatest music of our time. She came to the Library of Congress in 1925 and told us to build a hall and commission new music.

The Coolidge was started and finished in 1925. We had it restored in 1987. We hired the best acoustical engineer around, George Izenour, to make sure the restoration wouldn't spoil the acoustics. They were—accidentally—the best of their time, and he made sure that we preserved them.

Chris: Let's talk about that for a minute. In my limited understanding of acoustics, you don't want all the sound waves bouncing back to you at the same place at the same time. You want them dispersed. So a hall shaped like a box with hard, flat surfaces would have the worst possible acoustics. The best acoustics would be in an irregularly shaped hall with lots of sound absorbing materials. Here you have mostly flat surfaces and a flat ceiling. Why are the acoustics so good here?

Jon: Basically, if you can see, you can hear. We get good sound because the seating is sloped like a stadium. The hall is not box-shaped. Mrs. Coolidge built another hall somewhere else with a flat floor and the sound is dreadful. We can tune our hall a bit by lowering these fabric flaps. They're on rollers and come down quite far. When the hall is empty, the flaps begin to fill it up and that's been helpful in recording. Also, the walls aren't all parallel.

Chris: I see that now. The back wall is semi-circular. That must change the acoustics quite a bit.

Jon: You've really hit on the critical area. Our engineer tested every seat in the house before making recommendations. We ended up making the panels on the back wall, which is curved, slightly convex. If you look closely, you'll see the panels are pillowed out - it's not a flat surface. That's all it took to fix the bad spots.

It's also important how things sound on stage. Every musician who's played here likes it, because everyone onstage can hear the others. You can't see it, but behind the back of the shell is a masonry wall, one of the walls of the former courtyard in which this hall was built. It's flat and goes all the way up. That's a critical element. It makes the shell virtually transparent, acoustically speaking. The hall sounds great when it's full. You can hear everything on stage and nothing has to be amplified. We have movies and pop concerts here, too, but the sound is not quite as satisfactory because many performers today use amplified sound. The Coolidge really is one thing - a chamber music hall - and that's what it should remain.

Chris: Priceless hand-written manuscripts. Stradivarius violins. A fund that supports new music. Ongoing relationships with famous composers and performers. Enough copyright records to fill the pyramids. A long and proud tradition of premiering new works by the greats like Stravinsky and Ravel. It's been an eye-opening adventure. I had no idea all these treasures were here. I can't thank you enough.

Jon: My pleasure. Let the word go forth.

Part 1 - Jon Newsom talks about historic moments of music-making at the Library of Congress, and how the Library builds relationships with important musical figures.

Additions to the Library of Congress digital 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.

Brahms Violin Concerto
in D - Op. 77                Budapest Quartet        Porgy & Bess           Bach Cantata #10

   Haydn 'Surprise'        Bartok Concerto             Strads

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