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James H. Billington
The Librarian of Congress

Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who gave us a marvelous concert hall and Gertrude Clarke Whittall, who donated a priceless set of Stradivari instruments shared a common vision: to foster the classics and to support new music. Their aim and ours was and is to make possible free live performances of music by outstanding artists that might otherwise not be affordable. Today, artists as diverse as Dave Brubeck, Chen Yi, and Frank Zappa--three of the composers featured this season--cross lines that once separated one kind of music from another. As the embodiment of the American musical tradition, the Library’s concert series has increasingly broadened the path to the enjoyment of an eclectic range of musical styles.

Jon Newsom
Chief, Music Division

“No one should live as you and I do without devoting a part of our opportunities to the world.”

-- Letter of February 20, 1924 from Mrs. Coolidge to her son Albert

In October 1924, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge offered Congress a gift of $60,000 (about $632,000 in today’s dollars) to finance the construction of an auditorium for the Music Division at the Library of Congress. Mrs. Coolidge might not have imagined it would cost more than a million dollars to renovate her gift in 1989-1997. But it is not inconceivable that she could have envisioned the multifarious tapestry that music in America has become since the first concert in October 1925.

Originally designed and built for chamber music, the Coolidge Auditorium today reflects the diversity of American music, featuring artists from a wide range of musical genres: classical music of the past and the present, jazz, gospel and spirituals, blues, traditional and contemporary folk, popular songs and musical theater, soul, dance music, bebop, and rock-and-roll.