ABOUT THE COOLIDGE AUDITORIUM

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.