‘Song of America’ Concert Tour
to Kick Off Library of Congress Road Show
By Emily Sherwood, Ph.D.
What do you get when you bring together a pre-eminent historical
scholar and America’s leading baritone to design a program
celebrating American creativity? The Library of Congress’ “Song
of America” tour, a 12-city, seven month concert tour
beginning this November, is the brainchild of Librarian of
Congress Dr. James H. Billington and internationally acclaimed
musician Thomas Hampson. Scheduled for New York City’s
Carnegie Hall on January 19, 2006, the concert will feature
Hampson—who is renowned for his versatility in performing
opera, operetta, musical, oratorio and recital —singing
a repertoire of American songs written by such poets and composers
as Stephen Foster, Walt Whitman, and Aaron Copland.
The “Song of America” tour, an unprecedented road
show for the venerable Library of Congress, is designed to
bring the extensive resources of the Library to the people “so
that the community knows that this Library belongs to them.
It’s not just an entity that sits in Washington, DC.
It’s a repository of resources that very often are being
underutilized in communities,” says Jan Lauridsen, Assistant
Chief of the Library’s Music Division and Co-Chair of
the Song of America tour. The tour will begin by showcasing
American song “because so much of the American story
began with song interpreting the lives, courage and spirit
of the people who founded this country,” adds Lauridsen.
Hampson, who is also a gifted storyteller, will conduct master
classes and hold open rehearsals for students in addition to
his January 19th concert performance. “Tom has a burning
need to communicate how important it is to notice those students
early on who have a desire, interest, intellect, and curiosity
to pursue the creative arts,” notes Lauridsen. The Library’s
educational outreach staff will conduct day-long Teacher Institutes
to introduce students and faculty to the Library’s extensive
on-line performing arts resources—some “ten million
items, including the papers of Leonard Bernstein and Aaron
Copland, folk recordings, documents, and more,” according
to Lauridsen. Because music and poetry are inextricably linked
to American society’s greatest events and struggles,
the Library aims to help educators “show how song and
verse served a social and political purpose in our country’s
history,” explains Lauridsen. Thematic units and teaching
strategies, with on-line materials for future reference, will
help teachers incorporate the Library’s archives into
their lesson plans. “With so much of music curriculum
being stripped out of the public school system, this gives
us an opportunity to carry the message that it is important
to repatriate the study of music and the arts in the K-12 system,” adds
Lauridsen.
The “Song of America” tour will mark the first
phase of a broader “Creativity Across America” campaign
being launched by the Library of Congress. Other planned events,
which will vary according to city and will be scheduled based
on each city’s own calendar of activities, include poetry
workshops, a film series showcasing the Library’s motion
picture collection, a StoryCorps project that will record oral
histories from everyday Americans using the model of the Works
Progress Administration (WPA) Oral History Project of the 1930’s,
and conservation workshops that will help people preserve valuable
mementoes such as books, photos, letters, newspapers and videos
so that they may be handed down to future generations as historical
archives. The Library will leave each city with a permanent
exhibition portable enough to be taken on the road.
As the home of the Copyright Office of the United States,
the Library of Congress has yet another message in mind for
the American public through this multi-faceted national tour:
a celebration of the creative and inventive spirit that is
the cornerstone of our cultural history. “We’re
in a country where we have the freedom to create–to say
and write what we want,” explains Suzanne Hogan, Senior
Advisor to both the Library and its James Madison Council,
a private sector advisory body to the Library and Lauridsen’s “Song
of America” co-chair. In fact, Lauridsen encouraged her
eight year old niece, Hannah, to copyright an award-winning
poem she had written. “The message back to Hannah was, ‘You
own your words. Now someone has to seek your permission if
he or she wants to duplicate them,’” says Lauridsen.
Encouragement of individual creativity in all its forms, whether
in business, cooking or the arts, is the Library’s ultimate
goal. Hogan knows this from personal experience. The child
of a military family, she traveled extensively as a child and
found that music helped her to develop self-esteem and engage
with peers. If she and her colleagues accomplish their goal, “There
is going to be a spark of inspiration or validation that occurs
when some individual who is sitting in the audience says, ‘They
understand what I’m about,’ and then he or she
proceeds to go out there and do something well!”
