The American Musicological Society and the Music Division of the Library of Congress are pleased to present a series of lectures highlighting musicological research conducted in the Division’s collections.

The AMS / Library of Congress Lecture Series is a public lecture program oriented to a mix of professional musicians, musicologists, music lovers, and music educators. All proposals should be written with this broad audience in mind. Proposals that are clearly constructed to appeal to the widest possible audience will be preferred.

The AMS / Library of Congress Lecture Series has been fully scheduled for the 2025–2026 program year, and we are not requesting applications at this time.

Past Lectures

‣ Danielle Ward-Griffin, "Integration without Identification: NBC TV, Leontyne Price, and Opera Casting in the Civil Rights Era"

‣ Miranda Sousa,  "The Luiz Heitor Correa de Azevedo Collection at the LOC: Musical and Cultural Exchange Between Brazil and the US During The Good Neighbor Policy Years"

‣ Alex Bádue, "How Do You Measure a Year?: Jonathan Larson and the Creation of the Musical Rent, 1995–1996"

‣ Karen Bryan, "Self-Determination on the Operatic Stage: Mary Cardwell Dawson and African American performance in Washington, DC and New York City"

‣ Mark A. Pottinger, "Concert Hall Acoustics and the Sonic Ideal in Early Twentieth-Century America"

‣ Gayle Murchison, "Mary Lou Williams: Jazz, Race, Gender, and Iconography"

‣ Candace Bailey, Silencing the Guns of War: Women’s Binder’s Volumes in the Library of Congress

‣ Marta Robertson, "'A Gift to Be Simple': Japanese American Influence in Appalachian Spring"

‣ Mackenzie Pierce, "Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern’s Opera The Annointed, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and the Music of Holocaust Memory in the Early Cold War"  

‣ John Koegel, "Recovering the History of the U.S. Immigrant Musical Theater at the Library of Congress"

‣ Katherine K. Preston, "America’s Forgotten Love Affair with Opera"

‣ Hye-jung Park, "From World War to Cold War: Music in America's Radio Propaganda in Korea"

‣ Daniel M. Callahan, "Bernstein Conducting Himself"

‣ Randall Goldberg, "The Kishineff Massacre and Domestic Musical Practice in America"

‣ Christina Bashford, William Brooks, Gayle Sherwood Magee, Laurie Matheson, and Justin Vickers, "Johnnies, Tommies, and Sammies: Music and the WWI Alliance"

‣ Dominic McHugh, "In the Workshop of Lerner and Loewe: Archival Sources for the Genesis of My Fair Lady"

‣ R. Larry Todd, “Revisiting Mendelssohn’s Octet, or the Maturing of Precocity”

‣ Ryan Raul Bañagale, "The Ongoing Composition of Rhapsody in Blue"

‣ Paul Laird, "'A Hint of West Side Story': The Genesis of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms as Seen in the Library of Congress Bernstein Collection"

‣ Carol Hess, "Copland as Good Neighbor: Cultural Diplomacy in Latin America During World War II"

‣ Nancy Newman, "'A program not greatly to their credit': Finding New Perspectives on the Germania Musical Society through the American Memory Sheet Music Collection"

‣ Kendra Preston Leonard, "Meaning and Myth in Louise Talma’s First Period Works"

‣ Todd Decker, "Making Show Boat: Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, and the Power of Performers"

‣ Barbara Heyman, "Samuel Barber: Serendipitous Discoveries"

‣ Thomas Brothers, "Louis Armstrong: The Making of a Great Melodist"

‣ William Meredith, "What the Autograph Can Tell Us: Beethoven’s Sonata in E Major, opus 109"

‣ Carol J. Oja, "Bernstein Meets Broadway: Race, the Blues, and On the Town (1944)"

‣ W. Anthony Sheppard, "American Musical Modernism and Japan"

‣ Steve Swayne, "William Schuman’s Puzzling Seventh Symphony"

‣ Walter Frisch, "Arnold Schoenberg's Creative Journey, 1897-1912"

‣ Jeffrey Magee, "Now It Can Be Told: The Unknown Irving Berlin"

‣ Annegret Fauser, "After Pearl Harbor: Music, War, and the Library of Congress"

‣ Judith Tick, "Ruth Crawford Seeger, Modernist Composer in the Folk Revival: Biography as Music History”

Eligibility

All lecturers for the AMS / Library of Congress lecture series must base some or all of their research on materials held in the Library of Congress.

Award & Notification

Decision notifications will be sent in early April. The selected lecture(s) will be scheduled in coordination with the Library of Congress. Lecturers do not receive an honorarium; however, support for travel and accommodations will be provided.

Important Notes:

Start your application early. You may save an incomplete form and continue later. You MUST click the 'Submit' button at the end of the form to submit your application. Applications not submitted by the deadline cannot be considered. Upon submission of your application form you will receive an email confirmation. You may also view your application by signing into your Submittable account and clicking "My Submissions".

If you have any questions about your application, please contact the AMS office at ams@amsmusicology.org. For technical questions about Submittable, please visit submittable.com/contact.

Application Deadline: 11:59pm EDT, 16 January 2024