Piecing Together the Early Musical History of the Yaddo Artist Colony

Caitlin E. Brown is a doctoral candidate in Musicology at Indiana University and was a Short-Term Research Fellow at New York Public Library in 2018. She is currently working on her dissertation which explores musical activity at American artist colonies in the early twentieth century.

I had the pleasure of spending three weeks working with materials from the Yaddo records of the Manuscripts and Archives Division at The New York Public Library for my dissertation on musical life at American artist colonies in the early 20th century. The first thing to know about the Yaddo collection is it contains a staggering amount of material. The library holds over 500 boxes of items detailing the history of the Yaddo artist colony, including founding legal documents, personal correspondence, concert programs, tickets, photographs, newspaper clippings, and original works of art. Simply considering the breadth and size of the collection, it is easy to see that Yaddo has played a major role in the cultivation of American art over the last century.

Yaddo was originally the late 19th century retreat of wealthy philanthropists Spencer and Katrina Trask in Saratoga Springs, New York. The Trasks first leased the property for the summer of 1881 and eventually purchased it for their permanent vacation home. The impressive estate was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2013 and consists of nearly 40 acres of woods, lakes, countryside, gardens, and a Queen Anne Revival Mansion.
Spencer and his wife Katrina were generous patrons of the arts and cultivated a salon-like atmosphere at Yaddo, inviting artists and intellectuals from all over the world to take part in their lavish house parties and discuss contemporary art, music, philosophy, and science.

Tragically, Spencer and Katrina lost all four of their children before the turn of the 20th century and decided to turn their beloved home into a retreat for artists. The Trasks envisioned a place of "rest and refreshment [for] authors, painters, sculptors, musicians and other artists both men and women, few in number but chosen for their creative gifts" where they could work uninterrupted for long swaths of time and draw inspiration from the beautiful grounds. Yaddo welcomed its first group of creative guests in 1926, including painters, writers, sculptors, and composers.

I spent much of my time at NYPL sifting through administrative records and guest files, looking for items specifically related to Yaddo’s musical history. A particularly difficult task was piecing together details about lesser-known composers and musicians, so stumbling across information linking more familiar composers to Yaddo's early history was a welcome opportunity to expand my previous knowledge of well-known figures. It was a lovely surprise when I stumbled upon Leonard Bernstein’s name on a notecard (and how to reach him), as seen here:
 

Executive Director Elizabeth Ames kept detailed notes on Yaddo guests and their whereabouts after leaving the colony. This particular set of notecards is the remains of a guest card catalog that Ames and her secretaries created in Yaddo’s early decades. I was delighted to discover that many of the cards contained vivid details about guests’ stays, their food preferences, how they got along with other guests (or did not), outstanding long-distance phone bills, and any conflicts that occurred. It does not appear that any personal details from Leonard Bernstein’s residency made it onto his notecard, but it  inspired me to conduct a small investigation into Bernstein’s connections to Yaddo.

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was an American conductor and composer known globally for his charisma and unique style, both on the podium and in his original compositions. Incidentally, this year the music world is celebrating the centennial of Bernstein’s birth and many historians have been inspired to revisit his biography, filling in details and bringing more of his work to concert halls.

After I came across this Bernstein item in the Yaddo collection, I wondered if he had any involvement with Yaddo before 1952. Through his personal letters, I learned that Bernstein had long been familiar with Yaddo and other musicians who spent time there. In August 1940, he wrote to fellow composer Aaron Copland:

"Might Yaddo on Sept. 7 & 8 be interesting? Are you planning to go? I was thinking of upping to Lenox next week or so to see the Kouss [conductor Sergei Koussevitzky]. Perhaps I could combine both."

In this letter, Bernstein refers to the 1940 Yaddo Music Festival of contemporary American music, which featured performances of new compositions by American composers.

A significant challenge for American classical music composers in the early 20th century was finding opportunities in the United States for their music to be performed. In 1932, Aaron Copland and Elizabeth Ames pioneered the Yaddo festivals, which brought young American composers, musicians, and critics together for a few weeks in the summer to play and discuss new American compositions, and culminated in a series of concerts.
The 1940 festival events consisted of four concerts over two days, portions of which were broadcasted nationally on NBC radio. The programs included works by Roy Harris, Charles Ives, Paul Bowles, Richard Donovan, Quincy Porter, Henry Cowell, David Diamond, Arthur Cohn, and many others. If Bernstein was able to make the trip to Yaddo for the festival, he would have had the opportunity to meet many musical peers and hear several American compositions performed for the very first time.

Yaddo no longer mounts a contemporary music festival each summer, but the colony is still in operation and making plans for its continued support of the arts. Yaddo recently announced plans for the stabilization and restoration of the historic mansion, as well as a recommitment to "aesthetic daring, social egalitarianism, and internationalism, and the support of artists at political risk." Yaddo artists have collectively won 74 Pulitzer Prizes, 29 MacArthur Fellowships, 68 National Book Awards, and a Nobel Prize, making the work of any researcher interested in Yaddo’s history quite fruitful. I am eager to see what treasures are uncovered by other researchers in this collection.

NotesQuotations from Bernstein's letters are from The Leonard Bernstein Letters, ed. Nigel Simeone (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).  For more about the festivals, see Rudy Shackelford, "The Yaddo Festivals of American Music, 1932–1952," Perspectives of New Music 17, no. 1 (Autumn-Winter, 1978): 92–125, or Tim Page, "The trailblazer: Aaron Copland and the Festivals of American Music" in Yaddo: Making of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
The Yaddo records are open for research. For more information or to arrange access, email manuscripts@nypl.org.