Sunday, May 06, 2007

RECOVERED HISTORY


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THE MACDOWELL COLONY

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS - The Library of Congress is celebrating the
centennial of The MacDowell Colony – the first artists' residency
program in America and the model for hundreds of others – with a new
exhibition titled "A Century of Creativity: The MacDowell Colony
1907-2007." Among the many featured artists included in the exhibition
are composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, playwright Thornton
Wilder and novelist Willa Cather. The MacDowell Colony was founded in
1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, Marian, on 450 wooded
acres in Peterborough, N.H. Their vision was to provide artists of
exceptional talent with uninterrupted time, a private workspace and a
dynamic community of peers to inspire creativity and excellence. This
simple formula has had a profound impact. The MacDowell Colony has, to
date, awarded fellowships to more than 6,000 writers, visual artists,
composers, playwrights, filmmakers, architects and interdisciplinary.

Aaron Copland was unknown as a composer when he first came to The
MacDowell Colony in 1925. The artists he met there that summer changed
his perception of art in America. Years later, Copland acknowledged his
debt to the Colony, saying that if people found his music distinctly
American, the Colony deserved some of the credit.

Playwright Dorothy Kuhns met poet DuBose Heyward at The MacDowell Colony
in 1922, and they married the following year. When the Heywards
returned to the Colony in 1924, DuBose was working on his novel Porgy.
It was Dorothy who convinced DuBose it would work as a play, and the two
collaborated on dramatizing the story, which became the basis for George
Gershwin's legendary opera Porgy and Bess.

Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer-prize winning play Our Town is inextricably
linked to Peterborough, New Hampshire, which was a model for the play's
fictional town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire.

www.macdowellcolony.org.
http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2007/07-005.html

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