Tanglewood Totally Explained

Everything about Tanglewood totally explained

Tanglewood is an estate and music venue in Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts and is the home of the annual summer Tanglewood Music Festival and the Tanglewood Jazz Festival. It has been the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home since 1937.

History

Tanglewood was named for American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne, on the advice of his publisher William Ticknor, rented a small cottage in March 1850 from William Aspinwall Tappan in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, a sort of inland Newport, Rhode Island for America's wealthy of the Gilded Age. While at the cottage Hawthorne wrote Tanglewood Tales (1853), a re-writing of a number of Greek myths for boys and girls. In memory of the book, the owner renamed the cottage "Tanglewood", and the name was soon copied by a nearby summer estate owned by the Tappan family.
   Tanglewood concerts can be traced back to 1936, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave its first concerts in the Berkshires. This first three-concert series was held under a tent for a total crowd of 15,000. That same year, Mary Aspinwall Tappan (descendant of Chinese merchant William F. Sturgis and abolitionist Lewis Tappan), gave the family's summer estate - Tanglewood - to the orchestra.
   In 1937 the BSO returned for an all-Beethoven program, presented at Tanglewood (210 acres), donated by the Tappan family. In 1938 a fan-shaped Shed was constructed, with some 5,100 seats, giving the BSO a permanent open-air structure in which to perform. Two years later conductor Serge Koussevitzky initiated a summer school for approximately 300 young musicians, now known as the Tanglewood Music Center (formerly Berkshire Music Center).
   The Boston Symphony Orchestra has performed in the Koussevitzky Music Shed every summer since, except for the interval 1942-45 when the Trustees cancelled the concerts and summer school due to World War II. The Shed was renovated in 1959 with acoustic designs by BBN Technologies. In 1986 the BSO acquired the adjacent Highwood estate, increasing the property area by about 40%. Seiji Ozawa Hall (1994) was built on this newly expanded property.

Young musicians

In addition to hosting world-renowned programs of classical, jazz, and popular music, it also provides musical training in the form of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute (BUTI) for high school students and the Tanglewood Music Center for pre-professional musicians. Other youth-symphony organizations have also performed at either the Music Shed or Ozawa Hall, including the Norwalk Youth Symphony, from Norwalk, CT, and the Boston Youth Symphony.
In its early days, instructors included Aaron Copland (who headed the music composition faculty from 1940-1965), Paul Hindemith, and Olivier Messiaen. Koussevitzky himself taught conducting; his students included Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss. Bernstein conducted his first composition at Tanglewood in 1942 ("Sonata for Clarinet and Piano"). Other students have included Luciano Berio and Alan Hovhaness.

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