Word: chambers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Coolidge Foundation in the Library of Congress in 1925. She had given the Pension Fund of $200,000 to the Chicago Symphony and built the Sprague Music Building at Yale. For seven years she had been more directly involved with music patronage through her annual festivals of chamber music in the Berkshires and commissions to composers...
...Foundation began by sponsoring concerts in Washington similar to those at South Mountain. Its realm soon enlarged, however, to publications, radio, bringing European musicians to America, awarding medals for outstanding service to chamber music, continuing to commission new works, and, perhaps most important, beginning a program of free "extension concerts" in Europe and in educational and cultural institutions in the United States...
...Coolidge's father, mother, and husband died within 15 months of one another about 1915, Frederick Stock, then conductor of the Chicago Symphony, persuaded her to engage a house quartet to cheer her. Two summers later, when the Stocks were visiting her in the Berkshires, they went to a chamber music festival in Connecticut. At dinner that night, Mr. Stock suggested that Mrs. Coolidge's quartet should play at the festival. Her answer, "Why go so far; why not have it here?" was the beginning of the great scheme which has made the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts a world...
...Coolidge began a series of chamber music festivals in her newly finished Music Temple on South Mountain, near Pittsfield. To them she brought the most capable and renowned musicians in the world. The names of Hugo Kortschak, Willem Willeke, Jacques Gordon, Rudolf Kolisch, William Kroll, Albert Spalding, Myra Hess, and hosts of others appear on these programs. In these years she organized the Berkshire Quartet, the Coolidge Quartet, and the Elshuco Trio. She inaugurated in 1921 the Coolidge Prize for chamber music compositions and began commissioning works by contemporary composers. The list of those she has helped in this...
...realized that the job of running the concerts, awarding the prizes, selecting composers for commission, had become far too extensive for her to handle alone. She therefore decided to transfer the administration to the Library of Congress, where she built a chamber music auditorium, Coolidge Hall. To it she added the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, the greatest institution of music patronage in the world. On establishing the Foundation, Mrs. Coolidge wrote, "Fashion is an enemy to art, I think, and if we aim at a musical center which shall be as respectively national as the Library... it would...