[Dixielandjazz] American Songbook Archives

[Stephen G Barbone]

As many of us know, Michael Feinstein has an enormous collection of  
American Songbook memorabilia. The good news is that eventually it  
will become accessible on line from its new home in Carmel Indiana.  
(Near Indianapolis)

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

Archive of the American Songbook Finds a New Home in the Heartland
NY TIMES - February 5, 2011 - By DAVID BELCHER

Michael Feinstein is perhaps best known as a singer and pianist and  
the owner of a cabaret on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that bears his  
name. He’s also well known as a passionate historian of American song  
and for his vast collection of memorabilia. Now his collection will be  
housed at a new performing arts center in Carmel, Ind., a three-hour  
drive from his childhood home.

Mr. Feinstein, 54, said he accepted an invitation to house the  
collection at the $150 million Center for Performing Arts in Carmel  
because the cost of doing so in New York or another large city would  
have been prohibitive. A native of Columbus, Ohio, he also regarded  
Carmel, a suburb of Indianapolis, as a quintessential heartland  
location to display his collection of American music from the 1920s to  
the 1960s.

“The Great American Songbook is about the diversity of our country,”  
he said this week in a telephone interview. “Many writers came from  
New York or created music in Hollywood, but they came from everywhere,  
including Hoagy Carmichael and Cole Porter from Indiana.”

In addition to the collection, the center will house the Michael  
Feinstein Foundation for the Preservation of the Great American  
Songbook, in the center’s Palladium Theater, which opened last week.  
The archive and a planned museum will include a library with  
interactive displays and digital technology for people to access  
online from all over the world. But the sheer size of the space — all  
of it donated by the center to the Feinstein Foundation — was the big  
selling point.

“We estimate that Michael’s collection could fill a 70,000-square-foot  
building between display and storage,” said the center’s president and  
executive director, Steven Libman. “Michael wanted a place where the  
collection wouldn’t be lost among other collections or the glitter of  
a larger city.”

Mr. Feinstein, who was Ira Gershwin’s assistant for six years, has  
amassed a collection that includes hundreds of thousands of pages of  
original sheet music and full orchestrations from composers like Rudy  
Vallee, Henry Mancini and Peter Allen. He has thousands of LPs,  
private recordings and demos, and memorabilia like a snow globe that  
Irving Berlin gave to Rosemary Clooney after the filming of “White  
Christmas”; a 10-page telegram from Florenz Ziegfeld to Gus Kahn; a  
drawing of sheet-music art from the original “Porgy and Bess”; a  
limited-edition score of “Red, Hot and Blue” autographed in 1937 by  
Cole Porter and given to Mr. Feinstein by Bob Hope; and George  
Gershwin’s first song contract from 1916.

Much of the collection was kept in Mr. Feinstein’s homes in New York,  
Los Angeles and Carmel, in addition to three storage units in  
California — all of it meticulously catalogued. “You give me any  
space, and I can fill it up,” he said.

“Before I started a foundation people were giving me things because  
they didn’t know what to do with them or their families didn’t want  
them,” he added. “When people donate something they want to know that  
it will continue to have a life. Many places accept things which then  
go into a black hole.”