Music in the News

In September 2022, the Library of Congress posted a tweet inviting Lizzo, pop musician and trained flautist, to visit and play instruments from their large collection of historic flutes. The invitation centered on a specific item from the collection-- a crystal flute made by Claude Laurent in 1813 and gifted to President James Madison. Lizzo took them up on the invitation and tried out a number of the instruments, including the Madison flute. Then, during a DC-area concert, librarians brought the crystal flute onstage and Lizzo briefly played it in front of the audience and told them about the instrument. 

Reactions on social media and from pundits were immediate and strong, with many praising Lizzo's flute skills and the Library of Congress's outreach methods. Some were outraged by the choice to invite Lizzo specifically, or by her using the flute in her usual onstage context, including a revealing costume and suggestive dancing. 

When music and music history suddenly enter the larger cultural conversation, music researchers pay attention to the ways music works and creates meaning for a broad audience, and try to understand this through analysis of the situation. The current event raises research questions we can examine through research-informed analysis. The boxes on this page propose some research questions inspired by the news around Lizzo and the Library of Congress flute collection, and the reactions that news inspired. The sources in each box suggest some starting points for researching each question.

Interest in the flute collection at the Library of Congress, and the strength of reactions to Lizzo playing some of them, seems largely related to the fact that one of those flutes was owned by President James Madison. But why do we care about James Madison's flute? Why would he be gifted a special flute, and what was the role of classical music in early America?

Lizzo is a pretty big pop star, but some audiences weren't familiar with her before this event, or didn't know much about her "brand" or her previous performances. How does this event fit into her career and image? Why would the Library of Congress choose Lizzo, and why would her audiences and detractors respond so strongly?

Some discussions and stories focused on the safety measures and best practices for handling a fragile 200-year-old instrument. Should *anyone* be playing this? Should it be taken out of the library for a concert? Who gets to use these instruments? Will they still work and sound good? 

If nothing else, inviting Lizzo to play flutes from the Library of Congress collection was effective outreach for the Library-- many more people now know about their historic instrument collections! But what else is in those collections, and how did they end up in a library?