At so many landmarks of note, we hear America singing.

BY DWIGHT YOUNG

At the National Preservation Conference in Cleveland, I paid my first visit to Severance Hall, which may be the most gorgeous concert hall in the country, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is now firmly lodged near the top of my personal favorite-places list. Since then, I’ve been thinking about music and buildings and preservation.

From George Gershwin to Janis Joplin, from bluegrass and the blues to rap and the Broadway show tune, popular music is America’s biggest and best-known export. Millions of people in other countries don’t know a thing about daily life in the United States, but they sure as heck know how America sounds. Maybe we didn’t (to quote that old Coca-Cola commercial) “teach the world to sing,” but we certainly gave the world a bright, new—and distinctively American—song.

Music is the soundtrack of our lives—and our buildings. When Goethe called architecture frozen music, he knew what he was talking about. Art deco sounds like jazz. A glass-walled skyscraper plays a Henry Mancini tune, exuding sleek sophistication from every spandrel. Think “cathedral” and your head fills with the thundering chords of a Bach fugue, and I defy anyone to drive through a ranch-house subdivision without hearing the peppy theme from Leave It to Beaver.

It’s not surprising that music-related buildings are getting considerable attention from preservationists. Right now, the Trust’s Save America’s Treasures program is helping preserve the historic Chess Records studio in Chicago. Like the Sun Records building in Memphis (where Elvis made his first recording) and Detroit’s Hitsville usa (the original home of Motown Records), the Chess studio isn’t much to look at—but who cares? Songs recorded here by artists such as Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and Aretha Franklin have become part of mankind’s musical language. Chess records have traveled the world and beyond: The Rolling Stones immortalized its address—2120 South Michigan Ave.—in the title of a 1960s instrumental, and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” was included on a record sent far into the solar system by nasa in 1977.

Given all of this, it was a pretty big shock to learn recently that one of Washington, D.C.’s musical landmarks had bitten the dust last summer before anyone knew what was happening. In the 1920s, a ragtime pianist named Louis Thomas opened a popular cabaret on the ground floor of a turn-of-the-century row house at Ninth and R streets. A young Washingtonian named Edward Ellington—everyone called him “Duke”—frequently played piano there when he was just getting started in the music biz. As the launching pad for Ellington, the building could have become a major attraction in the reviving Shaw neighborhood—but that won’t happen now, because there’s nothing left of it.

Citing its deterioration, the city told the owner to fix the house or flatten it, and the owner—despite Washington’s tough law against demolition by neglect and last-minute efforts to call off the bulldozers—had it leveled. Preservationists and city officials engaged in the requisite handwringing over the unnecessary loss, but the fuss, like the dust at Ninth and R, eventually settled down. The owner plans condos on the lot, probably adorned with one of those “On This Site Formerly Stood … ” signs.

In 1970, Simon and Garfunkel recorded a wistful and adoring little love song called “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright:”

Architects may come and architects may go,
And never change your point of view.
When I run dry,
I stop awhile and think of you.

Oddly enough, it’s the only song about an architect that I know of. No one, it seems, has gotten around to writing “Moonlight and Roses and Henry Hobson Richardson” or “Hey Hey, I.M. Pei.” No matter. Though there may not be much music about buildings, there are lots of buildings about music—but not so many that we can afford to let the wrecking ball silence the melody.

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