Alison Stewart: This is All of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. On today's show, we're going to have a few conversations about higher education with colleges beginning their fall semesters. We'll take a look at a documentary called Bama Rush takes a look at greek life. We'll also hear about a new book called Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price. About how the pandemic lockdowns brought certain inequalities to the forefront as higher ed institutions converted to remote learning. Professor and author Anthony Abraham Jack will be here to discuss. We'll also talk about Title IX, how sexual violence on campus can be a threat to women's rights to education, a new book called A Survivor's Education: Women Violence and The Stories We Don't Tell from Joy Neumeyer. She'll also join us a little later on.

Plus, we have some announcements about our Get Lit with all of it Book Club Event, which is officially back after our summer hiatus. We'll unveil our book selection when we kick off the second hour of today's show o stay tuned for that. That is all coming up, but let's get things started with an iconic singer at an iconic New York venue. Here's Judy Garland at Carnegie hall.

[MUSIC -Judy Garland: When you're smiling.]

Alison Stewart: I feel bad interrupting Judy Garland. That is Julie Garland performing live at Carnegie Hall in 1961 for what is described as one of the greatest nights in show business history. A signed copy of Garland's Live at Carnegie Hall album is the inspiration for one of the episodes of the podcast that tells the stories of objects in Carnegie Hall's Rose Archives and Museum.

In other episodes, we learn about the history of the hall's opening night in Gilded Age New York, how the Rock Revolution brought a new crowd, and also, a historically important fundraiser for the civil rights movement. The podcast is called If This Hall Could Talk, produced by Carnegie Hall with sound made in public and in partnership with WQXR. The last episode of the season dropped this month. With me now in studio is host Jessica Vosk, singer and Broadway veteran who's performed at Carnegie Hall. Hi, Jessica.

Jessica Vosk: Hi, how are you?

Alison Stewart: And also Kathleen Sabogal, Director of Carney Hall's Rose Archives and Museum. Nice to meet you.

Kathleen Sabogal: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: All right, listeners, let's get you in on this. Do you have a favorite memory of a night at Carnegie Hall? What was the best concert you've ever seen at the venue? Call or text us now at 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. What do you think is special about Carnegie Hall? What makes the venue stand out compared to others? Or maybe you're out there and you've actually performed at Carnegie Hall like Jessica Vosk. Let us know. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC.

Of course, social media is available at @allofitWNYC. You perform at Carnegie Hall. I'm going to get it out of the way. What does it compare?

Jessica Vosk: Oh, man.

Alison Stewart: How does it compare?

Jessica Vosk: It doesn't. When they say the old adage of how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. I mean, it's true and then you get to Carnegie Hall and you don't remember it because it's so fantastic that your entire psyche blacks out. It was the best experience. I mean, I've had the honor of performing there twice with my own solo show and with the Judy Garland tribute, which again, was the impetus behind getting this podcast started and I'll be there this year with the New York Pops for Christmas. I feel like it's home. It's a very, very beautiful place to call home.

Alison Stewart: Kathleen. The podcast is built around these objects, these specific objects from the museum. As a director of the archive, what kind of objects are we talking about?

Kathleen Sabogal: These are, as you said, the signed Judy Garland album. We also have Benny Goodman's clarinet and the ticket for opening night, the very first opening night, May 5, 1891, a program flyer from benefit for Martin Luther King. These are all objects that are on display in our museum. It's a range of things from actual objects to ephemera that all have some connection to an amazing event that happened at the hall.

Alison Stewart: One subject who's interviewed for the podcast is Gino Francescioni. Yay, I said it.

Kathleen Sabogal: That's nice. You said that like you're actually Italian.

Alison Stewart: Thank you. I grew up in Jersey. Hey. Carnegie's archives. How did Gino and his team first go about trying to amass the archive? Where did they go to find objects?

Kathleen Sabogal: The archives started in 1986, and the whole impetus was to try to collect enough things to do one exhibit and with an eye towards our centennial, which was happening in 1991. Prior to this there was no archives at Carnegie Hall, so Gino had to go out and actually collect things. There were programs, some bound programs at the hall, but then everything else, he put ads in collectible newspapers, he went to flea markets.

Then when eBay came around, that was a great boon for us and then just writing to people, writing to the families of the architect, the Damrosch family from the Oratorio society. And so that was the way we just started to build and amass the collection.

Alison Stewart: The first episode of the podcast brings us to '61 from Judy Garland, that legendary concert. This is a review from just three months online. This performance, in my opinion, and many others whose opinions mean a lot more than mine, was the greatest performance by any entertainer, living or dead.

Jessica Vosk: I'm going to have to agree with that. I remember when I did this Judy Garland tribute for her centennial at Carnegie Hall, it was a beautiful-- little snippets of her concert with orchestrations from her 1961 concert, which never was supposed to happen because she was told you're so ill that you're never going to perform again. This was a huge-- and it was very close to the end of her life, but it became one of the best, highly awarded, best-selling, most iconic albums. I remember asking the audience in that moment, who saw that concert?

Alison Stewart: Oh, wow.

Jessica Vosk: Please raise your hand or something like that because I'm one of those people that's not scripted. You're welcome to all of your listeners. But I said, raise your hand. And so there were actually a handful of people in the room, in the audience who had seen that 1961 concert and I had them stand up, and I'm getting goosebumps as I'm talking about it right now but everyone applauded them and almost gave them a standing ovation for being there. Can you imagine? I certainly cannot. I would like to take a time machine back.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a little time machine and listen to Over the Rainbow.

[MUSIC - Judy Garland: Over the Rainbow.]

Alison Stewart: Jessica, what do you hear in her voice?

Jessica Vosk: Oh, Judy is one of those performers, I always tell people, who remains iconic and remains alive because of the pure emotion and vulnerability that she brings to a piece of music. I mean, if you hear it and listen to it just as the layman listening to it, you'll hear little cracks and differences in timbre and tone, and you could tell she's a bit older but what I hear as a singer is just the extreme vulnerability that she's using in her voice and emotion.

I mean, there's nothing like a storytelling type of person and she made everybody feel like they were in the living room with her. 3000 people feel like they were her best friend and that's what I hear.

Alison Stewart: There are so many albums say, "live at Carnegie Hall" Kathleen, as you're thinking about it. What is it about "live at Carnegie Hall" that remains timeless?

Jessica Vosk: I think it's like this-- as you said, it captures this moment and this magic that's hard to capture but there's something about a live album in general, just hearing the talking, the audience, the reactions, and it's Carnegie Hall, so I think it's special to begin with, and then you've recorded it and you've captured it, and it's just iconic.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some calls. Julie from Bethel, Connecticut is calling in. Hi, Julie. Thanks for calling All of It.

Bethel: Hi, thank you for having me. In 1980, I was in college, and The Weavers had a reunion concert at-- or their final reunion concert, I should say, at Carnegie Hall. My dad flew me in from Ohio, from college, and we went together, and we were way up in the nosebleeders, if there are those in Carnegie Hall, and it was the most captivating, magnificent, emotional concert I'd ever seen.

Lee Hayes was in a wheelchair, Ronnie Gilbert could just sing to the rafters, Pete Seeger, of course. And nobody wanted to leave. Nobody wanted to leave even after it was over. There were ovations after ovations. Finally, it was over and my strongest memory of this event was everybody just leaving the hall slowly. The last song had been Good Night Irene. And walking down the stairwells, everybody kept singing it.

3000 or thousands of people singing this song in I don't know how many harmonies and the music, the sounds just bouncing up and down the stairwells and into the streets. It was the most stunning, beautiful New York City memory And I grew up there that I've ever had, and I'll never forget it.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for sharing that. Let's talk to Jane from Hamilton Heights. Hi, Jane.

Jane: Hello. How are you? My great memory of Carnegie Hall is in 5th and 6th grades. My friend Yolanda and I had tickets to the young people's concerts. Leonard Bernstein held two-- We attended two seasons, and we sat in seats DD104 and 105, way up in the dress circle and we just loved Bernstein. We thought he was wonderful. These were concerts that were later televised and they later told-- he introduced young people to various concepts of musical theory, music types, different types of music. He was just wonderful.

I remember the very last concert we attended, he had us-- it was all about Gustav Mahler, and he had us all singing the last words of one of Mahler's choruses, symphonies, [unintelligible 00:12:20], which I believe meant forever.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Jane: And later on, let me tell you one quick thing [inaudible 00:12:27].

Alison Stewart: Okay, real quick.

Jane: Later on, my ballet teacher, Marion Facey, had an apartment and studio in one of those famed Carnegie Hall apartments and all of these people that I'm discussing, except Leonard Bernstein, were African American.

Alison Stewart: Interesting. Well, thank you. That took a turn. I didn't expect that. That was interesting. Thank you so much for sharing your story. My guests are Jessica Vosk and Kathleen Sabogal. We're talking about If This Hall Could Talk, the podcast. The second episode, Kathleen, focuses on the first concert performed at Carnegie Hall when it opened in 1891, but it also goes into the history of the hall, and the story goes that Andrew Carnegie came up with this idea on a boat. [laughs] Somebody dive in and share with me what the story was.

Kathleen Sabogal: He was on his way to his honeymoon in Scotland with Louise, his wife, and on the ship was Walter Damrosch, the conductor of the Oratorio Society and Symphony Society, and his father, Leopold, who had passed away. His dream was a concert hall for choral music. And so on the ship, they strike up a friendship. It continues when they're in Europe, and Andrew warms up to the idea of building a concert hall for choral music. And when they return, the plan is put into action, and he begins to look for land, and we open on May 5th, 1891 with Tchaikovsky.

Jessica Vosk: I think that's an amazing story because my brain goes to the fact of, gosh, how many conversations happen on yachts today that wind up with these fantastic ideas? Back then, they wanted-- I remember in all of the research this and reading all of this before I got to host this podcast, you realize that it was so far uptown at the time and it was so unlikely for a venue to be built that far uptown, but it was for the community.

It was supposed to be meant for not just choral performances, but an emphasis on choral performance, but to bring the community together. At the time, I believe it was 14th Street that was--

Kathleen Sabogal: That was midtown.

Jessica Vosk: The midtown of it all. Coming up to Carnegie Hall was quite a schlep, as they say, but I think what an incredible-- Can you imagine that idea just not having happened what an incredible institution that we have today?

Alison Stewart: We'll have more on this If This Hall Could Talk, after a quick break. This is All of It. This is All of It. I'm Alison Stewart. We're talking with Jessica Vosk, the host of the podcast. If This Hall Could Talk, we're talking about Carnegie Hall. Also joining us is the Director of Carnegie Hall's Rose Archives and Museum, Kathleen Sabogal. Let's talk to Mo from Riverdale. Hi, Mo.

Mo: Hi. How are you, Alison?

Alison Stewart: Great.

Mo: Wonderful. One of my favorite shows that you have, my story about Carnegie Hall is I used to work there almost 20 years ago. At that time, the 8th floor used to have artist studios, ballet studios, music studios, and we had an architecture firm that I worked for on the 8th floor. In our office, there was actually a trap door that if you're in the hall and you look up and you see the ring of light. That was where they used to go in and be able to change all the lights.

Anyway, when we used to work at night and we worked late and whatever, we would open the trap door and the music would just come through there, and we would just listen to concerts.

Jessica Vosk: Free concerts. I love it.

Mo: Free concert. Yes, absolutely.

Alison Stewart: Mo, thank you so much for calling in. What's your favorite piece of history or piece of trivia about Carney Hall?

Jessica Vosk: A lot of it has to do with understanding the history through the podcast that we've recorded. I actually really love the episode that we recorded about Martin Luther King and the Rat Pack. I find that to be so incredibly ahead of its time as far as using one's platform to bring awareness to another platform or to an idea. Meaning Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack friends, they were the ones to bring Martin Luther King to Carnegie Hall and say, "This man has these incredible ideas, and he's a fantastic speaker, and the world should be hearing him and listening to him."

Us, a crew of white guys, are going to be the ones to back him when a lot of people wouldn't. And I think that that history repeats itself often, and I find that to be one of the most incredible pieces of history that I've gotten to learn.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Helmut from Manhattan. Hi, Helmut.

Helmut: Hi. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing well.

Helmut: Can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: Yes. Your story. Go for it.

Helmut: My best story about Carnegie Hall is, like, I saw my daughter performing there earlier this year. She's at the United Nations school. Carnegie Hall opens the doors every four years for schools in Manhattan to have their kids on the orchestra and the string quartets to perform at Carnegie Hall. She's playing the flute, and it was incredible. I mean, I've seen her, obviously, in school concerts, but seeing her and hearing her in that hall with that acoustic was just mind-blowing. And I really thank Carnegie Hall for making it available. My daughter's experience is priceless for that type of moment.

Alison Stewart: Such a wonderful memory. Thank you so much for calling in. Someone texted. I heard Nina Simone perform at Carnegie Hall in 1963.

Jessica Vosk: FOMO.

Alison Stewart: It was a performance I remember to this day. So special. One of the episodes you write about is about Ella Fitzgerald's glasses. Tell us a little bit about Ella Fitzgerald's glasses, Kathleen.

Kathleen Sabogal: Those were donated by the Ella Fitzgerald Foundation. She had poor eyesight so we have these. They're iconic glasses and on display. They're on display with the album, her live Newport jazz album and she's wearing the glasses on the album cover. The glass classes are the object but then we get to delve into Ella and listen to Ella and Samara Joy. And I just love how we can connect these objects and go deeper and talk about the music and the person. It's just been great.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a little bit of Ella.

[MUSIC - Ella Fitzgerald: I've Gotta Be Me.]

Alison Stewart: Got this great text. This is Amy. I saw the Violent Femmes at Carnegie Hall right before it was fully renovated. It was so much fun. They invited fans on stage, and it was a pretty wild night. Tell us about how rock came to Carnegie Hall.

Jessica Vosk: When I walked into Carnegie Hall, I should say, for the first time, Carnegie Hall has this amazing thing backstage where you see portraits of everybody who's been there, and it's all black and white and you see, of course, Nina Simone, you see Judy, you see Liza, you see every iconic human being. The thing that I love the most is that the Beatles made their United States debut at Carnegie Hall.

They were the rock band at the time to make their debut at Carnegie Hall and in one of our episodes, we dive into the fact the rock of it all and how Carnegie Hall isn't just a place where you're going to hear classical music or orchestral music. You hear it all. Like we said, there's such an educational wing of Carnegie Hall that brings in all of these youth groups and orchestras, and these kids, again, get to have these experiences that I never got to have necessarily as a kid that I would die for now.

The rock stuff, like hearing the Violent Femmes, hearing this person say that they got to see them, makes so much sense to me because Carnegie Hall also became this, again, what Andrew and et al wanted, which was a community feeling, and rock was that. To know that the Beatles performed there and that I got to say I performed there makes me feel like I'm friends with the Beatles.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's talk about the etiquette. When you had the rock audience, you heard going on stage with the Violent Femmes. How'd those dynamics play out, Kathleen?

Kathleen Sabogal: The object for the rock episode is this t-shirt that is very cool looking and it has Carnegie Hall written on it. But the whole impetus was that the ushers would look less imposing to these rock audiences if they were wearing t-shirts. It didn't really work that well and the t-shirts were short-lived, but yes. I mean, we had a season, 1971 to '72 where we had over 70 rock concerts at the hall.

Led Zeppelin, The Doors, The Rolling Stones were at Carnegie Hall. You name it, they've been there. And it's not the place you think of for rock music but before arena rock really took off, you would play it at bigger places like Carnegie Hall.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Edna. Hi, Edna. I've got about a minute for you. Go for it.

Edna: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Yes, go for it.

Edna: My greatest evening at Carnegie Hall, even though there were many, was Liza Minnelli, Judy's daughter. I went to two performances. The second performance, it was done for theater people, for the Broadway stars. It was electrifying. She was on fire. Her voice, her dancing. The orchestra people at the end didn't want to leave. They were standing in and screaming. It was fantastic. And in fact, I have the CD.

Alison Stewart: Love that. Edna, thank you so much for calling in. How do you hope people take in the podcast, If This Hall Could Talk?

Jessica Vosk: In doing If This Hall Could Talk, which is such a group effort between all of us, I want people to understand that Carnegie Hall, you can go and see this museum. You can go and have a tour of the archives and see these pieces that we talk about. They're tangible pieces and I want people to know that the history that has brought us to 2024 and beyond comes from all of these people who paved the way to get there.

I mean, I always consider Judy Garland someone who paved the way for a gal like me to be able to have a sassy, New Jersey, brash, belty life. And I think for several musicians and people who are aspiring to do such things, listening to this podcast and understanding where things came from before, I mean, you talk about Samara Joy talking about Ella Fitzgerald.

There are all of these real big connections that aren't just associated with Coke Bottle glasses, but the minute you think of Ella, you think of the Coke Bottle glasses, and you think of the fact that she was very scared to sing on stage, and it's something we all understand. I want people to take much more than just listening to a thing about an archival piece.

Alison Stewart: It's so great. No, that's one of the great things about the podcast. It really is. And you're a terrific host, by the way.

Jessica Vosk: Why, thank you.

Alison Stewart: If This Hall Could Talk, Jessica Vosk is the host. Kathleen Sabogal is Director of Carney Hall's Rose Archives and Museums. Thanks for coming to the studio.

Kathleen Sabogal: Thank you.

Jessica Vosk: Thank you for having us.

 

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