As the daughter of two classically-trained musicians, Carla Hayden grew up in a family that had high expectations for her musical talent. Her mother played the piano; her father, who played the violin, was recruited to start the string department at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. Hayden was involved in music for many years, playing the piano until she was 12 years old. “By that time, we all agreed that music wasn’t my thing. There was no shame or blame about it,” she says. “But books and reading were my thing. When my family saw notes, they heard music. I could look at text and hear words.”
Hayden, who joined the Peabody Institute Advisory Board last fall, went on to break barriers in library science. Beginning in 1993, she served for 23 years as the CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. This system includes more than 20 library branches around the city, as well as the Central Library, which is also the State Library Resource Center for more than 150 public libraries in Maryland. Then, in 2016, President Barack Obama appointed Hayden to be the Librarian of Congress. She is only the 14th person to hold this position at the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, since the role was established in 1802. She is also the first African American individual and the first woman to serve in this position.
Her new PIAB role allows her a role that will allow her to bring together her family’s history of music with her own interest in words. “Peabody already has a connection with the Library of Congress, just as we do with other conservatories. But, because of its basic physical proximity to us, I’m interested in strengthening that connection even more,” says Hayden, who first became acquainted with Peabody through her role at the Pratt, which has a program for Peabody student musicians to perform in public libraries around Baltimore City.
Through her position on the board, Hayden would like to see more Peabody students playing at the Library of Congress, as well as diving into its collections—which include approximately 164 million items—to enhance their performances. The library’s assemblage of musical instruments alone includes violins, violas, and cellos, as well as about 1,500 flutes—the largest collection of a single musical instrument in the world.
To illustrate what this could look like, Hayden mentions the January 2023 run of the Washington National Opera’s The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Peabody faculty member Denyce Graves had the lead role in this opera that focused on how Dawson founded the National Negro Opera Company, the first African American opera company, in 1941. Staff members at the Library of Congress, which houses the National Negro Opera Company Collection, including correspondence, photographs, programs, music, and more, put together a collection to accompany the performance and enhance the audience’s understanding of the historical significance of the show. With the new Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., which has a 375-seat theater, Hayden foresees more opportunities to collaborate in this way with Peabody musicians and performers.
In her new role on the PIAB, Hayden is also thinking about her parents’ experiences as musicians, as well as their time as college students in music at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, shortly before the Civil Rights Movement began. “As African American classical musicians, I know that dreams they had were deferred,” Hayden says. “I’m very interested in student life and student activities, especially for underrepresented groups in classical music.”