Music and the American Presidency: A Virtual Fireside Chat with U.S. Presidents

THEODORE ROOSEVELT: I accept with pleasure and thank you heartily for the beautiful piano which you recently placed in the White House.(1) THOMAS JEFFERSON: No doubt a pianoforte would be a perfectly proper piece of furniture. But in the present state of our funds, they will be exhausted by articles more indispensable.(2) CALVIN COOLIDGE: The… Read more »

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT: I accept with pleasure and thank you heartily for the beautiful piano which you recently placed in the White House.(1)

THOMAS JEFFERSON: No doubt a pianoforte would be a perfectly proper piece of furniture. But in the present state of our funds, they will be exhausted by articles more indispensable.(2)

CALVIN COOLIDGE: The great contribution of the piano has been to open a storehouse of composition and enable good music to be familiar and popular…(3)

HARRY S TRUMAN: I once read some place that a happy childhood is a very, very rare thing, and I’m sure that that is true, but I can honestly say I had one… Of course, we didn’t have all the places to go and things to do that kids do now, and a lot of them don’t see how they can get along if they don’t have them. But I guess if you don’t know what you’re missing, you don’t miss it, and so, of course, when I was a boy, we didn’t have cars and movies and television and radio, none of that. We played. My mother played, and my sister and I played the piano…(4)

RICHARD M. NIXON: Playing the piano is a way of expressing oneself that is perhaps even more fulfilling than writing or speaking.(5)

RONALD REAGAN: …For awhile there I almost convinced myself I could play.(6)

(1) From Theodore Roosevelt’s March 2, 1903 Letter to Steinway collected in the Theodore Roosevelt Papers; cited in Music at the White House: A History of the American Spirit by Elise K. Kirk (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 172.

(2) From Thomas Jefferson’s June 18, 1800 Letter to Claxton {original letter in the Massachusetts Historical Society}; reprinted in Music at the White House: A History of the American Spirit by Elise K. Kirk (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 34.

(3) From “Bring the Best Music to the People, Urges President Coolidge,” The Musician, September 1923, p. 8.

(4) From a comment by Harry S Truman in Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman by Merle Miller (New York: Berkley Publishing Co. distributed by Putnam, 1972), p. 49.

(5) From The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Simon and Schuster), p. 9; also reprinted in Music at the White House: A History of the American Spirit by Elise K. Kirk (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 318.

(6) From a Reagan quote in The Films of Ronald Reagan by Tony Thomas (Secaucus NJ: Citadel Press, 1980), p. 119; reprinted in Music at the White House: A History of the American Spirit by Elise K. Kirk (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 348.