Emily Robinson

Emily Robinson, a Massachusetts native, comes to Boundary Stones by way of Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA where she received her B.A. in Media & Communications and Political Science. A lifelong history fanatic (with a Ben Franklin action figure to prove it), Emily has spent the last several years working on a collaborative archival project with the historic Allentown Band, promoting its history through various forms of digital storytelling— a medium with which Emily has been mesmerized since an elementary school project on Jim Henson, a D.C. native himself. When she's not blogging at WETA, Emily can be found photographing D.C. architecture and obsessing over any and all music.

Posts by Emily Robinson

The Humble Beginnings of the National Symphony Orchestra

9/25/2017

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in DC by Emily Robinson

The National Symphony at their inaugural concert on January 31, 1930 (Photo Source: Used with Permission from the NSDAR Archives)

At 4:45 p.m. on January 31, 1930 the “new and shaky ensemble known tentatively as the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington D.C.” took the stage of the recently finished DAR Constitution Hall at eighteenth and C streets northwest. Conductor Rudolf Schueller and the musicians were welcomed into the hall by vigorous applause from an audience of 2,000 music-loving Washingtonians who eagerly awaited the newly established orchestra’s first notes. Arriving at this moment of glory did not happen easily, or quickly for that matter. While Washington is typically considered a capital of arts and culture today, this was definitely not the case in the early 1900s.