Tanglewood is a summer home for the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts, as well as the Tanglewood Jazz Festival and Tanglewood Music Festival. Mrs. Gorham Brooks and Miss Mary Aspinwall Tappan gave the Tappan family estate, Tanglewood, to Mr. Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in 1936. The site has hosted festivals on its grounds ever since. The venue is 526 acres (212.86 hectares) in size and attracts around 350,000 visitors each year.
When a small group of Berkshire residents presented the New York Philharmonic at Interlocken in 1934, the seeds for this venue were sown. The residents held a second summer festival the following season, and then again in 1936, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra joined the repertoire and the venue was relocated to Holmwood. The 1936 festival, which was held under a giant tent, drew around 15,000 people. Finally, in 1937, the festival relocated to Tanglewood and adopted the name Tanglewood Musical Festival, which it retains today.
During the 1940s, the site grew rapidly, with the construction of several buildings that now make up the venue’s core structures. The Tanglewood Music Center, Theatre-Concert Hall, Chamber Music Hall, and a few smaller studios were all finished 1941. The venue could now accommodate approximately 100,000 visitors per year as a result of the expansion.
The complex was nearly doubled in size from its original 210 acres when it was expanded in 1986. (85 hectares). With the purchase of the new property, the committee was able to relocate their concert hall to its current location. The Seiji Ozawa Hall, which opened on July 7, 1994, was the name given to this new concert hall. Tanglewood concerts can now accommodate more people and offer a wider range of performances thanks to the new hall. The Tanglewood Music Center and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute (BUTI) are two music schools on the property, where musical greats such as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Lukas Foss have all taught the school’s students.
The Tanglewood Tales, a collection of short stories Nathaniel Hawthorne, inspired the venue’s name. In the Berkshires in 1850, Hawthorne rented a cottage from William Aspinwall Tappan and rewrote a series of Greek myths. Tappan renamed the cottage Tanglewood in honor of the author’s achievement, a name that would eventually be applied to the entire Tappan estate.