At a concert in Washington, the singer played a few notes on the former US president’s flute, to the delight of the audience.
Photograph: Shawn Miller/Library of Congress
Tuesday night in Washington, Lizzo interrupted her performance when a woman with a flute entered the stage.
The singer gripped the guitar with care while donning a sparkly bodysuit.
“Wow,” she said. Holding it up to the audience, Lizzo explained: “It’s crystal. It’s like playing out of a wine glass.”
She then started playing a note. Lizzo twerked while trilling the flute as the audience went crazy.
Lizzo returned the crystal flute to the audience and said to the crowd, “I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s. We just made history tonight.”
“IT’S LITERALLY AN HEIRLOOM – LIKE… AS A FLUTE PLAYER THIS IS ICONIC AND I WILL NEVER BE OVER IT,” Lizzo captioned a video of the event on Instagram.
Madison served as the country’s fourth president from 1809 to 1817. His crystal flute usually resides at the Library of Congress. It was custom created for Madison’s second inauguration by French watchmaker and technician Claude Laurent. The instrument bears engravings of Madison’s name, rank, and the year of manufacture, 1813.
Before British troops burned down the White House in 1814, some people think that Dolley Madison, the first lady, saved the flute and a well-known painting of George Washington.
Lizzo, a musician who was born Melissa Jefferson, revived interest in the flute more than 200 years later. Thursday saw more than 350,000 likes on an Instagram video of her playing Madison’s flute.
The day before her performance, Lizzo was invited to the Library of Congress to go through its almost 2,000 flutes in its collection and to play some of them, including Madison’s flute.
She played a tune in the library’s Great Hall for the few staff members there. Later, she uploaded a video of her performance to Instagram.
“She is amazingly talented,” Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, curator for the Library of Congress flute collection, told the Washington Post. “It was one happy afternoon watching her enjoy and love being at the library and Great Hall.”
Lizzo, a flautist with classical training, has performed live with her own instrument called Sasha Flute while frequently twerking.
Sasha Flute “narrated” a video of Lizzo experimenting with instruments from the Library of Congress collection in a post on Instagram.
As Lizzo played one tiny flute, the narrator observed, “Child, I don’t know what flute this is, but that’s 500-year-old spit she tasting.”
Tuesday’s performance by Lizzo featuring Madison’s flute brought cheers from the audience. She continued by thanking the library.
“Thank you to the Library of Congress for preserving our history and making history so freaking cool,” she said. “History is freaking cool, you guys.”
