A D.C. Music Museum Sounds Better and Better

Like so many other big ideas around here -- a new children's museum, an outer beltway, rail to Dulles, voting rights for D.C. residents -- the notion of a national music museum has bounced around for years, collecting VIP endorsements (Nancy Sinatra, then-first lady Hillary Clinton, mega-developer Herb Miller) and getting nowhere.

For more than a decade, plans for a music museum and performance center have surfaced in Congress, at the D.C. Council and in corporate boardrooms. Most recently, the museum was proposed for the site of the city's old convention center, now a freshly paved 10-acre parking lot between Ninth and 11th streets NW.

But the D.C. government controls what goes in that empty space, so don't look for answers in this lifetime. A new central library? Housing? Retail? Convention hotel? An occasion to dump even more money into the pockets of friendly contractors? Now you're talking.

Just a couple of blocks away, however, you can hear a faint song of hope for the civic imagination: Amid the wreckage of another reach for glory -- the ill-conceived D.C. history museum that opened in 2003 and closed in 2004 in the old Carnegie Library on Mount Vernon Square -- the prototype for a music museum is taking root.

On the two days after Christmas, you can get a preview by taking the family for free music performances and lessons (piano, guitar, deejaying, writing hip-hop lyrics). Shortly after that, promoters of the museum, led by business bigwigs at the Federal City Council, expect to sign a three-year lease for the Carnegie Library building, which would become The Gig, a space for performance and instruction ( http://www.the-gig.us ).

The Gig seeks to generate a sonic boom bursting through this city's geographic and class lines. As music center director Jim Weaver, a harpsichordist and former music curator at the Smithsonian, says: "If you're a lawyer on K Street and like to play rock but never have the opportunity, you could come by and pick up one of our instruments and get a Sonic Workout with a personal trainer. And if you live in the neighborhood, you could come over and get lessons or sign up your kid for the marching band."

With instruments supplied by Yamaha, support from foundations eager to rebuild arts education in the city and income from ticket sales, organizers intend to fill the vacuum created when testing mania led to the elimination of music classes in many public schools. "Few D.C. schools have marching bands, so we're going to create a citywide band," Weaver says.

He is considering filling the wee-hours gap after D.C. nightspots close by having deejays play house music in a coffeehouse setting on Saturday nights right up to The Gig's Sunday gospel brunch.

If it all sounds too ambitious to be true, there are nonetheless reasons to believe it might happen. "The Historical Society brings us a facility in fabulous condition, with $20 million of rehabbing already done for the City Museum, all equipped for distance learning and multimedia programming," Weaver says.

The Gig is designed to see what programs will draw crowds and what should go into the ultimate goal: a music museum and performance center that could end up along the Anacostia waterfront or maybe even on that old convention center site.

After years of riding the District roller coaster, Weaver isn't predicting anything. He's just observing that even in a city rooted in dysfunction, even with a government that reneges on deals, wastes dollars by the hundreds of millions and lets problems fester for decades on end, "if you keep breathing and don't go away, sometimes things happen."

The music rings out on the second day of Christmas.

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By this point in Washington's endless baseball soap opera, everybody hates one another and nobody trusts anyone else. Before Mayor Tony Williams pulled the emergency brake on today's scheduled D.C. Council vote on the lease for a new stadium, baseball's bosses were preparing to announce that without a solid deal with the District, they would invite new offers from other cities that might want the Wandering Expos/Nats.

No one seems to want to help anyone else. Baseball sits back and glowers instead of making the relatively small gestures that would give council members the political cover they need to approve the deal. Congress and the White House, which happily used Washington as a threat against baseball's antitrust exemption for all our years in the post-Senators desert, have fallen silent.

Fans and union members rallied yesterday for baseball, while a small pack of protesters disingenuously tried to blame the stadium deal for the failure to fix the city's decrepit schools. The game of brinksmanship may now continue right up to New Year's Eve. But the bottom line remains the same: A stadium means an extended downtown and a broader tax base, the city's only real hope to meet the needs of its residents.

How will this game end? Who will broker a deal? There's a fella working down at Arena Stage this week in the new production of "Damn Yankees," an out-of-towner who knows Washington baseball through and through. Commutes between here and a place more infernal than the Springfield Mixing Bowl. Guy by the name of Applegate. I could have sworn I saw him yesterday hanging out in the Wilson Building, just outside the office of the council chairman, Linda Cropp.

E-mail:marcfisher@washpost.com