Philadelphia, PA

Philadelphia wrote the country's founding documents and much of its musical constitution. In Independence Hall the Declaration and the Constitution were debated and signed; a few blocks away the Liberty Bell keeps its crack and its pilgrims. The city's musical charter is nearly as weighty: the Academy of Music of 1857 is the oldest opera house in America still used for its original purpose; the Philadelphia Orchestra, whose burnished "Philadelphia Sound" was cultivated by Stokowski and Ormandy, ranks with the world's great ensembles; and the Curtis Institute of Music, tuition-free since 1924, has trained Bernstein, Barber and generations of the world's finest players. Marian Anderson, the contralto whose voice and dignity broke barriers, was Philadelphia's own.

The archive's stage is Irvine Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania — the 1929 Gothic fantasy whose vaulted hall houses the Curtis Organ, one of the largest pipe organs in the world, its ten thousand-odd pipes a university's cathedral of sound. Beyond it: the Museum of Art's steps that Rocky made a shrine, the Barnes Foundation's astonishing Cézannes and Matisses, cheesesteaks defended with theological seriousness, and the gridded green city that William Penn planned in 1682 as a "greene countrie towne" — still, at heart, exactly that.