This festschrift to
honour the fiftieth anniversary of IAML
(UK) – the library world is festooned
with acronyms – is well judged. Written
by those well known in the profession
and covering a wide subject area it
underscores the diversity of music librarianship
and its frequently turbulent history
in Britain. The subjects covered are
as diverse as the sound carriers now
available to the technologically advanced
student of recording – ranging from
histories of service provision, through
two academically bracing bibliographical
essays (one on George Thompson, a long-lived
music publisher who died in 1851, the
other a much shorter one on Byrd’s Gradualia
in York Minster Library) and then finally
to more nuts and bolts areas such as
inter library loans and information
technology.
IAML (UK) has made
great strides in broadening its remit
and in trying to provide access to music
– in its widest sense – through such
important tools as Music Libraries Online,
which facilitates the lending of a vast
number of performance sets. The whole
mechanics, for example, of choral singing
in this country would be immeasurably
the poorer – in fact almost non existent
– were it not for the close so-operation
and professionalism of the lending machinery
in this country. How do you get your
sets of Messiah or Annie Get Your Gun?
Certain features of
the tangled history of music provision
in public libraries – the title in fact
of one essay – struck me as salutary.
Issue figures preserved at Aston Free
Library show that in 1886-87, its first
year with scores, those 135 music scores
attracted 1,486 issues. Furthermore
the importance of donated collections
of scores and their custodianship by
the powerhouse libraries in Liverpool,
Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow cannot
be over-emphasised and nor indeed can
the educational potential of the provision
of scores (indeed it was an explicit
function of the late Victorian library
committees to encourage good music).
The perennial question of educative
and popular exists in music librarianship
parallel to that in book provision.
However much they may have looked askance
at the public borrowing penny dreadfuls
– and not Ruskin or Gibbon – librarians
could no longer insist they read improving
literature than they could resist the
tide of popular vocal and lighter music.
Rationalising with the ingenuity of
Socrates some Victorian and Edwardian
librarians even believed that provision
of good music scores would in itself
encourage a drift away from the scorned
Fiction (a term of High Table abuse
for the mutton chopped librarian).
It was in 1911 that
William Lace of Brighton first suggested
a record library, though not a lending
library as such, but recordings in
situ to be listened to in a special
room. It wasn’t until the 1940s though
that the idea of a lending collection
of discs became a reality – some years
behind continental European and American
practice. Walford Davies was all for
it and so was Vaughan Williams and they
endorsed a long established practice
of the record recital by private clubs
in library halls. I’d no idea that the
pianist Winifred Christie, whose marriage
to the inveterate inventor and composer
Emanuel Moór led to her espousing
his double keyboard Moor Duplex piano
(and recording on it – she was a superb
pianist) contributed so heavily in time
and money to establish the Central Music
Library in Westminster.
One theme running through
some of the historical articles is the
entrenched view of recorded music as
lightweight, as a frivolous external
triviality. Some of this is traceable
to the founding of the service, to the
idea that some things are extraneous
to the service and are a financial drain
on it. Charging for services, whether
of audio-visual loans or the hiring
of meeting spaces in order to play recitals
of music (a frequent occurrence up until
the fairly recent past) is an issue
addressed in passing in the final article
by Eric Cooper. There are other concerns
that might also have been considered
here and the pervasive issue of copyright
is high amongst them. Nevertheless this
is a lucid and broad survey and those
stimulated by the workings of the International
Association of Music Libraries et al
will find much upon which to reflect.
Jonathan Woolf
Richard Turbet (editor)