Music Librarians
- a specialised kind of craftsmanship
by
Arthur Butterworth
All of us who are
involved in music-making depend in
various ways on the skills involved
in looking after the printed music
we need to practise our art of performing.
There are several branches of music
librarianship, some of them perhaps
not given much thought to by musicians
in general. Let’s consider some of
them separately:
It is taken for granted
that the greater part of the music
we use in study or performance is
nowadays printed by some means or
other. This was not always so; for
in earlier days probably most copies
of music were hand-written. While
music printing has been in use for
several centuries, it might surprise
many to know that until very recent
times and the almost universal use
of computerised music printing, a
very large proportion of contemporary
music - more especially orchestral
parts (‘band’ parts as they are colloquially
known) only existed in hand-written
copies. It might surprise the casual
reader to know that some otherwise
very familiar music, often heard in
public or broadcast performances,
- Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, Shostakovich,
Sibelius, Holst, Britten Rachmaninov,
and many other composers’ works even
now are still only available for hire
in hand-written manuscript copies,
and are not for sale. Sometimes only
one set of parts was in existence,
so that the copyright owner - the
composer himself or his publisher
- would regard these single sets of
parts as very precious. There must
often have been anxiety when such
a single set of parts was loaned out.
Would it travel safely? Would it be
damaged or defaced by the user? Lost
altogether? This sometimes happened
in war-time when a single set of parts
might, perhaps reluctantly, have to
be sent overseas. With the present
world-wide use of photocopying machines,
this is no longer a worry; for a new
set of parts can be made available
within a few minutes.
Publishers generally
have their own "house style"
of printing and are reluctant to depart
from it. Some of these have a long
and admired history, such as: Breitkopf
& Härtel, Lengnick, or Peters
Edition, in Germany; Novello &
Co, Boosey & Hawkes, in Britain
while in France: Durand et Cie, Leduc
and others. Every country has its
leading music publishers. They all
differ in style, so that it is almost
a matter of being able to tell at
a glance the country of origin, national
styles are so much in evidence.
Well-known as many
of these house-styles are, some are
more admired than others; it generally
depends on the legibility and general
appearance of the printed musical
symbols, on the lettering, and indeed
on the size and quality of the paper
used; for some paper is so flimsy
as to wear out after repeated use
(a notorious fault of much French
printed music).
Orchestral players
have ever been faced with an enormous
number of different styles of printing:
some good; but often bad. Sometimes
so small as to be almost illegible
or feint on the printed page; sometimes
the paper itself so dark - grey or
yellow instead of clear white. Light
music, the kind once heard at the
seaside by the local pier orchestra,
was poorly printed: Viennese waltzes,
marches, ’novelty numbers’ as they
were once known, and similar ephemera.
Even the classics were not invariably
decently printed. One orchestra I
played with had - at the time and
still in use - sets of parts of Beethoven
symphonies which dated back a century
or more, and which were so fragile
as to need most careful handling by
the player. Such parts often had pencilled
markings by previous players: emendations
by conductors of former times; sometimes
so altered and then subsequently erased
so that the original thinly-printed
note could hardly be deciphered (for
instance the brass parts of the Tschaikowsky
Violin Concerto).
Furthermore, it would
seem that earlier publishers hardly
ever bothered to put in ‘rehearsal
letters’; and never unique bar-numbers
- which are now universal. How did
one, for instance, efficiently rehearse
- with the inevitable stops and starts
- a work such as the Schumann Piano
Concerto which had perhaps no more
than three reference markings in the
whole of the last movement; and this
a moto perpetuo which is difficult
to identify the place where the rehearsal
stop has been made when one is in
the middle of counting around 130
or so bars’ rest. However, it gradually
dawned on publishers (and obviously
composers too) that putting frequent
rehearsal markers in the score and
parts saved time and frustration at
rehearsal. At first these were generally
capital letters "A" then
maybe twenty or thirty bars later
"B", and probably another
fifty bars further on a letter "C",
and so on to the end of the movement.
Even these were pretty useless. Then
figures - usually every ten or twenty
bars - like mile-posts by a railway
track - regularly and arbitrarily
spaced out, with no reference to the
uniqueness of the musical phrasing
- which would make identification
of stopping and starting points more
logical to those players who had to
count dozens of bars’ rests. However,
most of these problems have disappeared
in recent times: the use of exact
bar numbers has made rehearsing far
more efficient and less time-wasting.
It is said that there
is already some requirement in American
orchestras that all new music must
now be printed - manuscript copies
are no longer acceptable; that it
must conform to minimum requirements
of type-face size, spacing, manageable
turn-overs (right-hand pages must
not require the player to have to
turn over in the middle of a phrase),
the printing must be so spaced out
as to have adequate bars’ rest or
time to turn the page. In this last
respect it used to be a convention
in hand-copying that the copyist would
ensure that, even if it meant leaving
half a page blank, was better than
continuing the copied line right to
the very foot of the page and then
expecting the player - somehow - to
manage to turn over without missing
a note in doing so. Of course this
was fine by the copyist who was paid
by the page; so that the more pages
he copied, the more he got paid for
the job! In this latter respect it
is worth noting that at one time it
used to be said that if an orchestral
part (notably viola parts) had so
many uninterrupted notes in them that
two full pages - a left hand and a
right hand - were so full that no
convenient rest occurred at the bottom
of the right hand page; then the part
was regarded as over-scored! Beethoven
and Schumann could be said to be guilty
of this on many occasions - just have
a look at the 9th Symphony,
or Schumann’s "Rhenish"
to verify this.
A second - and really
un-connected - aspect of librarian
work concerns the handling of such
material in public libraries and by
orchestral librarians. In Germany
there was at one time a difference
between a Hochschule (practical
music) and Universität (Musikwissenschaft
- ‘Academic Music’) which we might
do well to consider in some respects
of librarianship nowadays. In many
large town public libraries there
is often a music department which
hires out sets of orchestral scores
and parts. These libraries are more
often than not staffed by academically
quite well-qualified young staff who
have a good music degree, but who
really know NOTHING at all about the
practicalities of the "workshop"
floor as we might call it: the rehearsal
room or concert platform on the day
of a performance by a big orchestra.
Where does the problem lie? It resides
in the fact that so many ‘smart young
things’ with snazzy degrees in music
are set the task of labelling orchestral
parts in that ever-so-neat school-girl
like hand-writing; so that the front
brown paper cover (insisted upon by
the senior librarian when the parts
are first acquired by the library)
is marked with infinitely small lettering
(oh! so neat and tidy when laid out
on the library counter) but which
is so maddeningly un-readable when
the orchestral librarian has to manage
these copies when they eventually
land up scattered on music-stands
on a huge concert platform. Just imagine
the scene: a rehearsal or concert
is over, each music stand has - or
should have - the correct copy on
it, so that efficient collection by
the librarian can take place as he
moves his way between the ranks of
empty chairs, music stands and the
various risers between the wind, percussion
and strings. Orchestral players are
human, they don’t always leave their
music in the right place, more often
than not a few copies stray onto the
floor and are left there for the orchestral
librarian to collect up afterwards;
confusion reigns, copies are mixed
up - especially if the programme has
contained several works. Trying to
see from maybe a distance of thirty
or forty feet away, the squidgy, tiny
lettering that some ‘clever’ academically-trained
librarian has so delicately marked:
"V2"
instead of clearly marking in BIG
letters VIOLIN 2
or "cor ang" instead of
COR ANGLAIS is maddening for
the very practical orchestral librarian.
While it is all very
well and good that librarians should
have academic knowledge of the music
they handle in the quiet reading rooms
of large public libraries, studious
places indeed the tasks of the orchestral
librarian are hardly at all connected
with academicism. It is an essentially
practical skill, not learned in university
seminars and tutorials but "on
the shop floor" - the platform
of the concert hall. It is a skill
born of long experience of having
been a player: a user of the parts
put before him, not the student studying
the history of the composer and his
times: the difference in fact, between
the two kinds of musical study: Hochschule
and Universität.
Music, like so many
other vocations has become confused:
academicism is now rife in everything;
often at the expense of more useful
vocational skills which only come
with actually doing the job rather
than studying it theoretically.
Arthur Butterworth
March 2008
