Too Seldom Praised: Orchestra Librarians

[Ralph]

Librarians work backstage for the PSO

By Mark Kanny
TRIBUNE-REVIEW CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC
Sunday, July 17, 2005

Before the musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony take the stage, before they can even pick up their parts to practice them, crucial work has taken place backstage in the music library.

Walk into a public library and chances are you can pull the book you want from a shelf, or have a librarian do so. Even private and research libraries work off the shelf, order what they don't have, or find information on the Internet.

But orchestra music librarians have to check every page of what they provide. This weekend's performances of Jonathan Dove's reorchestration and abridgement of the first two operas of Richard Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelungen" highlight the highly specialized tasks performed by music librarians at top orchestras.

Most of the music that orchestras perform has been engraved -- cleanly laid out and well-spaced for reading. The parts for Dove's arrangement appear to have been hastily copied by hand, so poorly done they required hundreds of hours of work that even included rewriting some of the worst passages.


For Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra music librarians Joann Vosburgh and Lisa Gedris, the Dove parts are an extreme example of their daily work that takes place on the fifth floor of Heinz Hall.

"We're not librarians, we're musicians," Vosburgh once told a group of visiting librarians from Mt. Lebanon. A native Pittsburgher and former oboist, Vosburgh became assistant symphony librarian in 1984 and principal librarian this January when librarian Howard Hillyer retired. She's married to the orchestra's principal trumpet, George Vosburgh.

Gedris, a native of Curwensville, Clearfield County, was hired as assistant librarian this season after a national search. She is a trumpeter who performed with the orchestra on its 1999 European tour with Mariss Jansons and also played "Swan Lake" with the orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York City in November.

Legibility isn't the only issue facing orchestra librarians.

"Everything has errors," Vosburgh says, "even new critical editions" that aim to remove past misprints and reflect current understanding of composers' intentions. French and Russian editions are the worst, she says.

For well over half a century, librarians at major orchestras have shared the mistakes in music found by conductors and players by sending errata lists to one another. Twenty-five years ago they formed the Major Orchestra Librarians Association, which has only two dozen members, to facilitate exchange of information.

Each year the symphony music librarians prepare approximately 80 different programs for the orchestra to perform -- about 600 compositions totaling 35,000 parts for as many as 250 artists in a given performance. Those parts are rarely only a single page and often run to dozens of pages -- all of which must be checked.

The orchestra owns or has permanent loans of parts to 1,800 pieces, and purchased two additional titles for next season -- Antonin Dvorak's "Symphonic Variations" and Sergei Rachmaninoff's "The Isle of the Dead," Vosburgh says. New music is almost always rented, with some publishers reserving sets of materials for top orchestras.

Ask concertmaster Andres Cardenes about the music library and he raves.

"They're just phenomenally efficient at getting bowings into parts and flexible in handling all the different programs we play," says Cardenes, who is responsible for deciding on the bowings for the first violins, which is then the basis for the rest of the string section. This spring he's been working on a big stack of music for next season.

String sections almost always bow together for uniformity of musical projection, with the players moving their bows up and down in the same patterns.

"The issues are not simply expediency," Cardenes says. "I have to consider not only bowing style and string style and sound, but also look at it within the orchestra. We have a big brass section and we have to have a certain power to compete with the brass."

Markings are entered in pencil because they may be changed in rehearsal. Orchestra librarians use electric erasers -- akin to a drill with an eraser bit -- because they are more accurate and less physically fatiguing than using a handheld eraser.

Sometimes the music library copies new sets of parts, as it did for Georges Bizet's music for the play "L'Arlesienne" that Yan Pascal Tortelier will conduct next season. The music library uses custom cut 10-by-13-inch paper when it makes parts, using 70-pound paper stock because it stands up on the music stand better than the 20- to 24-pound stock used in most businesses. The librarians use an extra sticky tape made by 3M for binding parts and removable tape for highlighting cuts and other temporary instructions. They also use a special device to leaf the parts for easier page turns.

When no parts are available for older music, the library may even create a set of parts. Gedris says that she first tried copying, cutting and pasting together parts from the score of an 18th century violin concerto by Pietro Locatelli that Cardenes scheduled for a Pittsburgh Symphony Chamber Orchestra concert this fall. Dissatisfied with the result, she entered them into her computer at home, using OPAS software -- Orchestra Planning and Administration System. At home she was also able to call on the expertise of her husband, David Gedris, who has become fluent on that software making arrangements for the River City Brass Band, of which he is principal flugelhorn.

The sheer volume of work in the library can be daunting. To help keep track, the symphony uses the OPAS software, which was developed by the American Symphony Orchestra League with input from orchestra librarians. The portion of the program the library uses is a huge database of compositions that helps, among many other functions, track which musician plays which part.

At one point this past season, the librarians had a "six folder week," when it had to supply parts for six different concerts -- a Pops program, an outreach concert, a recording session, "Symphony with a Splash," "Fiddlesticks" and "Popular Classics."

All were non-subscription concerts, which typically mean extra work for the library. The orchestra's most artistic concerts are the Mellon Grand Classics, at which music is performed uncut and as the composer wrote it. The only exceptions the librarians can think of are Sergei Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. Rachmaninoff sanctioned cuts in his symphony; while Russian violin pedagogue Leopold Auer made cuts in the Tchaikovsky that many soloists use.

At all other symphony concerts, much more than half the season, music is often performed with cuts -- which not only must be entered but sometimes necessitates reworking the pages to avoid bad page turns. Vosburgh says the library has even reworked some notoriously bad page turns in standard repertoire -- such as the first violins encounter in the first movement of Felix Mendelssohn's "Italian Symphony."

Pops concerts also often provide an extra challenge because principal Pops conductor Marvin Hamlisch creates his shows during the rehearsals, including changing the pieces that will be presented to the public and sometimes making new cuts or removing old ones. The changes he makes must then be quickly be entered into the pages the musicians will see at the next rehearsal or concert.

Vosburgh doesn't mind the extra work because, she says, Hamlisch "is so brilliant." She knows that her role -- like that of everyone offstage at Pittsburgh Symphony -- is to be a facilitator for the artists who create the magic of music onstage.

Mark Kanny can be reached at mkanny@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7877.

[Heck148]

the librarians do a huge, behind the scenes job that most people take for granted, if they have any awareness at all.

getting the right parts out in a timely fashion, keeping track of these parts, collecting them, returning them is a major project...Major orchestra libraries are complex organizations that must function properly to avoid terrible foul-ups.
prior to rehearsals, at rehearsal time, at concert time - the right music must be available and ready for use....

I did it for one summer for a community band. what a PITA!!

the long-time librarian [over 35 years] of our orchestra just retired at the conclusion of this season. She did a great job, very organized. she'd always bend over backwards to make sure people got the right parts in a timely fashion. she will be missed...

her replacement seems quite good, but is new to the orchestra business.
I wish her well - musicians can be really pissy and demanding about parts - also, they have a remarkable knack for losing/misplacing them, which quickly becomes a problem, esp for rental parts. publishers charge hefty penalties for missing parts, or for late returns...

[Auntie Lynn]

The music librarian at my job is a treasure without measure. In fact, he is so good, I don't even want anybody to know we've got him. And the folks who man the library search desk at SF Pub Lib are also outstanding - I give 'em a lot of business...