Conservatory Libraries

Conservatory Libraries Jane Gottlieb (bio) As documented in Carol June Bradley's history of music libraries in the United States, "The first academic music libraries were conservatory, i.e., performance libraries: Oberlin (1865), New England Conservatory of Music (1867), Cincinnati Conservatory (1867), and the Peabody Conservatory (1868)."1 Then, as now, these collections were established primarily to serve the needs of performing musicians. The history of the "conservatory" and their attendant library collections is recounted thoroughly in the Grove Music Online articles on "Conservatory" and "Libraries: By Type – Conservatories."2 In the United States, conservatory libraries may be further subdivided into those affiliated with larger universities and colleges (such as the Eastman School of Music, part of the University of Rochester or Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music) and those that are independent, such as the Curtis Institute, Cleveland Institute, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and The Juilliard School. The experience of working in a conservatory library differs markedly within these distinctions; more on that distinction will be elaborated below. Continuing with Bradley's chronology, significant conservatory (or school of music) library collections that were established around the turn of the twentieth century include the Sibley Music Library of the Eastman School of Music (founded 1904), Juilliard's Lila Acheson Wallace Library (founded 1905 and incorporating as its first library collection the G. Schirmer Circulating Library of Music, which was established in 1876),3 Yale University School of Music Library (1917), Indiana University School of Music Library (1924), and Curtis Institute of Music Library (1926). The development of many of these libraries was generously supported by private donors connected to the larger institution, and some of them were able to amass extensive special collections that would rival those of [End Page 274] research or national libraries. Notably, the Sibley Library's early librarians (Barbara Duncan and Ruth Watanabe) were given funds to travel to Europe and purchase rarities on the antiquarian market.4 That the core collections of many of our American conservatory libraries include unique manuscripts, early editions, and archival collections speaks to the significant role that these primary source materials may hold in the education of performers. In other cases, such as that of Juilliard and New England Conservatory, the founding collections that formed the basis of the library collections comprised editions and manuscript scores that are now considered rarities. As noted above, Juilliard (which was founded as the Institute of Musical Art in 1905) had as its first library, the Schirmer Circulating Library of Music and all the surviving materials from this core collection are now part of the library's Peter Jay Sharp Special Collections.5 Among the most significant differences between the affiliated conservatories and schools of music and the independent conservatories is that of centralized technological and IT support structures. The 'schools of music' that are connected to larger universities and colleges implemented online library catalogs decades before that may have been possible in the independent conservatories, simply because the larger university already had such an infrastructure in place. Some of the largest libraries, notably Eastman and Indiana, were also leaders in the so-called retrospective conversion projects of the 1980s6 that brought millions of bibliographic records for music materials into online databases, thus setting the stage for others to convert their card catalog holdings more easily to machine-readable form.7 The library leaders who worked hard to establish the now-accepted standards for cataloging of music materials spent considerable efforts on advocating for "why music is different." Simply put, enabling access to music materials will always entail a focus on the different formats (manifestations in current parlance) in which music is disseminated: published or unpublished scores and sound recordings (and their digital surrogates), as well as distinguish sources that provide information about music (books or journal articles). The conservatory librarians who came of [End Page 275] professional age in this era of advocacy for "why music is different" (the present author among them) might find themselves in institutions where it was not at all necessary to advocate for "why music is different" since that was the main area of study in the institutions that we are part of, but instead...