Making Music Librarianship More Improvisatory: A Musicologist’s Perspective

Making Music Librarianship More Improvisatory: A Musicologist’s Perspective1 Imani Danielle Mosley (bio) “A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door.” – Fran Lebowitz When I was a freshman in college, many moons ago, at Appalachian State University, I was given a task by my bassoon professor. In order to better play the classical era period music I was working on currently, I was to go listen to various performances, on LP, and transcribe various cadenzas. Our music library was modest but well-built, in the music building, with wonderful small listening rooms, set up to do this very task. At this particular time, the LPs were in the stacks. I knew what I was looking for generally—Mozart, Kozeluch, etc.—but the encouraged mode of browsing was to pull out everything that looked interesting and plausible. There was listening, transcribing, reading the liner notes to augment my own notes; hours spent in that tiny little room, surrounded by books, scores, and LPs. It was overwhelming but simultaneously liberating; I loved the possibilities that lay before me. Now perhaps I’m preaching to the choir here, but that potential libraries have has always been something with which I deeply identified. As a kid, my favorite thing to do was to go to the public library, sit in my favorite section (religion and mythology), sit down on the floor, and read every book on the shelf. When I spoke with Dorothy Berry about this plenary, this is the idea that came to me—libraries as sites of improvisation. I thought about the way in which discovery can be improvisatory, the things we find, what can be revealed to us when understood as part of an improvisatory process. But what does it mean to improvise? The non-musical definition revolves around making something out of whatever is available. Usually, this definition denotes a kind of frantic scrambling, a doing the best with what you have. You’ve given it the best that you can, and in the immortal words of Tim Gunn, you’ve made it work. This does not feel like the kind of thing that we want students and researchers to be doing. Sure, there’s [End Page 7] chance in all scholarship but there is a much larger focus on preparation. So how can we think about improvisation as being less of a making do in not ideal circumstances and more about being open to using everything that comes to us in the work of our scholarship? I’ll tell one more personal story before I answer that question and go on to the actual mechanics of this talk. Later in college, no longer at App State but now at Queens College-CUNY, I was given another assignment. I was to write a comparative analysis of the Brahms and Ligeti horn trios. The Ligeti had long been a favorite of mine and I was intrigued by uncovering more uses of mesto in the literature. This meant checking out all the CDs of horn chamber music in our music library among other things. And it was in that process that I discovered Britten and the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings. That moment changed the trajectory of my life. And yes, it was motivated mostly by curiosity on my part but also by the freedom to let myself discover. I allowed myself the space to go down an unexpected road, and boy did I make it work. But back to improvisation; I believe that thinking about libraries as spaces and sites of and for improvisation is a possible pathway towards a renewed and integrative future for libraries and librarianship. As this talk is from the perspective of a musicologist, I will say that while I hope for that future for libraries, that it also helps my discipline as well. And it is that nexus of need that this talk will examine. Firstly, how can we think about libraries as spaces and sites of and for improvisation? I don’t think that those of us (and I think that’s safe to assume everyone here) who actively engage with libraries think of them...