Librarians: In their own words

In my 21 years as an orchestra librarian there are a couple of embarrassing moments that stick out in my mind, and one near-disaster. What is it about Pops concerts? For me the worst problems have all happened during Pops shows. During my very first year we had a concert where everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Two conductors had to cancel due to illness and the 3rd came in at the last moment and didn’t know some of the repertoire. At the dress rehearsal, the guest artists arrived late due to travel delays and we didn’t have time to rehearse everything. At the concert, the guest artists were tap dancing along with Sandpaper Ballet and all of a sudden the music came to a halt. The conductor had only a piano/conductor score so she didn’t know what was wrong. She looked at the concertmaster who shrugged and mouthed “8 bars rest.” It turned out the wind parts had never been put in the folders and without rehearsal no one knew. Luckily the dancers kept moving and no one in the audience was any the wiser and the music resumed 8 measures later when the strings re-entered. To this day I try to never let a conductor leave the stage without rehearsing everything on the program, even the anthem – just to make sure everyone has everything they need. Lesson learned.

Another embarrassing moment occurred more recently: the one thing I’ve always dreaded finally happened. I was doing 10 things at once during intermission, and when I went into the conductor’s room to get the scores for the 2nd half, I was distracted when he presented me with a bottle of champagne. Then, when the 2nd half started, my phone rang. I’d forgotten to take the conductor’s scores out on stage! Luckily the conductor used the situation to improvise some schtick and he came off stage and carried the scores back on himself. The audience was none the wiser, but I was devastated…!! When I told Karen Schnackenberg about it she quipped, “Join the club.” I guess it happens to every librarian sooner or later.

The worst thing that has happened? Just last season a wind player advised me 5 minutes before the first rehearsal that he’d lost all of his music. He’d made the mistake of taking real parts (not “practice parts”) out of town on vacation. It turned out that he never even practiced them, but he’d been to 3 hotels and at some point had re-packed his bag and the parts were mislaid and left behind. There were over 20 pieces of music in that folder and we had to cobble together parts from scratch for most of them, as only a few were published and available elsewhere to be sent in overnight via fax or e-mail. What a traumatic 24 hours that was for the library staff (through no fault of our own). I’ve always made it a rule that real parts – especially one-of-a-kind music – should never be taken out of town, so hopefully something like that won’t ever happen again.

I guess the funniest things that have ever happened to me weren’t even library-related but because I was standing backstage I was pressed into service. Once I had to cut an amply endowed singer out of her dress when she couldn’t get the zipper down at intermission, and another time I had to help a handsome male singer quickly change into his coconut bra and grass skirt for a Hawaiian number. It was a tough job, but someone had to do it!!!