Librarians: In their own words

We were on tour in Europe in 1997 when Princess Diana died. We had spent that Saturday night in Germany and learned of her death early Sunday morning before we traveled to Dublin for an evening concert. Obviously, the program would have to change since it included Gershwin’s American in Paris, and our concert was now going to be a memorial service led jointly by a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister in tribute to Diana. When we arrived at the hotel in Dublin, Music Director Andrew Litton wanted to discuss the program – we would use the Funeral March from Beethoven 3rd which was already in the folders, we would remove the Gershwin – but what else? I told him I had brought “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations in the library trunk … in case of emergency. He was stunned, but also relieved that I had this movement ready to go. He had used it many times during his tenure in England for a tribute upon someone’s passing. That night when the orchestra found “Nimrod” in their folders, they first thought another orchestra had provided it for us, until they saw the Dallas Symphony Orchestra stamp on the parts. It was just the right thing to have on the program and was tremendously moving for the audience and orchestra. Although it was a terribly sad situation, it felt good to know that because I had taken the time before leaving Dallas to think through emergency repertoire, organize and put it in the trunk, and be prepared for unknown circumstances, we were able to express our collective respect and sorrow as Americans in an appropriate way. But you know what? I never would have thought to take that piece if I hadn’t attended MOLA conferences years earlier in which “What to Have in the Tour Trunk” was discussed, and seasoned veterans passed along that little pearl of wisdom. I don’t go on tour now without it and a few other select pieces. You just never know what’s going to happen.

One of the librarian’s worst nightmares is someone expecting you to pull a certain piece of music out of thin air. On tour, particularly an international tour, this act of magic is much harder to pull off. Such a situation happened when were performing a series of Copland’s Old American Songs with a baritone on a European tour. We had, of course, rehearsed in Dallas before leaving the states. The soloist had chosen which eight songs he was doing many months before, and after confirming and reconfirming this with him (even checking his encore preferences), we made a booklet for the orchestra of the selected songs so that they wouldn’t have to flip back and forth between the two sets of parts in which the songs are published. As the rehearsals finished, the music director asked the soloist once again whether or not he wanted to have any additional songs available in case of an encore, and explained that if not, we were traveling with the selected excerpts only – nope, the singer was sure, this was it. We got to the first performance with him in England, he sang the group of songs, came offstage, and decided to do an encore, so he chose one of the songs to repeat. Afterwards, he let us know how disappointed he was that none of the other songs were available for a different encore, and that for the next night at the Proms in London, he wanted to sing one that was not included in his original group of selections. We hedged. He insisted. This was 10:00 at night in Basingstoke, before a bus ride to London. Rehearsal in 16 hours.

I had two choices. I could either wait until morning to contact Boosey & Hawkes in London to try to rent materials (if they had them available) or I could try to get the parts sent from home. (This was before people routinely traveled with laptops, before hotels equipped most rooms with internet access, before music was widely available by pdf files.) We got to our London hotel late that night, and at about 1:00 AM I called my library partner, Mark Wilson, back in Dallas to see if he could fax the parts for the additional song. It was Labor Day evening, and despite being in the middle of a family cook-out, Mark dutifully went to the hall, got the song, copied it and faxed it to my hotel in London. By the time I woke up the next morning, all the parts were under my door. I spent the morning putting them together and bowing the strings, then hurried off to Royal Albert Hall to get the parts into the folders for rehearsal. Mission accomplished.

That afternoon, despite great pressure from the soloist, the BBC told us they would not allow him to do any encores since the performance was being broadcast live on radio.

It seems silly now, not having put the whole two sets of songs in the trunks as back-up parts, but when traveling to 13 cities in 4 or 5 different countries for 3 weeks abroad with several programs, packing space is at a premium, and I made a judgment call about what I could leave out, since we had cleared the list of songs with the soloist. Guess I learned my lesson about that!!