Twenty-three years ago this week, with the delivery of a vast collection on March 18th, 1999, the Sibley Music Library entered into a unique relationship with music publisher Carl Fischer, LLC.   The Eastman School of Music and publisher Carl Fischer had actually maintained a commercial relationship that dated back to the 1930s, but I consider the initiative between the Sibley Music Library and Carl Fischer a wholly unique venture between a corporate entity and a research library.  I also think it safe to say neither side foresaw in 1999 the scale of outside interest in what we were launching.

The trip down to Manhattan was not without incident.  As we were motoring down a hilly rural route upstate,  Mrs. Davidson was pulled over by an instantly materializing New York State trooper and was issued a speeding ticket.  Four hours later, just when we had arrived in Manhattan, an MTA bus kissed one of the back doors of Mrs. Davidson’s vehicle; Ian Quinn was mere inches away from injury but was fortunately unharmed.  The vehicle was towed away for repairs and we four resolved to brush off the events of the drive.  Awakening the next morning, we all made our way to Cooper Square from our respective accommodations—Mary had booked herself and me in at the Gramercy Park Hotel, which was within walking distance—and over the course of four 12-hour days, we four packed up the company’s extensive Archive, fueled by frequent cups of Starbuck’s coffee and replenished with delicious ethnic cuisine during our lunch and dinner breaks.  The result of the week’s work?  A tidy sequence of 391 shipping crates, each packed to capacity with precious archival content, and described by Ian in an Excel spreadsheet as he walked along the rows of crates with laptop computer in hand.  The 391 crates were trucked to Rochester the following week, and were delivered to the “old” Sibley Music Library building while Mrs. Davidson and I were both attending the annual conference of the Music Library Association in Los Angeles.  Several days later, Mr. Lauren Keiser, until that time Executive VP of Carl Fischer and now the company’s in-coming President, flew up to Rochester bringing five additional boxes of documents, these mainly consisting of papers from the President’s Office.  News of the Archive’s transfer was published in the summer, 1999 issue of Eastman Notes, accompanied by a photograph of the four of us (displayed here).  A Loan Agreement was quickly concluded, and was signed by representatives of Carl Fischer, LLC and the Sibley Music Library on April 13th and April 22nd, 1999.

An Archive comprised of 391 shipping crates’s worth of material is a hefty bundle of content.  Apart from the sheer extent of the Archive, there would be the need of adequate working space and infra-structure to process the holdings so as to get them into their research-ready state.  Mrs. Davidson pointed to the one space on the Eastman School campus that could possibly accommodate such a large collection: the basement of the “old” Sibley Music Library building on Swan Street.  An article could be written about that building alone.  When constructed in 1937, it was promoted at that time as being the first building ever yet constructed in the United States exclusively for a music library.  Former Head Librarian Ruth T. Watanabe (served 1947-84) once described the “old” Sibley Music Library as standing “in unassuming modesty” behind the more elegant Eastman School and Eastman Theater.  Truly, Ruth was being characteristically tactful; her predecessor Barbara Duncan (served 1922-47), a pragmatic German-American Bostonian who did not mince her words, cut to the chase when telling a collection donor in 1942 that the Depression-era building had been built plain because there was no money with which to make it fancy.  Nevertheless, the building boasted an extensive basement that, in spite of many low-hanging beams and conduits, would offer us the floor space and shelving that we needed for the Archive.  There was, in fact, a precedent here, for by the 1970s members of the SML staff had resorted to storing materials in the basement when the library’s collections were threatening to surpass the building’s capacity at ground level and above.  It was striking to me to think that the “old” building was once again being pressed into service for current SML business.

When you come down to it, a publisher carries out an enormous amount of activity.  The publisher negotiates and contracts with authors so as to obtain original works to publish (and acquires those works in some format—back in the day ink on paper, but today in entirely digital formats); the publisher prepares said works to go to press, and this editorial/production stage can be quite extensive, involving much dialogue between editorial/production team and the author. The work eventually goes to press—many publishers off-load the actual printing—but when the new publication comes back, it needs to be marketed and sold, and it also behooves a publisher to retain a library or archive of one copy of every item it has published.  Some music publishers also retain rental libraries of scores that are loaned out for performance, rather than old as individual copies.  This would all come into focus as we opened the shipping crates and got to work.

The archive was initially comprised of three distinct sub-groups: corporate papers; last copies of publications; and production packages, which were comprised of bundles of camera-ready pages and proof copies. To these three sub-groups a fourth was later added: New Publications, comprised of two copies of each new item rolling off the press as of the fall of 2000.

For historical purposes, I regarded the corporate papers as the richest.  They held general correspondence; files from the President’s office; sales ledgers and trade catalogs; numerous commemorative documents, including anniversary brochures, scrapbooks, and photographs; sales records; editorial and publication-related correspondence; and a small amount of artwork marked up for production use.  The files of editorial correspondence, arranged by surname of composer or arranger, read like a Who’s Who of American Music in the 20th-century: Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, and many others. Some of those files held fair copies in the hands of their respective composers.  The sub-group of production packages contained proof copies and camera-ready masters; the proofs bore notes and annotations in the hands of members of the production team, as reflected standard procedure in publishing houses.

The sub-group of last copies was comprised of one copy of most of the company’s permanently out-of-print publications; not quite every publication, but certainly most of them.  They were filed by their series numbers within the company’s catalogue, and each instrumental area formed its own series (J for band, CM for choral octavos, P for piano, V for solo voice, and so on).  For applied musicians the world over, the last copies would prove to be a very rich source, as I’ll mention momentarily.

Arrangement and description project

 Virtually as soon as word had gone out that the archive had arrived at Eastman,  I began to receive inquiries from interested parties seeking copies of the out-of-print music, or else seeking historical information for articles and academic writings. The loan agreement enacted by Carl Fischer and the Sibley Music Library gave the SML permission to process the Archive according to the standards of sound archival practice, and I recognized that it would behoove us to process the archive as soon as possible so as to respond to requests in an efficient and timely manner. Owing to various workplace and workflow realities, I was obliged to defer any plans to process the Archive for some time.  In March, 1999 I had only just assumed my position, and I had a good deal of work to do on the Eastman front before I could reasonably devote the time necessary to addressing the Carl Fischer Archive, but it also held a place on the to-do list.

News of the Archive’s deposit at Eastman was circulated to the extended Eastman School community in the summer, 1999 issue of Eastman Notes, and had earlier been circulated in the April, 1999 issue of The Sibley Muse.  Publicly, I presented on the SML/CF archival venture in the Archives Roundtable of the Music Library Association at the MLA’s 2002 annual conference. After processing of the archive had commenced, I delivered a revised version of the presentation at the 2004 Lake Ontario Archives Conference (now the New York Archives Conference) and at the 2004 annual meeting of the New York State/Ontario chapter of the Music Library Association.

In the fall of 2002, after tracking the patterns of use over the course the first three calendar years that we’d had custody of the Archive, I consulted with a veteran university archivist from another institution who provided much valuable guidance.  In the spring of 2003, after much planning, I hired and trained a team of student workers, and the processing began that June after the end of the academic year. Quite providentially, and what truly was a significant advantage, David Sengstack’s gift money provided the funds for compensating the student workers and for purchasing needed archival supplies for the project after Carl Fischer had provided us with a sum of funds for the initial materials order.

The processing project was divided into two phases: arrangement, during which the holdings were sorted, weeded, and rehoused in proper archival housing; and description, during which relevant data for each and every item were transcribed into an Excel spreadsheet.  (Excel was the tool of choice owing to that being Carl Fischer’s own in-house tool.)  Each of Carl Fischer’s publishing series featured a different physical format, and therefore the publications in each series posed different considerations as regards their physical arrangement and preservation.  In advance of launching the project I had drawn up guidelines and plans intended to instruct the students on every last situation that I thought might arise, but notwithstanding those carefully laid plans, the arrangement phase of the project continually turned up instances that required creative solution-seeking.  The student workers worked on the sub-group of last copies over the course of four summers (2003 through 2006 inclusive), after which the holdings had been properly ordered, rehoused, and described in the spreadsheet.  To give an explicit idea of how many items the last copies represented, the spreadsheet ran to a total of 45,531 rows.  Processing of the historical papers would continue at a slower pace during the next several academic years, and on completion, we had a finding aid (i.e. inventory) in MS Word format numbering 144 pages.

► Photos by Gerry Szymanski, April, 2003:

Streams of activity

There were four distinct streams of activity stemming from the archive, the first being the provision of reference and research service to inquirers with questions.  In addition, some holdings of the Archive were perused for various scholarly ends, leading to citation in publications.  Several researchers did, in fact, travel from long-distance to interact with the Archive. Copyright restrictions did apply, of course, as did the company’s proprietary interests in the Archive, and the company’s permission was a pre-requisite for any research use.

A second activity was the provision of photocopies (and later, from 2009 onwards, of digital scans) of publications to the company, typically for reissue.  In this fashion Carl Fischer brought back into print numerous compositions, transcriptions, and arrangements by such renowned 20th-century greats as Leopold Godowsky, Fritz Kreisler, and Alexander Siloti.  And third, the archiving of current publications was a component of the archival operation since the fall of 2000, whereby Carl Fischer sent two copies of each new publication for archiving.  In time some new accessions actually went out of print and became source copies for the archival reprint service.

The fourth, and by far the largest, stream of activity was the archival reprint service, representing a unique collaborative venture between a corporate entity and a not-for profit research library, whereby individual items of out-of-print music were photocopied on demand and sold. That service amply demonstrated the inestimable value of the archive’s last copies sub-group.  The origin of the service lay in the various inquiries that began to arrive after the initial dissemination of news of the Archive’s arrival at Eastman. Those requests were handled at on an ad hoc basis, with no charges levied other than the company’s standard fee for copyright clearance, but in time, the increase in the number of requests prompted President and CEO Mr. Keiser to propose a formal retailing service as a means of responding profitably to those requests.  Under the scheme, the sharing of revenues was a 60/40 split, with the company retaining the slightly greater amount (the company was obliged to pay royalties, after all).  For each music request, Carl Fischer’s New York City office invoiced the customer; the Sibley Music Library then generated and sent the authorized photocopies directly to the customer.  The archival reprint service was advertised in Carl Fischer’s annual trade catalogues and on the company’s website.  In addition, news of the service was circulated via numerous electronic listservs, and, what was probably equally as effective, via word-of-mouth. Carl Fischer’s dealers regularly referred customers to Eastman with requests for the permanently out-of-print (POP) titles.  On average I used to receive approximately one dozen inquiries after POP titles each week, with approximately half of those resulting in completed transactions.

Under the provisions of the archival reprint service, we provided music to customers in all parts of the U.S. and throughout Canada and Europe, and eventually to customers in various locations in the Far East. The customer pool included band directors, solo performers (both professionals and amateurs), school music teachers, choir directors, and retail music dealers who were making purchases on behalf of their customers.  Authorized photocopies were purchased for use in ensemble concerts both large and small; in religious services of various denominations; for home music-making; for teaching and pedagogical purposes; and for civic use.  One constant source of requests for POP titles were the school music festivals and all-state competitions that take place across the nation.  I couldn’t help but notice that with our own New York State School Music Association, the required list every year numbered majority Carl Fischer POP titles.  The POP titles were a hot commodity!

Soon after the archival reprint service was launched, I noticed an interesting phenomenon recurring again and again, whereby a customer purchasing a particular piece of music would recount to me his or her personal experience with that composition that had prompted him or her to own the sheet music, whether purchasing it anew or else replacing a used copy.  Was it because the means of purchase—contacting an archivist at a far-away research library—was so unusual and required some explanation or justification?  Whatever the reason, it was my pleasure to receive email messages, telephone calls, and letters from customers expressing their appreciation for the service and for the access to the music, and also sharing their past personal experiences with the music they were purchasing.  In addition, more than a few customers sent me programs from performances that access to the POP sheet music titles had made possible.  As the curator entrusted with the responsibilities of maintaining and servicing the Archive, I was deeply touched and gratified by these many testimonial letters and email messages. One of my favorites came from an elderly bandsman, now deceased, who was a member and occasional horn soloist of a community band in Georgia, and who in his youth had been a member of the renowned Allentown (Pennsylvania) Band. After we had provided his band with the needed score and parts for Walter B. Rogers’ A Soldier’s Dream (a composition depicting a day in the life of a soldier), the gentleman wrote to me to express his appreciation for the availability of the music. Significantly, he wrote at some length of his love for that particular composition and how much it had meant to him to play that particular solo once more at his now-advanced age. “As someone in your position understands, probably better than most,” he wrote, “each soloist is in love with the piece he’s playing. He sees something that he wants to communicate to his audience.” He concluded his letter with these words: “’Soldier’s Dream’ was a favorite of Earl Heater. Earl was a great trumpet soloist with Sousa and our first chair trumpet in the Allentown Band. He died much too young. I suppose one day soon I’ll have to explain to him why I played his number the way I did. Probably, though, he’ll just give me that same nice smile he always did.”

Thus, it was clear that David Sengstack’s original vision of preserving the records of music archives at the Sibley Music Library for scholarship had now been complemented by an equally important initiative that was embodied in the archival reprint service, providing for the needs of applied musicians.  Such was this latest manifestation of the longtime connection between Carl Fischer and the Sibley Music Library.

► Photos by David Peter Coppen, March, 2016:

Conclusion of the loan

On two occasions, circumstances external to the Sibley Music Library impacted the Archive’s shelving configuration in the basement space.  On each occasion, we were obliged to re-consider how to use the space efficiently while guaranteeing the safety of, and ease of access to, the Archive.  The first was in the summer of 2004 when, as part of extensive renovations to the Eastman Theater, massive conduits were to be installed in the basement.  By design, the planned conduits would run the entire length of the basement interior through its very center, i.e. directly through the heart of the shelving area. Installation would thus entail the removal of a significant linear footage of shelving, effectively dividing the space into two distinct areas on either side of the new installation. Faced with a decrease in shelf space, I opted to devote the basement’s shelf space entirely to three of the four record sub-groups—the last copies, the historical papers, and the new accessions, and to stage the production packages away from the shelving area in an unshelved but stable arrangement.

Later, in the spring of 2007, the SML received a compliance order from the UR Fire Marshal relative to a new regulation mandating that a designated number of inches of space be kept clear between any upper shelving and the ceiling in all storage areas.  Under the new regulation we would lose a further extent of shelving, thus forcing a still more compact shelving arrangement of the Archive. Nevertheless, a uniform compacting throughout the basement ensured that the holdings of the three chosen sub-groups would remain kept safe and orderly.  With the professional co-operation of our Office of Facilities and the contract workers, the Archive’s holdings were protected from any disorder during both the 2004 conduit installation and the 2007 re-configuring of shelving.

Finally, in the fall of 2012, we at Eastman were made mindful of environmental considerations in the basement after two heavy rainstorms occasioned some slight water penetration in the space.  The underground location, with what we now believed was an actual potential for major climate catastrophe, would not prove permanently optimal for paper-based documents of major historical value.  Those considerations were ultimately instrumental in determining to seek an orderly and amicable conclusion to the loan of the Archive.  The Archive had been delivered to us on March 18th, 1999, and it was removed from Swan Street by two moving vans exactly seventeen years to the day later, on March 18th, 2016.

In looking back on this initiative, I am profoundly grateful to my superior, Dr. Dan Zager, former Head Librarian of the Sibley Music Library, who never flinched at my material requests in support of the Archive; my thanks also to Mr. Lauren Keiser, former President and CEO of Carl Fischer, to whose desk I always enjoyed immediate access by email or by telephone, and who received me cordially during my drop-ins to New York City; and a shout-out to my former colleagues at Carl Fischer, all of whom have moved on by now: Lola Kavonic (you were a delight to work with!), Kris Kazacs, Shira Flescher, John Guertin, and Subin Lim, with whom we at the SML interfaced on an almost daily basis on the archival reprint service; and to Sherri Zelina, who was Head Rental Librarian, who entertained my many questions about rental holdings with humor and patience.

Finally, I thank all of those Ruth T. Watanabe Special Collections team members who tirelessly pitched in over the years to support this initiative:

• in March, 1999, Seth Brodsky and Ian Quinn provided able support during our spring break outing to Manhattan;
• between 2001 and 2016, Katherine Axtell and Mathew Colbert provided essential in-office support for the archival reprint service;
• below-stairs, those who labored tirelessly to process the archive were Liz Hanan, Alex Dean, Ben Warsaw, Joshua Fein, Zachary Cairns, and Jeremiah Goyette;
• and the team members who provided research and photocopying assistance for the archival reprint service were Joshua Fein, Dieter Hennings-Yeoman, Zachary Cairns, Jeremiah Goyette, Aaron Grant, Hannah Swayze, Jacek Blaszkiewicz, and Austin Richey.

—Thanks to you all for helping to make it work.  It was a pleasure to have worked with each of you!