Musings in the Music Library #3 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library

Another vignette in a series which was sent by  fellow librarian, Daniel Neal from the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library, in a mail to the SABC Music Library and the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra Library:

An orchestra library is not a place of research or reference, although it does have certain capacities in that medium.  

I’ll get an email from some unknown in Australia who is looking for data concerning their great grandfather who played double bass in the Cape Town Orchestra in the 20s…or was it the 30s?  Can I provide them with anything?  And I can’t, unfortunately.  

To a lesser extent I will be asked for recordings of certain works, and very rarely some musicological question (although Google and Wikipedia seem to have taken up a lot of this in the last ten years).  

In essence the Library is there to provide scores and parts for specific performances.  

The easy bit is to pull the file boxes off the shelves and load the parts folders.  The hard bit is to find, somehow and with limited budget, musical material that the Library doesn’t have!"

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Musing in the Music Library #2 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library 

Musings in the Music Library #1

Musings in the Music Library #2 - Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library

The following vignette was sent by a fellow librarian, Daniel Neal from the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra Library in a mail to the SABC Music Library and the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra Library:

"The CPO Library is a rather complex entity, a partially combined form of what had been the CAPAB Library and the CTSO Library that was a result of the merger in 1997 of the then two orchestras of Cape Town.  

Each collection was (and still is) catalogued in its own manner and wasn’t (and still isn’t) cross-indexed.  

On taking up the post of Orchestra Librarian in April 2001 I was immediately lost and often plagued with questions of availability that I was unable to answer; the worst of these coming from people who wanted to know if I had such and such an aria from such and such opera.  Or worse, often a query stated as “you know, THAT aria, for a tenor, I think… maybe Verdi?”  

As it was not quite Hell, but bordering on it, I thought it appropriate to put up a few lines in the plaque that is on the front door.  In Italian, for the benefit, mostly, of those who need arias by yesterday, the lines are from the Divine Comedy. As Dante passes through the gate of Hell, he sees an inscription, the final line of which is the famous phrase

“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”, or “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”.  

To date, not one of the opera aria demanding sorts have ever noticed this, let alone considered and commented upon it."

Related post: 
Musings in the music library #1