Music from libraries and me: a memoir for National Library Week Apr 13 '08    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet The Bottom Line Libraries offer more than books, movies, and computer terminals! It would not take great intuition for anyone to guess that I have spent a lot of time in libraries or that this began at an early age. In wrapping up my contributions Laurashrti's National Library Week writeoff, I want to salute both the librarian at my hometown public library when I began checking out books (I'd guess when I was in second grade), Miss Gooseberry (I kid you not!), and school librarian Judith Hanks. Both encouraged me in multiple ways and provided some guidance so subtle that I did not notice it at the time. In passing through libraries at the four universities I attended, I sometimes went intending to cruise, but was invariably distracted by (absorbed into) the books (I get bored fast--and my tolerance for boredom has not increased with age!) Libraries have also been important sources of music for me, and it is this that I chose to focus on for the writeoff. As I have admitted in several music epinions, I was a musically quite priggish youth, largely adverse to music written between Bach and Bartok (in time, not in the alphabet!), though excepting Rococo and Romantic violin concerti ("my instrument"). It is difficult for me to believe that if someone had asked me and I'd understood the question "Aimez-vous Brahms?" my answer would have been "Non." (Am I younger than that now? Well, my musical tastes are certainly more eclectic!). The conductor of the high school orchestra in which I played, Logan Zahn, adored the "Philadelphia sound" elicited by Eugene Ormandy (who had been music director of the Minneapolis Symphony before going to Philadelphia). I think that had something to do with my deciding to check out the Ormandy/Philadelphia recording of the Requiem Mass of Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869), the "Grande Messe des morts," Op. 5 of 1837. The tsunami of sound (and the transcendent beauty of the "Sanctus") washed away the mental wall that had sealed off music of the Romantic era... and I eventually came to appreciate Mozart and Haydn (though I still prefer Bach and Handel). The James Madison College Library within the "living-learning complex" of Case Hall (a dormitory with the classroom's of our small college within the largest US multiversity) was a refuge for me, though I'm not sure why I needed refuge after escaping small-town Minnesota. Maybe a sort of "resort"? The record I remember spinning there most often was a collection of music by Edgar Varèse (1883-1965), who as a major influence on Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, (surely on Olivier Messiaen, too) and the too-little known music of Iannis Xenakis (to which I may also have been introduced there). A haphazard introduction to cool jazz also occurred under headphones in the Madison College Library. (That I was able to read anything with Varèse streaming into both ears is as puzzling to me as ever having not loved Brahms!) OK, going to college in Michigan immersed me in Motown (music which did not make AM radio back in southern Minnesota, though Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman" did), though the company had abandoned its roots and move to LA-LA-land. (The Miracles and the Temptations came to town while I was a freshman, and Stevie Wonder jammed with a friend of his from deaf-and-blind school one night in Case Hall...) My introduction to recordings of Sam Cooke and 1950s doo-wop occurred while I was a student at the University of Toronto, but I don't recall checking out any music from the Robards Library (and in that pre-Walkman era, did not listen to it in my carrel with a view out to Lake Ontario). I have underused the Music Library (in its old and new locations) at Berkeley, though occasionally ventured into it (them). Over the years, I have taken home CDs of a fairly wide range of kinds of music from the San Francisco Public Library. For Laurashrti's National Library Week writeoff, I sampled discs from the M's (in different sections of the music holdings) and have epined about JAZZ Jelly Roll Morton's "Winin' Boy Blues" at http://www.epinions.com/content_425799224964 Wynton Marsalis's "Mr. Jelly Lord" (covers of Morton compositions) at http://www.epinions.com/content_425128201860 the remastered "Mingus, Ah Um" from Charles Mingus at http://www.epinions.com/content_423954058884 Branford Marsalis's debut album, "Scenes of the City") at http://www.epinions.com/content_425893990020 Wynton Marsalis's jazz ballet compositions Sweet Release & Ghost Story at http://www.epinions.com/review/musc_mu-330182/content_423776390788 CONCERT MUSIC "Tutto Mozart" sung by Bryn Terfel at http://www.epinions.com/content_424596508292 Darius Milhaud's Carnavals (Aix, London) at http://www.epinions.com/content_426018967172 ROCK The "best of" (all of!) the Music Explosion at http://www.epinions.com/content_422499880580 Maria Muldauer singing Bob Dylan love songs, "Heart of Mine" at http://www.epinions.com/content_422401511044 (I also checked out, listened to, but decided not to write about the Moody Blues' "On the Threshold of a Dream," Wynton Marsalis's "Big Train" and "From the Plantation to the Penitentary" Olivier Messiaen's "Des Canyons aux Etoiles" (eventually I'll undertake writing about this very difficult work), a collection of Thelonius Monk Blue Note recordings (not in the databse), and undoubtedly other discs I don't remember.) During this time, I also wrote about some of the movies I checked out from the SFPL: Nothing Sacred, Great Moment, Night and the City, Soy Cuba, Pierrot le fou, and The Crystal Liturgy a documentary on comoser Olivier Messiaen and even two books: Mary Lee Settle's Blood Ties and Tim Miller's 1001 Beds. I should also note that my recent interest in the photographs (and career) of Dorothea Lange and Rondal Partridge was stimulated by a showing at SFPL of Meg Partridge's Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life and an exhibition of Lange's Steep Ravine photographs on the library's top-floor gallery. SO, I continue to have my horizons -- musical and other -- expanded by public libraries, and this series of reviews is a small token of my gratitude to them (and especially to the San Francisco Public Library).

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