The Volunteer March

It's been over a year since I posted last, hasn't it? Yet the Web is proving a more archival medium than we suspected: reader X24 commented just a few weeks ago, with a reasonable question:

How easy is it for a normal, everyday member of the workaday public to come in to peruse or make copies?

Librarian Jean Cunningham knows all. She's the only staff member at the Library, which is otherwise sustained by the efforts of volunteers such as Bernice, June, John, and Mike. Would you like to:

• visit the Library,
• use the Library's music, or
• (best of all) volunteer at the Library?

Then contact Jean. Here's what she says about visiting:

The library is open by appointment. Weekday afternoons are best, although other times can be arranged.

Sing, Katie (but Leave The Piano Alone)

Thousands of pages of music, and I can't read a note. Nope, I'm just not a musician, despite my earnest middle school attempts to play the clarinet. Now that I've ceased contributing to noise pollution, what appeal could a music library hold for the likes of me?

Plenty, really; probably even more than if I were just seeking the trombone part for "Caravan." A lot of the music at the Paramount library is in the form of sheet music for solo piano, often with lyrics for the capable and/or uninhibited to vocalize. Sometimes guitar or ukulele tablature peppers the sheet, which won't necessarily be an exotic tune to warrant this instrumentation. This kind of music is usually bound with an eye-catching illustrated cover, and often some hyperbolic music publishers' claims adorn the inside or back covers: 1913's "Ecstasi" is promoted as "[t]his is the number that put the 'tang' in tango;" "Quiéreme Mucho" (1931) is to be regarded as "the logical successor to 'Amapola,'" in case you were seeking that. It's often crass, nearly always middlebrow, and more fun than a barrel of banjoleles. It's music for amateurs.

Even as the phonograph and the radio lost novelty and achieved necessity in American households, people still liked having sheet music around, it seems. As noted before, the Paramount library has sheet music published well into the Eight-Track Era, by which time you'd think we had surrendered music-making entirely to professionals. Maybe we just wanted to pretend we were musicians, just as many people kept parlor pianos or a music room, even though nobody played.

And how was your taste assessed when you brought some of these titles from your piano bench?

As if Edvard Munch illustrated sheet music

The Drowsy Chaperone

Wholesome fun in 1907 included one or both of the Russell Brothers in drag

Songs of Other Days

Hear this song on a 1914 cylinder recording

We're still handling the recent donations. Some of these are the 1970's piano albums which don't thrill me as much, but it seems that stratum is well-excavated, and more of the new items in the Library database are of earlier vintage.

One of the satisfactions of data entry at the Library is discovering what else we have on the shelves. It's predictable that there are apparently thousands of titles composed by Irving Berlin, or Harry Von Tilzer, but who suspected that the Library has the sheet music for "Chopsticks?" Yes, that's right: "Chopsticks," the bane of every piano owner, the tune so simple even bratty six-year-olds can play it (I know from experience). If you're one of the two or three people on Earth who don't know how to play it by ear, well, request the music from the Paramount Sheet Music Library.

A 1940's title donated by Mrs. Bach Skinner. Love the cartoon rays from his eyes!

Watch Eydie Gorme and the Whippoorwills perform "Ma, He's Making Eyes at Me"

Time in a Bottle

As I do with so many donations to the Library, I grabbed a stack of new acquisitions and sat at a PC, entering the new cataloguing information into the Library's database. This is a dull task in most other situations, but I like doing it at the Library: I get to handle the music, look at who wrote it, where and when it was published, even read the lyrics.

As can be detected in my other posts, I prefer music published in the early 20th century. I know it's often trite, culturally obtuse, and not very experimental, but it appeals to me as few current genres of music do. Maybe I'm susceptible to nostalgia: in, say, 1918, would I have been considered something like Samuel Siegel's "Ragtime Echoes" as modernistically offensive as some of my contemporaries?

Whether it is simply a passing phase of our decadent art culture or an infectious disease which has come to stay, like la grippe and leprosy, time alone can show

– Etude magazine critic Edward Baxter Perry, quoted in This Is Ragtime by Terry Waldo

Among the new donations (the treasure of a garage in Stockton, California) were several piano albums, the kind amateur musicians use when they need the basic melody and lyrics to popular songs. I started at the top of the stack, the most recently published selections. These were mostly from the early 1970's, with the apparently requisite puffy lettering and Peter Max illustration style on the covers. The song titles were certainly familiar to me: they were played on the radio frequently when I was a kid–"One Tin Soldier," "Bad Bad Leroy Brown," "Delta Dawn"; the soundtrack of stagflation– and I probably know them better thanks to ceaseless TV ads for the K-tel hits collections.

As I entered the data for these songs I started feeling gloomy. I wondered why I felt so less intrigued by this music. Was it because, even at the time, I thought the early Seventies was one of the most aesthetically repulsive eras of human history? Yet, as I created a new catalogue entry for "The Entertainer," I remembered that the time wasn't all bad. We got another Ragtime Revival, for instance, thanks to Marvin Hamlisch's anachronistic score for The Sting. But the next entry was for an annoying piece called "Dreams of an Everyday Housewife." Reading the patronizing lyrics for this one, which I don't remember on the hit parade at all, helped me understand why Ms. magazine was founded about the same time.

Yaaka Hula Hicky Dula

The Library volunteers have been gradually excavating the newest batch of donated sheet music. My role has been mainly to exclaim about the music's cover art: coming from the collection of an enthusiastic amateur musician, the sheet music is bound with appealing, colorful illustrations.

Fresh donations

At the top of the stack were more recent selections, mostly from the 1940's. The cover art for these ballads and dance numbers tended to be images of bandleaders in U.S. military uniforms or serene ladies in evening gowns and pomadour coiffures. Just beneath this stratum was a stack of Hawaiian selections, also printed in the Forties, almost thirty years after the fad for Hawaiian music had raged.

I've Gone Native Now, or The Malahini Hula

If We Can't Be The Same Old Sweethearts, We'll Just Be The Same Old Friends

And then we reached the pre-Modernist layer of music. The cover art on these unabashedly sentimental, corny songs was lush, full of colorful gradients, and exuberantly pictorial. Ornament was no crime for these illustrations: trimming, borders, dingbats, and superfluous wording crowded the central image ("Fluffy Ruffles" is hyped by a subtitle as "a live peppery dance number full of snap and ginger").

Near the bottom of one box was the deep color of an early twentieth century (1910) hit, "Silver Bell," with music by Percy Wenrich. The Native American influence on this song pretty much ends at the cover imagery, but it's such an appealing fantasy anyway.

The lush colors of 1910

Hear the That Girl Quartet perform "Silver Bell"

'Neath the Oaks

It frustrates me that the most anybody seems to know about Oakland are lurid crime stories. Yet, when I lived across the Bay in San Francisco, I too was as ignorantly dismissive of the metropolis I knew only as a sequence of BART stops. Within days of moving to Oakland, though, I became its champion. Now, if I move anywhere, it's not back to gray, congested, overpriced San Francisco.

What's here besides failed urban renewal projects and freeways?

Well, there's the Paramount Theatre, for one. To borrow a relevant title, it has some of the best remaining seats, as one of the last of a dozen or so movie palaces that once enlivened downtown Oakland.

The main lobby of the Paramount Theatre

Ever want to see a historic building without cringing at the sight of insensitive remodeling? Then come to the Paramount's Saturday morning tours, and revel in the cut glass, metal leaf, ebony veneer, incised plaster, and the other luxury materials ordinary people used to have in their surroundings.

A light fixture on the mezzanine

A melodic heat register

After the Paramount tour, go to your local multiplex to notice the unfavorable comparison with genuine movie palace magnificence. Be sure to revisit the Paramount when the Movie Classics showings resume.

Some details of the lobby décor

Everybody Wants a Key to My Cellar

Some paying work removed me from the Paramount for a couple of weeks. I took a nice breather last Thursday, when I returned to the Library and its stacks of unsorted music for a welcome change of scenery.

It was a special occasion: the Library hosted an august visitor, Kerry Stratton, Conductor and Music Director for the Toronto Philharmonia, scanning the Rudolph catalog and the Library's Filemaker database for selections he can use in some future salon orchestra programs. Unfortunately, we disappointed his hopes of finding the music for "Xylophone Stampede". But the Library's holdings provided diverting surprises:

• A script for an NBC radio program broadcast from San Francisco in the late 1940's. Reading aloud the corny between-song patter, with its obsequious repetition of sponsor names, scotched my illusion that mainstream radio was any less inane sixty years ago

• An instruction manual, Glenn Miller's Method for Orchestral Arranging, autographed by the famous band leader

• And a program for a recital by the students of Walter J. Rudolph, performed at Oakley Hall on March 7, 1912

Program, the students of Walter J. Rudolph in concert

Who was the romantically posed longhair on the program cover? Was it the young Mr. Rudolph himself?