Bring Back That Old-Fashioned Waltz

I spend Tuesdays underground. Regardless of how fine the weather is (and this spring it's been rainy too often), on Tuesdays I descend a narrow, beige-painted stairway which looks like it belongs in a submarine, to a basement room efficiently if bleakly lit by fluorescent bulbs. This is the Paramount Theatre Music Library, in Oakland, California.

Anne Yambor sorting music

By the time I arrive mid-morning there are usually three or four other people in the basement room. We greet each other, and settle ourselves around a broad table. We are surrounded by stacks, piles, and bunches of sheet music. Out in the hallway there are cartons full of more sheet music. In an adjoining room, and in the attic of this building, are shelves bulging with sheet music. Each of us will spend the day organizing the sheet music, moving the papers from one stack to another.

Music waiting to be catalogued

It sounds like a task for one of those obsessed librarian-scholars in a Jorge Luis Borges story. But the work is nowhere so grim. The organizing proceeds slowly because the sheet music is so interesting, even when not being performed: I'll find myself staring at a piece's cover, where some musician wrote his name in the penmanship of eighty years ago, or the exquisite cover art, or at a song's absurd, sentimental lyrics. I'll forget momentarily that I'm supposed to be matching the paper in my hand to the library's catalogs.

The Rudolph Catalog

One of these catalogs is a masterpiece of typewritten art. Sometime in the mid-20th century former vaudeville musician Walter J. Rudolph decided to organize his own extensive collection of popular and light classical music. He typed, apparently on a manual typewriter, with few mistakes or corrections, in neat columns and black and red ink, an entry for each of the 70,000 titles of music in his possession. Now the Library has both the music and the Rudolph catalog, and I struggle to contain my fascination with each title so that I can work through the next stack of music.