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?

My Funny Valentine

The sheet music of yesterday! Faded, dog-eared, and torn, it is an astonishing heap of mementos that seem as lost in the recesses of time and as fruitless to scan as someone else's old valentines.

– Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime, p. 5

It's true, I might question the value of my interest in these corny, baffling, and sometimes offensive songs published long ago. But there are other aspects of yesterday's Hit Parade to consider.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle

– Hart Crane, "My Grandmother's Love Letters"

This "seasons [sic] hit" was a "big success" in my great-grandmother's day

A few years back I had earnest, obsessive interest in current music. I worked in record stores, socialized with musicians, and never let an issue of Option magazine go unread. But sometime in the early 1990s I stopped caring about all this. Part of it was my realizing how much keeping current was related to endless, unsustainable consumption– buying the latest release of Band XYZ– and superficial status– one is cool for having bought the latest release of Band XYZ.

I started engaging in something like anticonsumption: I listened only to music I found in LP format at libraries. Since budget cuts made new acquisitions almost impossible, library music choices tended to the quaint, being leftovers from California's golden age of infrastructure. The music selections seemed to be either ethnographic (lots of Nonesuch and Folkways) or middle-of-the-road (no acid rock, but postwar jazz and vocals). San Francisco State University's library had a remarkable selection of mid-century Blue Note releases, as well as the Raymond Scott 10" that entertained me until the overplayed "Powerhouse" skipped.

This marinade in the music of olden times schooled me in the concept of the standard, versus that of the cover version. A pop or jazz standard is a song released to all performers. Nobody must sound like Dinah Washington when singing "What a Diff'rence a Day Made," which is why Jamie Cullum could perform it so effectively here at the Paramount in June, and why neither vocalist must shape the performance to resemble the original "Cuando Vuelva a Tu Lado", a Mexican bolero from 1934.

I can't wait to hear the myriad interpretations of "Too Much Mustard"

It's even more enthralling to hear contemporary recordings of these decades-old songs. Not everything's out on CD yet, regrettably, but the freeform world of podcasting promises to take up the slack:

• Podcasts from Radio WFMU, including the riveting Thomas Edison's Attic and the Antique Phonograph Music Program.

New! A 1913 recording of "Too Much Mustard" is available at the Internet Archive

Up on the Housetop

Until now I'd been only in the library's basement office, where we do all the sorting, cataloguing, and data entry. Finally one afternoon librarian Jean Cunningham led me up several flights of stairs– from the Paramount's basement to its highest balcony– to an industrial-looking room holding movie projectors, file cabinets, noisy ventilation fans, and many, many steel shelving units crammed with sheet music. These are the Library's stacks.

A more interesting attic than most

It was exciting to visit the stacks, where the music is apparently in order and accounted for, though not without the devoted, uncompensated labor of several volunteers. Shelving the music is a Sisyphean task: there are always loose items, always duplicates, always new pieces of music, always old ones to reshelve. Here also the work can slow when the music itself provides distractions, such as interesting cover art, or the faint pencil scrawl of a musician's note. We're assisted by the amazing thoroughness of Walter Rudolph, who bound his meticulously catalogued sheet music collection in handmade cardboard portfolios. It's easy to find and shelve a Rudolph item, though regrettably he might have trimmed the music and discarded its illustrated cover to fit the sheets into the portfolio.

Mr. Rudolph sewed these sturdy binders for his music collection

Elsewhere in the room are cardboard boxes and file cabinets full of barely investigated treasures. I reached into one box and retrieved a bunch of signed publicity photos of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson: a fan club's overstock? What will we find in the other boxes? And when will we have the leisure to open them?