Yale's Music Library Revised

Yale's Music Library RevisedAuthor(s): Brooks Shepard, Jr.Source: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Jun., 1956), pp. 421-423Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/893317 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 21:26

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Music Library Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Notes.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.204 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:26:53 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mulias

http://www.jstor.org/stable/893317?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


YALE'S MUSIC LIBRARY REVISED By BROOKS SHEPARD, JR.

When the Albert Arnold Sprague Memorial Hall was built for the Yale School of Music in 1917, its design was inspired, so it is said, by the typical New England town hall. The basement jail cells of the latter became, in the new plan, a series of tiny cubicles for instrumental practice. The administrative offices of the ground floor became two rows of teaching studios, separated by a pair of corridors with doors at both ends, intended to insulate the sounds produced by one row from those emanat- ing from the other. And on the upper stories, where the meeting chamber or court room of the town hall is traditionally located, was placed the auditorium.

The first and last of these arrangements have proven quite successful. There is an insufficient number of rooms for practice and record listening in the basement (and where are there enough?), but their sounds are largely muffled by the earth of New Haven and the thick floors of the building. The auditorium possesses acoustical properties which are the envy of the nation, and if arriving audiences reach the top of the great flight of stairs flushed and gasping, their strenuous efforts are amply repaid.

It is on the ground floor that the whimsy, or perhaps it was only the ignorance of the designers, had distressing effect. The strange system of corridors failed largely because the heavy traffic became stalled at the many doors blocking its way. The doors were consequently left open, and sounds coursed through the halls with the din characteristic of our older conservatory buildings. A curious combination of acoustical theories had stuffed the walls with seaweed, and then covered them with a hard, resonant layer of plaster. When the seaweed dried, inevitably, and drifted to the bottom of the walls, it served only as a refuge for the varmints taking up abode in the new building.

The impracticality of design of Sprague Hall, readily apparent to a visitor, easily became the norm to those working daily within its walls. Generations of faculty and students accepted philosophically the racket and the inconvenience. The limitations of the building became intoler- able only, as is so often the case, when the volume of space provided by the building became wholly inadequate for the expanded commitments of musical instruction in the University. At the peak of crisis, in 1954, many studios were shared by more than one instructor, and few faculty members were privileged to retreat for work or consultations to offices of their own. The Library, occupying a room in the corner of the building, had enlarged its holdings some twenty-fold since 1917, and served a correspondingly increased number of faculty and students.

421



To accommodate properly the expanded facilities of the University's School and Department of Music, a new building incorporating the latest developments of acoustical design would naturally have been most desirable. The University had many other commitments, however, and could only provide across the street from Sprague Hall a former fraternity house, built three generations ago in the Venetian taste.

The chagrin of those persons concerned with the acquisition of new space soon turned to pleasure when it was discovered that the two buildings, together, were astonishingly adaptable to the present-day functioning of musical instruction in the University. The ancient fraternity house, now renamed Stoeckel Hall in honor of the first music instructor on the Yale faculty, contained a quantity of small chambers, as well as larger rooms, capable of accommodating offices and teaching studios for the entire faculty. At the same time, the entire ground floor of Sprague Hall proved to be remarkably suitable for housing the collections and operations of the Music Library. In both buildings a minimum of rearrangement of partitions was necessary.

It is beyond the scope of this report to describe the modifications which have ameliorated the conditions of faculty teaching and study in Stoeckel Hall. The Sprague Hall alterations, however, accomplished with a generous memorial gift honoring the late John Herrick Jackson of the Yale class of 1934, constitute a model adaptation of an obsolete building to modern music library requirements. Responsible for its success was the capable and imaginative library architect, J. Russell Bailey, of Orange, Virginia.

The original reading room remains the nucleus of the new Library. Near its entrance is placed a circulation desk, behind which are the stacks of the circulating collection, carved out of three former office rooms of the School of Music. The circulation desk dominates a large hall containing the readers' catalogs and exhibition cases, formerly two parallel narrow corridors dividing one row of studios from the other. The studios them- selves, opening onto the exhibition hall, contain now the phonograph collection and administrative and processing offices of the Library, as well as the graduate seminar. There are two special collection rooms: one a former studio, the other occupying a former corridor which has since been closed off. Lavatories and a small lounge for the Library staff are provided, and a room for phonograph listening by groups of students.

The results of the changes have affected not only the efficiency of Library operations, with consequent effect on morale, but the very nature of these operations. Because of the difficulty of surveillance in a room which doubled as a passageway, for example, a restricted circulation and reserve book policy had formerly been necessary. Although this has been greatly liberalized at no expense of staff time, the incidence of book loss has diminished since the completion of the new Library to about a third of its former figure.

422



Not all of the requirements of a flourishing music library in a University could be met, of course, by remodeling within four substantial walls. The most serious deficiency, a familiar one in most libraries, is the provision for a collection currently of some 50,000 bound volumes. Of these, only about 8,000 are included in the permanent reference collection in the Reading Room, and another 4,000 are in the special collection rooms. Several thousand volumes of little-used material have been drawn off the circulating collection housed in the stacks, to be stored in a large basement storage room. The most optimistic estimates will permit no more than about twenty years' growth of the circulating collection before the present stack space is filled. In this event, the convenience of a one-floor plan will have to be sacrificed, for the only space available will be that directly below the present stacks.

The equipment provided for these new library quarters includes no revolutionary devices. The furnishings, however, employ new designs from the Library Bureau of Remington Rand which have proven both highly serviceable and a welcome relief from the institutional designs of tradition. A gratifying aspect of the planning was the co-operation offered by representatives of this firm to the architect and the librarian. Not content merely to peddle stock items from the company catalog, the representatives helped to solve problems peculiar to music libraries and to this one in particular. An example which might be of interest to other librarians is the problem of supporting rows of thin folio scores on metal stack shelves. Ordinary book supports collapse under the weight of leaning scores while the largest standard wire support, suspended from the shelf above, does not reach far enough to prevent scores from slipping out at the bottom. At our request, and with the assurance that a greater market awaits, the company is now developing a suspended wire support for 12" shelves.

Although the past year or two has witnessed the construction of a heartening number of new and magnificently equipped music libraries, many librarians will continue to find their pleas for facilities subordinated to those of other institutional departments. Given adequate floor space to work with, and aided by the experience and imagination of a professional library designer, they may hope to achieve most of their objectives within existing building space. The very much lower cost, too, may make the difference between an administration's acceptance and rejection of an argument, no matter how reasonably presented, for improvement of music library facilities.

423



Documents

Yale's Music Library Revised