Before every San Francisco Symphony concert, you’ll see a black-clad figure distributing folders on the musicians’ stands. Most of the time, that’s Margo Kieser, the orchestra’s principal librarian and holder of the Nancy and Charles Geschke Chair. Although you’ll never see Kieser or one of SFS’s assistant librarians performing onstage, they’re absolutely crucial to the smooth functioning of the orchestra.
Across Grove Street, San Francisco Opera Orchestra librarian Carrie Weick plays an equally important part. And for the Oakland Symphony, Marin Symphony, Monterey Symphony, and California Symphony — smaller-budget regional orchestras that each perform about once a month — Drew Ford is the librarian. Unlike Kieser and Weick, Ford is also a performer, serving as principal cellist of the Stockton Symphony and section cellist in the Monterey Symphony and Fresno Philharmonic. On top of that, he is the personnel manager for Oakland and Monterey. That’s life when you’re a Bay Area freelance musician.
Orchestra librarians are not the same as music librarians working in academic settings. The latter hold degrees in music, often at the doctoral level, and also degrees in library and information science. They purchase materials, manage subscriptions to academic journals, and assist students and faculty with research.
Orchestra librarians are musicians who work for performing arts organizations. They obtain scores and parts, consult with conductors and concertmasters, check the music for accuracy, ensure that page turns are realistic, and make corrections as necessary. They generally hold just music degrees. At larger organizations, such as the SF Symphony and SF Opera, they’re in the same union as the instrumentalists and are covered by the same collective bargaining agreement.
There’s little in the way of formal training for orchestra librarians. Musicians find themselves in the job because it needs to be done and they’ve got the right skills. Deep knowledge of classical music is essential, of course, as is an understanding of the rehearsal process and how orchestras function. Familiarity with the core symphonic repertory is also important.
Kieser, who has been with the SF Symphony for 40 years, got her start at the former San Jose Symphony when the late George Cleve was music director. She had been a piano major in college and also sang and played violin and trombone. Her predecessor in San Jose, the scholar and performer Dan Leeson, didn’t want to be librarian anymore, so he trained her, and she inherited the job.
Weick, who plays piano, violin, viola, and French horn, joined SF Opera in 2000 as a half-time assistant to Lauré Campbell, then the music librarian, as well as a half-time assistant to the personnel manager. She learned how to be librarian on the job and in 2012 took over full-time. But she “had done a lot of manuscript work in the 1990s,” mainly for singers who wanted the piano part for a piece of music transposed, she explained to SF Classical Voice. “And I had knowledge of all the instruments, mostly from taking a band arranging class in college.”
Ford started on this path even earlier. He was a high school cellist when he wound up as the student music library assistant. He occupied something of a similar role while studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and then at The Juilliard School. “My fellow students hated copying bowings into their parts,” he explained. When he returned to California and started playing with the Monterey Symphony, the orchestra’s librarian drafted his help. He would later assume the job.
There’s currently some training available for orchestra librarians, Kieser said. Miami’s New World Symphony, co-founded by SF Symphony Music Director Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas, and the Boston Symphony’s Tanglewood Music Center both have fellowship programs. Alumni of the latter have won positions at more than two dozen organizations.
Still, most orchestra librarians get their training on the job. Weick said that “the best training for a music librarian is music education. You learn the foibles of each instrument. You learn the keys. You learn what’s hard, and not just note-wise. Can you get the mute out fast enough? Who’s going to need more time to turn a page?”
Orchestra librarians have some personal characteristics in common. Kieser and Weick agreed that you need to be organized and detail-oriented, while Weick added that an interest in building things, such as a set of parts, is helpful. Ford referred to himself as “persnickety” and also said that “it’s important to be approachable and a problem-solver, someone who can help people to enjoy their jobs and feel supported.”
Orchestra librarians’ day-to-day work is governed by what their organizations are performing. Scores and parts need to be obtained far enough in advance. Kieser, Weick, and Ford were unanimous about their preference for buying music over renting whenever possible. They’re going to be putting a large amount of time into reviewing the materials, inserting bowings and other markings, and correcting any problems they find. All that work vanishes when the parts are returned to a publisher or rental agency.
Even before music is ordered, the librarians consult with the scheduled conductors, who choose the editions that will be performed. Weick recalled emails with Mark Elder, who was slated to conduct a production of Verdi’s Rigoletto at SF Opera that was ultimately canceled by the COVID-19 pandemic. She asked whether he wanted to use the critical edition, hoping that he did not. These scores reflect composers’ actual manuscripts, but according to Weick, they’re often not sufficient for performance. They might lack dynamics or articulations, for example. Elder responded that he “wasn’t too keen” on critical editions and found them most useful for reference.
(But sometimes the critical edition is by far the most accurate and practical, such as the Bärenreiter edition of Hector Berlioz’s Les Troyens, which was used for SF Opera’s 2015 production, conducted by former Music Director Donald Runnicles.)
When orchestras perform concertos, Kieser said, the librarians will also consult with the soloists, who might want particular editions or to use particular cadenzas.
The librarians also work with their orchestras’ concertmasters to make sure that bowings are correct for all of the string sections. Weick mentioned that she will soon be going over the string parts for SF Opera’s June performances of Mozart’s Idomeneo with concertmaster Kay Stern. Stern has played the work several times in the past and will know where previous conductors made changes.
Conductors will sometimes even bring their own parts. Weick related that Jesús López Cobos did just that for Rossini’s La Cenerentola in 2014 and said to her, “I have saved you a lot of time.” To which she replied, “Yes, you have.”
When an organization commissions a new piece and is the first to perform it, it will often work with the composer and his or her publisher. SF Opera presented the world premiere of John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra in 2022, and during the rehearsal period, Adams made revisions, which then had to be incorporated into the parts. And further rethinking of said revisions required further updates.
While Weick is in charge of parts for the SF Opera Orchestra, the company also has an opera librarian, Vivian Wang. Her responsibilities are parallel to Weick’s, covering the vocal side. Wang maintains SF Opera’s library of piano-vocal scores and prepares them for performances, marking cuts and proofreading them against the orchestral scores and parts. She identifies and corrects errors not just in the music but also in the text.
Her goal is to make sure that everything is consistent for rehearsals and performances. She and Weick consult each other about repeats, inserts, and keys and to reconcile any discrepancies. Wang also maintains and assists with SF Opera’s collection of librettos, recordings, reference materials, and other vocal music, such as art songs, musicals, and concert works.
The SF Symphony has by far the largest music library of these organizations because the orchestra is more than a century old and plays the greatest number of different concert programs each season. It consequently owns scores and parts to roughly 5,000 works. There are some interesting duplications, though. For example, the SF Symphony has 17 different suites drawn from Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet. And some of the oldest items in the orchestra’s library come from when the Pittsburgh Symphony was experiencing financial difficulties, which led to a canceled season and the selling off of some of its music.
The SF Symphony’s library is big enough that it’s divided into separate sections: regular repertory, kids’ music, brass, and holiday music. It has also overflowed its original space. Some of the less-used music is stored in a tall closet-like area called the Silo, which includes a built-in ladder and a pulley system for accessing music in the upper reaches.
SF Opera owns parts for about 140 operas and a number of additional works, not to mention the items in the company’s archive. The music library includes early printings of full scores by Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner, among other valuable articles.
Back in 1930, the great diva Maria Jeritza, who created the role of the Empress in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten and was the Metropolitan Opera’s first Jenůfa and Turandot, sang Salome with SF Opera (before the War Memorial Opera House was even built). The San Francisco Public Library has a photograph of Gaetano Merola, the company’s founder and first general director, waiting at the airport for Jeritza’s arrival and holding a score for Salome. It’s possible that this is the Salome score in the SF Opera music library. (There’s a cut in it that removes about a page of music and saves Salome from singing a high B-flat, perhaps evidence that Merola accommodated Jeritza’s vocal capabilities.)
Among Northern California’s regional orchestras, the Monterey Symphony has roughly 900 works in its library, the Marin Symphony about 600, and the California Symphony, the youngest of the bunch, about 500. The Oakland Symphony’s library is currently being recataloged, so the number of works it owns is unclear.
Asked how the job of an orchestra librarian has changed, Kieser, Weick, and Ford all mentioned the impact of computers. Finale, Sibelius, and other music engraving programs make it possible to produce neat corrections and to print out full scores. Likewise, if a publisher provides parts as PDFs, it’s possible to simply print out replacements when needed.
Could orchestras eventually move to all-electronic parts, using iPads or other electronic devices? Kieser, Weick, and Ford were dubious. Ford cited the enormous hardware investment that would be required, while Kieser mentioned the cost of fully digitizing the music a large orchestra plays. She also mentioned repertory changes at the SF Symphony, which now programs more pops concerts and film showings.
Some things never change, though. Ford said that he makes corrections any way he can — “whatever is most efficient.” In addition to engraving programs, he’ll use pencil or Avery permanent adhesive typewriter correction tape.
Certain challenges face all orchestra librarians — finding and correcting errors, musicians who leave their parts at home, time pressures — but others are organization-specific.
“There are operas that exist in multiple versions, like Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann and Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov,” said Weick. “And then there’s Ricordi,” Verdi and Puccini’s publisher. “Ricordi scores of a certain age don’t have key signatures because you were only playing tonal music. Rehearsal numbers and letters [which identify specific places in a work] came in after Verdi –– the late Verdi have some rehearsal numbers. Ricordi also has lots of different versions of the same score [cataloged] with the same number, so you have to see when it was printed to figure out which one you’re looking at. There are four or five different Otello scores.”
Ford said that the most challenging programs for him to prepare are pops concerts covering a wide repertory. Until he receives the music, he won’t know which instrumentalists to hire and probably won’t know which parts are doubled. For these concerts, he can find himself distributing up to 600 parts to the musicians’ folders.
With the large number of performances on the SF Symphony’s schedule, Kieser and her staff have an enormous amount of cross-checking to do to ensure that everything is in the right place. They consult multiple sources to confirm that a work is complete: the publisher’s website, the score, the packing slip, and the parts themselves. Kieser once discovered that a publisher had omitted a part and hadn’t listed it on the packing slip.
Asked what she’d like the general public to know about orchestra librarians, Kieser said, “We do this for the love of the music. It’s never lost on me that I work with one of the greatest orchestras in the world.”
