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National Library News
January 1996
Vol. 28, no. 1
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Speaking from...
Research and Information Services
by Mary Jane Starr, Director General
Silver anniversaries are very special occasions. At the National Library of Canada, the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the Music Division was particularly significant because
music was the first designated area of special emphasis; it remains the model for
subsequent developments in literature, and now in history. And complementing the
Music Division’s contribution to the Library’s work are its significant achievements
both nationally and internationally.
The Music Division After 25 Years
 by Timothy Maloney, Director, Music Division
Until 1970, there was no institution in Canada with a mandate to collect musical
Canadiana comprehensively. That year, with the encouragement of Mrs. Roland
Michener, wife of the then-Governor General, the National Library of Canada acted on
a prospectus submitted in 1967 by Helmut Kallmann, then supervisor of the CBC
Music Library in Toronto, to direct more of its resources towards preserving Canada’s
musical heritage for posterity, and Kallmann was appointed as the first Chief of the
National Library’s newly created Music Division.
Looking back 25 years later, there is much to celebrate. In 1995, the National Library
can boast the largest and most significant collection of musical Canadiana in existence.
It can be proud of the music librarians, archivists and documentalists who safeguard
this national collection. They provide expert music reference and research support to
hundreds of musicians, scholars, film-makers and ordinary citizens who call, write, e-mail
or visit the Division every year from across Canada and, indeed, from all over the
world. In recent weeks, for example, researchers from France, Germany, Holland,
Israel and Canada have consulted the Music Division’s Glenn Gould archival
fonds, the National Library of Canada’s most heavily used archive.
One of the earliest tasks was to bring together the various musical elements dispersed
throughout the Library’s holdings and assemble a contiguous collection of Canadian
sheet music, scores, monographs, periodicals and sound recordings. This improved the
Library’s ability to meet the needs of music researchers. Procedures were established
to ensure the long-term collection and preservation of musical ephemera (such as
newspaper clippings, publicity brochures, commercial catalogues, concert posters and
programs) which document a wide range of musical activity in Canada, and noteworthy
Canadian musicians and composers were invited to deposit their archives for permanent
safekeeping at the National Library. Gradually, the collections expanded, many
significant items were acquired, and the reputation of the Music Division grew.
Among the musical treasures which now form part of the national music collection are:
the manuscript of a brief composition which Beethoven dedicated and sent to a
19th-century Canadian musician; letters from such musical luminaries as Ravel, Debussy, Mahler, Vaughan
Williams, Scriabin and Rachmaninoff; more than 300 acetate discs of the Canadian tenor, Raoul Jobin, privately
recorded for Jobin from live-to-air broadcasts of performances at the Metropolitan
Opera in New York and other great opera houses; a copy of Le Graduel Romain, the earliest Canadian music
publication; the largest collection anywhere of 78-r.p.m. discs issued by the Berliner
Gramophone Company of Montreal, the world pioneer in flat-disc sound recordings; various early editions of “O Canada”; a concert program printed in gold on lace from a private soirée given
by Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle, featuring the Canadian soprano, Emma Albani; the first sound recordings of Céline Dion, Bryan Adams, Jeff Healey, Oscar
Peterson, Maureen Forrester, and others;
 Gould's piano.
Glenn Gould’s battered piano chair and the Steinway piano he played for many
of his recordings; the archives of Gould, Oscar Peterson, the composers Healey Willan and Claude
Champagne, the rock guitarist Randy Bachman and the folk group The Travellers,
among others.
Over the years, the national music collection grew through the mechanism of legal
deposit, which now assures an ongoing stream of current acquisitions for domestic
audio and video recordings as well as published materials, and via gifts and purchases
of foreign Canadiana, retrospective items and archival fonds. The
collection now comprises:
about 18 000 monographs and reference works on music 22 000 musical scores 1 700 music periodical titles (some of which date back to the early 1800s) 20 000 pieces of pre-1950 Canadiana sheet-music 160 000 Canadian sound recordings in all formats from wax cylinders to laser
discs 70 000 Canadian concert programs and posters 35 000 photographs of Canadian musicians and musical ensembles in addition to
other types of Canadian musical iconography 500 linear metres of archival fonds from many of the country’s most
illustrious musicians and composers 70 metres of information files covering a wide range of Canadian musical topics.
The information (or “vertical”) files are so comprehensive that they served as the single
most important source of documentation for both editions of the Encyclopedia of
Music in Canada (1981, 1992).
The depth of the music collections, coupled with the wealth of knowledge and expertise
of the Music Division staff, has proved invaluable for numerous publication projects,
including the reference works The Da Capo Catalog of Classical Music
Compositions (to be published in the spring of 1996), Encyclopedia of
Canadian Pop, Rock and Folk Music (1994), and Dictionnaire de la
musique populaire au Québec 1955-1992 (1992); the biographies Sir Ernest
MacMillan: The Importance of Being Canadian (1994), The Sackbut
Blues: Hugh Le Caine, Pioneer in Electronic Music (1989), Glenn Gould:
A Life and Variations (1989), and Healey Willan: Life and Music
(1983); the histories Music Education in Canada: An Historical Account
(1991) and The Music of Canada (1985); and the Canadian Musical
Heritage series of anthologies devoted to historical Canadian music (1983-
present).
Design used for Claude Champagne exhibition.
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In addition, exhibitions at the National Museum of Science and Technology,
the National Gallery of Canada, the National Archives of Canada, the Canadian
Museum of Civilization, and other museums, galleries and libraries have profited from
the National Library’s music collections. The films André Mathieu,
Musicien and 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, among others, have
also made extensive use of the Library’s music collections, as have numerous radio and
television documentaries, recordings, theses, university term papers and grade- and
high-school essays.
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The Music Division has itself undertaken a variety of projects to promote greater
awareness of its collections and of Canada’s musical heritage. In addition to
maintaining a union catalogue of pre-1950 Canadiana sheet music and indexing
Canadian music periodicals (few of which are indexed elsewhere), the Division has
prepared catalogues to a number of its collections, e.g., Catalogue of Archival
Fonds and Collections of the Music Division (1994), compiled by archivists
Jeannine Barriault (Acting Head of the Music Manuscript Collection since 1994) and
Stéphane Jean.In addition, other reference works have been written by divisional staff
for publication by the National Library, e.g., Roll Back the Years: History of
Recorded Sound in Canada and Its Legacy (1975) by Edward Moogk, the Head
of the Recorded Sound Collection from 1972 to 1979, and Music Publishing in
the Canadas 1800-1867 (1981) by Maria Calderisi, the Head of the Printed
Music Collection from 1973 to 1991. Division members have curated numerous
exhibitions drawn from the National Library’s collections; the most recent major
exhibition, entitled “Sir Ernest MacMillan: Portrait of a Canadian Musician”,
commemorated the 100th anniversary of the birth of this amazing Canadian man-about-music.
The Music Division also contributed to the National Library’s on-site and
World Wide Web exhibit, “Celebrating Women’s Achievements in Canada: 21
Pioneers”, which marked International Women’s Month in October 1995. In this
exhibit, tribute was paid to the accomplishments of such Canadian women as opera
singer Emma Albani, violinist Kathleen Parlow, composer Barbara Pentland, conductor
Ethel Stark, singer-songwriter Mary Travers (a.k.a. La Bolduc), and folksong collector
Helen Creighton. Members of the Division have also written articles and prepared
bibliographies and discographies for a number of international reference works; for
example, the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (1981, 1992) was co-edited
by Helmut Kallmann, and contributors included Maria Calderisi, the late Stephen
Willis (the Head of the Music Manuscript Collection from 1977 to 1994), the late
Edward Moogk, Recorded Sound Librarian Richard Green, Documentalist Florence
Hayes, Music Research Assistant Barbara Norman, Marlene Wehrle (Head, Printed
Music Collection) and the author of this article, who succeeded Kallmann as Director
of the Division in 1988. Florence Hayes also contributed articles to the
Encyclopedia of Keyboard Instruments (1994), Stephen Willis to The
New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1993), Maria Calderisi and Marlene Wehrle to
Music Printing and Publishing (1990), and Music Research Assistant
Cheryl Gillard to Women in Music History (scheduled for publication in
1996). Since the early 1990s, the Division has collaborated with CBC Records in
Toronto, and with Montreal-based Analekta Discs and Justin Time Records, on
different projects to produce a number of compact discs from historic 78-r.p.m. and
acetate recordings held by the National Library; among the artists represented on these
re-issues are operatic tenors Edward Johnson and Raoul Jobin, pianists Oscar Peterson
and Glenn Gould, and composer, conductor and organist Sir Ernest MacMillan. The
Division has also produced remastered digital tapes of popular and dance-band music
from the 78-r.p.m. era for broadcast use on the CBC-Stereo programs, “The Arts
Tonight” and “Fresh Air”.
Despite federal government downsizing and diminishing budgets, the mission of the
Music Division remains constant as it enters its second quarter-century. In fact, the
successful combination in the Division of a comprehensive collecting mandate and
broad subject expertise has resulted in special recognition by the National Library for
the domain of Canadian music as the Library’s first subject “area of special emphasis”.
The Music Division has been considered a model on which further areas of emphasis
in Canadian literature and history, presently being developed by the Library, could
be built. The Division’s stature within the Library, as well as its burgeoning profile in
the musical community across Canada, speak to the many achievements and ongoing
outreach efforts of its personnel, who have been leaders in music librarianship at
the national and international levels. Helmut Kallmann, now retired, co-founded the
Canadian Music Library Association (CMLA, later CAML), which he twice chaired,
and initiated Canadian participation in the International Association of Music Libraries
(IAML), serving as the Canadian delegate from 1959 to 1971. Maria Calderisi, who
retired in 1995, was President of CAML from 1976 to 1978, and of IAML from 1986
to 1989. I was President of CAML from 1993 to 1995, and other divisional members
remain active contributors to professional associations, such as IAML and IASA
(the Inter-national Association of Sound Archives), and to conferences and journals in
the domains of musicology, and library and archival science. A recent noteworthy
contribution from the Music Division to the international discourse on audiovisual
preservation was a two-part article, originally published in the National Library
News, on “The Degradation of Sound Recordings” by the Division’s Audiovisual
Conservator, Gilles Saint-Laurent; a revised version was published by the Commission
on Preservation and Access in Washington, D.C as “The Care and Handling of
Recorded Sound Materials”, and republished in the U.S.-based Journal of the
Association of Recorded Sound Collectors as “The Preservation of Recorded
Sound Materials”. Republications by UNESCO and the International Federation of
Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) are pending.
While today’s challenges for the Music Division are quite different from those which
existed 25 years ago, we are confident of our ability to meet them with resourcefulness
and imagination. We are pursuing private-sector partnerships and sponsorships to help
us with extensive conservation and preservation treatment of audiovisual and paper-
based archival documents, and we are exploring new digitizing technologies to make
collection elements and access tools available on the Internet. For example, the
Division recently began a projected five-year cooperative project with the Canadian
Musical Heritage Society to convert the Library’s manual union catalogue of pre-1950
Canadiana sheet music to a computerized database for eventual availability on CD-
ROM or the Internet. Similarly, the Division is currently seeking funding to scan its
manual canadian music periodical index (via optical character recognition) to make this
valuable research tool available through the Internet. We are also talking to several
prospective archival donors about the possibility of their providing some form of
endowment with their donations so that the Music Division could utilize the future
income for the continuing conservation of those collections and others. Also in the
realm of archives, acquisitions will continue to be sought out from the worlds of jazz,
folk, pop and rock music in recognition of the place that popular genres have occupied
in 20th-century Canadian life and of their growing importance as subjects for scholarly
enquiry.
Although the challenges may have evolved, in some ways the tasks remain unchanged
by the passage of time and technology. We continue to seek out early Canadiana to fill
in the many holes that still exist in this national collection, which has been building for
only a quarter-century -- a mere blink of the eye compared with the time it has taken to
build the vast music collections of the Library of Congress, the British Library and the
Bibliothèque nationale in France. Items such as the first edition (1880) of “O Canada”,
Berliner disc No.1 (“God Save the Queen”), original 78s of Emma Albani and Éva
Gauthier, early Wilf Carter songbooks, Canadian piano rolls, pre-Confederation
hymnbooks, LPs of the Two-Tones (Gordon Lightfoot’s first group), several hundred
pieces of pre-1950 Canadiana sheet music and several thousand Canadian recordings
from the cylinder and 78-r.p.m. era are among those on our desiderata lists.
Judging by the successes of our first 25 years, the Music Division’s start has been
tremendous. It will continue to evolve and adapt, and to seek creative ways to preserve
Canada’s musical heritage and make it better known to Canadians. We greatly look
forward to the next 25 years!
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An earlier version of the article was published in the December 1995 issue of
Classical Music Magazine.
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