Music, Libraries, and the Academy: Essays in Honor of Lenore Coral.
Krummel, D.W.
Music, Libraries, and the Academy: Essays in Honor of Lenore Coral.
Edited by James P. Cassaro. Middleton, Wisconsin: A-R Editions, Inc.,
2007. [xi, 265 pp. ISBN-10 0895796120; ISBN-13 9780895796127. $50.]
Illustrations, appendix, music.
Lenore Coral (1939-2005) was a powerful presence in the music
library world for nearly forty years. She was president of MLA from 1987
to 1989, honorary member in 1991, and recipient of our Special
Achievement Award in 1995. After her undergraduate and library school
education at the University of Chicago, her career trajectory in
librarianship was ever upwards, from Irvine (in 1967) to Madison (in
1972) to Ann Arbor (briefly) to Ithaca (for her last twenty-three
years). Her scholarship sent her often to London, where she received her
doctorate (directed by the volatile Thurston Dart no less: their working
relationship boggles the mind). Leni's writings fall under two
rubrics. Those on eighteenth-century British music, book and music
auctions, and music collections, are well researched, admirably
painstaking, and dispassionately objective. The context is usually
narrow but the arguments are clear and the implications are pertinent.
On the other hand, her writings on cataloging and bibliographical access
through thematic catalogs, ISBD, and RILM are visionary in their
importance and passionate in their conviction. If her scholarship was
conspicuously cautious, and her political presence generally fearless,
it was because she knew that both would succeed or fail depending on the
persuasiveness of her integrity. Here, in other words, were the critical
scholar and the political activist, wrapped up in one extremely active
body. In her achievements, there are no disconnects. Each provided
valuable perspectives on the other, much as her library management
duties and scholarly experience enriched her activity in a range of
professional organizations.
Her mixture of intelligence, idealism, and energy were what
empowered her. She knew what was right (and usually quite correctly),
and this justified her personal style, which ranged from the objective
and well-reasoned to the outspoken and at times almost petulant. Her
ready smile concealed the passion in her eye, but also a warning: it was
always she who personally needed to determine how deserving the causes
really were. When the causes were rejected--whether for being too vague
in their conception, too lazy in their execution, or too crass in their
objectives--Leni was devastating, whether through withering dialectics,
well-worded sarcasm, or anecdotes that showed that she had done an
awesome amount of good homework. But there was also the impatient smile
that betrayed the frustrations of a perfectionist. Her appreciation of
the ambiguities and shadings that are sometimes part of the real world,
however, were often exceeded by an instinctive ability to analyze
particulars and show convincingly that quality rarely cost more than
sloppiness. She knew all too well that her oversize conscience had
uphill battles to fight, against compromise, sloppiness, and
insensitivity. (I am sure that she would continue to be horrified, if
she were alive, at the cataloging initiatives begun in her day at the
Cornell University Library. To her, standards are ideals and not
excuses.) Her grumpy moments worked mostly to confirm her authority. She
may or may not have been a religious person, but I will always see her
as a spiritual embodiment of several Old Testament heroines: Deborah,
the formidable judge of what is right; or Esther, interceding to prevent
the massacre of the music library catalog; but above all Judith,
victoriously holding up the severed head of one of our Holoinfernal
adversaries. Leni, we shall miss you.
Leni's Gedenkschrift includes essays on her favorite subjects:
on eighteenth-century music, on music libraries and collections, and on
an assortment of bibliographical contexts of musical masterpieces. The
seventeen contributors will remember her from several settings. From her
Chicago days come Daniel Heartz and H. Colin Slim, who taught her as an
undergraduate. Philip Bohlman came to Chicago much later: their ties are
through overlapping subject interests. Her years at Cornell are
reflected in pieces by Neal Zaslaw from the music faculty; by Roger
Parker, now back in London as Thurston Dart Professor at King's
College; by her longtime assistant in the library, James P. Cassaro; and
by, among the many doctoral students whom she assisted and encouraged,
Sarah Adams, Sandra Mangsen, and Richard Will. From the American music
library world come essays by Linda Solow Blotner, Mary Wallace Davidson,
Geraldine Ostrove, and Daniel Zager; from the international music
library world, by Barbara Dobbs MacKenzie and Pamela Thompson. It is
particularly fitting that the IAML citation for Leni and Anders Lonn
should be reprinted, and a picture of them together reproduced. Their
commuting partnership, between Ithaca and Stockholm, was beautiful to
behold. Much that the music library world is proud of today no doubt
reflects their rich discourse on the theory of cataloging, and
Anders' provocative influence on Leni's rigorous thinking and
vigorous activity. Concluding the volume is "La Lenore," a
keyboard delight composed as a tribute by her Cornell colleague David
Yearsley, and performed at her memorial on 9 April 2005.
D. W. KRUMMEL
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
EDITED BY ROBERT FOLLET