Susan T. ("Suki") Sommer (1935-2008).

Gottlieb, Jane

Susan T. ("Suki") Sommer (1935-2008). The Music Library Association (MLA) has lost its spiritual leader: Suki Sommer passed away on 4 March 2008, about one week after returning from our annual conference in Newport, Rhode Island. Born Susan Thiemann on 7 January 1935, Suki was beloved by all who were fortunate enough to come into her sphere: librarians, musicologists, students, and the regular folks who encountered her in her Upper West Side Manhattan community.

After receiving her bachelor's degree from Smith College in 1956, Suki went on to pursue graduate work at Columbia University as a student of Paul Henry Lang. She also received a library degree from Columbia, and in 1970 was appointed lecturer in music librarianship at Columbia University's School of Library Service, where she would go on to teach so many of us how to do what we do. She taught music librarianship, as well as a class in performing arts bibliography, until the school's unfortunate closure by the university in 1992.

Suki began her long career at the New York Public Library (NYPL) in 1961. In 1969, she was appointed head of the Music Division's Special Collections, which also encompasses the Toscanini Memorial Archives of microfilms of source materials from other libraries. There are many musicologists who automatically think of Suki when they reflect on their work in these collections. She had vast knowledge of the library's history and rich treasures, which she shared in her article "Joseph W. Drexel and His Music Library" in Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang (Edmond Strainchamps and Maria Rika Maniates, eds. [New York: W. W. Norton, 1984], 270-78). From 1987 to 1997, she was head of NYPL's Performing Arts Library circulating collections, which exist in the same building as the research collections but serve a very different clientele. In 1997, she returned to the Music Research Division to assume the position of chief, and remained at the library until her retirement in 2001. Suki slipped into each of these varying roles with ease: she was the all-knowing librarian when helping an individual scholar find his or her way through a rare manuscript and related literature, and the eagle-eyed administrator when dealing with staff or funding issues. It was a mistake for anyone to interpret her humor or wonderful sense of irony as lack of seriousness. She was fiercely intelligent, and always knew exactly what was going on.

When awarded MLA's Citation, its highest honor, in 1994, she was recognized for "her multitudinous and continuing contributions as librarian, educator, author, editor, and organizational luminary...whose inspirational work has energized and influenced generations of her students and colleagues." Even with these words, it is impossible to summarize Suki's countless contributions to MLA. She served as the organization's president from 1989 to 1991, succeeding Lenore Coral. It's so hard to believe that they are both gone. Suki was a master editor: she edited the Notes "Book Reviews" column from 1978 to 1982, and the complete journal from 1982 to 1987, as well as IAML's journal, Fontes Artis Musicae. She often spoke of the joys and challenges of editing: both seeing the finished issue, and knowing that there was never a respite from the tight production schedule for a scholarly journal published quarterly.

Suki's vision and inspiration brought many people into our profession. She offered special financial support to the new members' reception at the annual meetings, and made it a point to attend and reach out to newcomers. As someone mentioned in their MLA-L tribute to her, when engaged in conversation, she made you feel as if there was no one else in the room.

Suki and her husband Bob Sommer were true Upper West Side Manhattanites: they possessed the liberal values and quirky outlook that scared even former mayor Rudy Guiliani (although he would never admit it). They knew all the special features of our restaurants and grocery stores, and how to avoid the lines at our local Duane Reade drug store. Suki and Bob were married for thirty-eight years, and she was grief stricken upon his death in January 2007. Suki is survived by her beloved brother Nicholas, his wife Helen, and their son, Clark Thiemann.

As evidenced by the outpouring of messages on MLA-L following Suki's death, so many of us had life-changing encounters and close relationships with her that I feel somewhat selfish in recounting my own experience. Suki was like a second mother to me. From the time I met her as a student in her Columbia University music librarianship class in 1977 until her death, I looked to her for perspective, advice, and, most of all, friendship. I consulted her when contemplating the purchase of my co-op apartment (just one block away from her own apartment), as well as on professional matters. I found her uniquely Suki-wisdom coming at the most needed times: on a gurney to terrifying surgery in May 2005, I recalled Suki talking about one of her own surgeries and comparing the line of gurneys creeping their way to the operating room to cars trying to merge on the Long Island Expressway.

Suki keenly understood life's boundaries. In so many ways she taught us how to live, and, by sharing her last days with us, showed us that it is possible to die with grace and dignity. When I spent time with her in her Newport hotel room, we looked at the water together and watched the path of a lone seagull that had stopped on the hotel deck. At the banquest she told me that she came to the meeting both to see her friends and to make sure that MLA was in good hands. She left knowing that we loved her deeply and that we are all okay.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

JANE GOTTLIEB

Juilliard School