For CSOA librarians, it’s all: ‘the right music in right place at the right time’

Justin Vibbard, CSO’s principal librarian, oversees a staff, who are considered orchestra members (as is Vibbard himself). Their duties never stop regardless of the season. At any given time, they are working on music for that day’s concert or rehearsal, or concerts a few months or even a year away. 

The library team consists of Carole Keller, who just celebrated her 25th anniversary with the CSO, and Mark Swanson, who joined as an assistant librarian in 1984. The Chicago Symphony Chorus maintains its own library, as does the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. Olive Haugh is assistant chorus manager and librarian, while Benjimen Neal is the Civic’s librarian.

Located on the lower level of Orchestra Hall, the CSO library consists of more than 5,000 scores, with additional older ones in the orchestra’s Rosenthal Archives. “It’s a large library. It’s probably not the largest in the world," said Peter Conover, the CSO’s former principal librarian, in an interview he did before his retirement in  2023. "but it’s among the largest.”

In addition to purchasing or renting scores, librarians prepare scores for performance, for example, by correcting errors (orchestra librarians have a shared database of published mistakes), cutting and pasting parts so that page turns are easier and inserting bowings.

The leader of each string section decides on bowings for every work (essentially indicating down- or upstrokes for each bar) and marks his or her part accordingly. To ensure that the other musicians in that section are in sync, a librarian makes sure those bowings are transferred to their parts.

Although many orchestra librarians are former symphonic players, no set career path exists to obtaining such a post. “There is no place in the country where you can take classes and do this,” Conover said. “Many of us have had the same path: Basically, we stumbled into it. We were dragged in somehow.”

There are three parts to a librarian’s job: acquisition, preparation and distribution. “The distribution part is  the only time the public really sees us,” Conover said. "We’ll run around with the crew and help with stage changes, but really the only time is when we come out five minutes before with the conductor’s score.

“It’s kind of a ceremonial position. Other people could certainly do that, but it’s a nice opportunity for us to have that last-minute conference with the conductor. It’s a last chance for us to look at the stage and make sure everything is ready.”

Ask any orchestra librarian about his/her duties, and the response will be a variation on the adage: “To make sure we have the right music in the right place at the right time. If you can pull that off, then that’s pretty much 99 percent of the job.”