John
At 5:55 PM -0400 8/03/03, Eden - Lawrence D. wrote:May I call on the collective wisdom of you all?
My brass quintet has stayed active since 1978. Our library of tunes has grown over the years to the tune of over 400 arrangements. We keep track of all the arrangements with a Letter/Number system. For example: A1, A2, A3...through the alphabet. Tunes are sorted by composer.
I am concerned about the possibility of accidental loss of any of the folders, so we make copies of the tunes for each concert and bring only those tunes to the job. We have a group policy that originals and copies not be kept in the same place. The problem is I am getting less than 100% cooperation from the quintet members....originals and copies get mixed together on jobs.
When an "accident" happens, it is my job to reprint music and this is often a time consuming task.
How do other group librarians maintain the music? How do you protect against loss and still have all the tunes on hand for rehearsals? What kind of filing system do you use?
In my brass quintet we only ever hand out copies of music, and the originals stay with the librarian (in our case, the horn player. I wonder if there is a built-in affinity for this in hornists, like politics in trombonists?). In his library at home, tunes are given a sequential library number (first tune to be added is 1, then 2, 3, etc. We are in the 100's by now). He used to make two index cards, one to be filed by composer in a box, the other to be filed by title in another box, alphabetically. This is a reproduction of the "title" and "author" card files in old libraries.
He recently changed this to a spreadsheet-based (Excel) system with columns for index number, title, composer (last name first), arranger, style, additional instruments, source ("from Porgy and Bess" for example), and comments. He can search the spreadsheet instantly for any word, or sort it by composer, arranger, style or any other criteria that he thinks might be useful. He sends updated copies by email to other members of the quintet from time to time so that we can participate intelligently in discussions about repertoire and programming.
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-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
