Music, Libraries, and the Academy: Essays in Honor of Lenore Coral (review)

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...