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

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 ...