Susan T. ("Suki") Sommer (1935-2008).(NOTES FOR NOTES)(Obituary)

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, ...