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By Joseph Kerman The Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library, which opened in July, is surely the liveliest structure seen on campus since the Pelican Building. Located among beautiful trees on the southeast quadrant of the campus, near Hertz, Wurster, and Kroeber halls, the new library has an offhand way of flaunting simplicity and then beguiling with elegant touches of luxury. I love the light that flows in everywhere from windows that feel like lofty transparent wall panels, opening onto a veritable slideshow of campus panoramas. Especially luminous are the ample second-floor reading areas, reading room, and seminar room. What a study-friendly place! When I made my first visit the day it opened last July, I found, in addition to the summer-school clientele, the mix of non-students I always saw at the old music library: piano teachers, teenage guitar students, the occasional critic and visiting scholar, and just folks needing to look up something about the Messiah or Rhapsody in Blue, post-rock or geezer rock, sitars, Strads, or baritone saxes. Friends brought the eponymous Jean Hargrove ’35 to look at the outcome of her philanthropy--at long last. At the time of her energizing gift in 1996, the music department could not have been more grateful; to get a needed building on this campus--in the humanities, yet--was a task that occupied (drained) eight department chairs for three decades, including Bonnie Wade in the 1980s and Wendy Allanbrook in the 2000s. I first met Jean--a concert pianist who began performing in her teens--soon after my own stint in the 1990s. By that time, the old second-floor music library in Morrison Hall was bursting its seams and trying to serve a very different student body from that envisaged at the time of its planning in the late 1940s. Built in the days before there were CD players or computers, and prior to the output of a frighteningly prolific half-century of book and journal publication, every wall of the old library was jammed with improvised bookshelves brimming to overflow, with the slim volumes of sheet music turned on their sides and squeezed together. For regular users of the music library--which serves as a community resource as well as a research facility--the most satisfying sight in Hargrove is stacks that are filled to no more than half of capacity, with ample provision for future holdings. A room containing nearly fifty computer terminals greets you as you enter. Some people harbor the suspicion that libraries may be on their way to becoming dinosaurs, or at least old-world sanctuaries, in this age of racing information. As Berkeley’s newest jewel box shows, nothing could be further from the truth. Emeritus professor Joseph Kerman came to Berkeley in 1952, part of a generation that built the music department to its position as one of the nation’s top centers of graduate study. His influential books include Opera as Drama and The Beethoven Quartets. |
 Photos by Peg Skorpinski
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