When Jake Brumbaugh took over this fall as band director at Traverse City Central High School, one of his first projects was to tackle the music library. He sifted through an estimated 1,000 pieces of music, evaluating, alphabetizing and organizing as he went.
"I wanted to know what was here,” Brumbaugh said. "There's a lot of good stuff and I wanted to use it efficiently. It's really an extensive music library, it's really neat to peruse it.”
Situated outside Brumbaugh's office, the rolling, floor-to-ceiling shelves the band shares with the orchestra (the choral program has a separate library) turned out to have a few treasures in them. Like 17 scores with all the parts transcribed by noted band director Mark Hindsley of the University of Illinois and Indiana University.
These scores consist of classical pieces by composed by Bach, Wagner, Glinka and Strauss, among others. Their odd coloring is actually due to reproduction on an ancient copy machine, although at first Brumbaugh thought they were hand written.
Terming the found pieces "gems,” he hopes to use them when his students are ready for this tough material. Although Hindsley has died, his son is still selling the 74 transcriptions his father made and Brumbaugh has his eye on a few more for the library.
"We haven't played any of them yet, they're pretty difficult,” said Brumbaugh.
When the two high schools split in 1997, music teachers at the time decided to leave all the music accumulated over the decades at Central High School. West High School sports a dedicated room for their library, which is shared by the three disciplines of band, choir and orchestra. Although the shelves of the meticulously organized space are still a bit bare, the three programs are slowly building up their inventories.
"We have a fairly meager budget,” said Russ Larimer, choral director at the school. "It's difficult to stay on top of new literature because the price of music keeps going up and the budget keeps going down.”
On the other hand, some of what was left behind at Central is so old it is almost unusable, with paper crumbling and yellowed tape barely holding together tears. Still, the selection is extensive and other music groups outside the Traverse City Area Public Schools community sometimes tap into it..
"The Northwestern Michigan College Concert Band has used our library on occasion and the Encore Winds Symphony occasionally does,” said Brumbaugh, noting that junior high and elementary schools in the districts have their own, smaller music libraries. "Cress [Smith, band director at St. Francis] has borrowed a couple of things; one of her students is dating one of my students and so sometimes she will call and say, 'Send this piece with Audrey.'”
Looking five years ahead, Brumbaugh has designs on both expanding the library and filling in some gaps, especially in music by contemporary composers from the past 5-10 years.
"We do have some junk, some weak stuff, and we're lacking more modern things,” added Brumbaugh, who also used the organization project to help decide where he wants his students to be musically in five years. "I'd like to see more variety in what we have in the classics.”