Since its inception 60 years ago, the Marvin Duchow Music Library has seen McGill students through the good, the bad, and the never-ending tears that accompany late-night cramming sessions. Wandering the aisles for the first time, I passed towering shelves lined with scores of music I doubt I will ever learn to decipher. Compared to the hectic atmosphere of rue Sherbrooke below, the library feels like a greenhouse for one of the most instinctive forms of art.

To mark its anniversary, the library is presenting Marvin Duchow Music Library at 60: Interplay of Community, Service, and Discovery, exhibiting artifacts drawn from the library and the university’s archives, with one display near the entrance and another inside. When I first explored the exhibit, a bright red record from 1982, featuring the McGill Symphony Orchestra conducted by Uri Mayer, immediately caught my eye. Like the musicians themselves, the record’s bold colours draw viewers into the intertwined histories of the Schulich School of Music and its ever-evolving library.

Rather than simply documenting the library’s history, the exhibit celebrates the efforts of those who sustained the space as a resource for the music community on campus and beyond. Marvin Duchow, a former Schulich School of Music Dean, understood how integral these two institutions were to each other. In a featured address to the Canadian and American Music Library Associations, he emphasized the reciprocal role music faculties and libraries play in sustaining one another.

Also featured are various administrative and informational artifacts, including a visitors’ log, The McGill Daily’s articles detailing students’ and librarians’ fight for a larger facility, photographs showing the library’s various iterations, and words from the many librarians who have looked after the collection over the decades. An obituary for Marvin Duchow is, of course, featured prominently in the collection—a fitting tribute to the man who dedicated himself to the pursuit of community knowledge.

Through the care taken in curating the exhibit and the honouring of those who fought for the library, the space is not only celebrated as somewhere to study but as a necessary resource for musicians. In a featured statement, former head librarian Cynthia Leive underscored the library’s role as a learning institution on its 25th anniversary.

“Students […] haven’t the years and money necessary to build a personal collection of books and scores,” Leive said. “So they start by coming here [….] They become more interested, more literate, and start studying scores [….] What they will take away with them is a love of music and knowledge, and of learning that will be with them for the rest of their lives. That, in essence, is the spirit of the library.”

The exhibit exemplifies Duchow’s belief that libraries are the heartbeat of an academic community by focusing on both the library’s evolution in the Elizabeth Wirth building and on the strong connection to its faculty. The library is loved through the care that librarians and staff put into keeping it going, day and night, for whatever one might need. The library, as its namesake hoped it would, continues to reflect the changing needs of the musicians it houses. Of course, the one thing that never changes is the music community’s commitment to protecting the space. 

In 1975, a decade after the library’s opening, Librarian Emirata Kathleen Toomey humorously recounted the quirks that come with her job, highlighting the work the exhibit celebrates. Her words, like the exhibit itself, find hope in the library’s future through the foundations of the past, and still resonate on its 60th anniversary.

“A library is not always such a frivolous place,” Toomey said. “There are those who rely on it for their life’s work, and it is of prime importance that it continues to grow—especially in its holdings. If the past ten years are an example of things to come, I can foresee only a bright future ahead.”