I was struck this morning by a memory of going to the old SLC public library, when it occupied the building that now houses the Leonardo Museum. It was a late morning in the summer, probably a Saturday, and I was on the west side of the 5th floor where the music and art holdings were. I was sitting at a table thumbing through a copy of Steve Reich’s Writings about Music. I had just graduated from high school.
The southwest corner of the 5th floor was devoted to the library’s record collection. I listened to a lot of new music and even some recordings of Balinese gamelan (distributed by outfits like Nonesuch in their Explorer series). The guy at the desk, seeing that I was interested in new music, even made some suggestions: a mix of hits, like Pendercki (the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima was a sonic gut punch) and misses, like Xenakis (I still just can’t). That record collection is where I learned about music written after 1900.
Everything felt new, even though it was library-old. Even the dust motes lit by the sun coming in through the windows on the east side where there was a little courtyard with a pool.
Man, I miss that place.
The ghosts of libraries past. Sometimes at USU's new library I catch sight of a particular book that I remember from the old library that was demolished about 15 years ago, but was the library of my undergraduate degree in the '70s. It takes me right back to the days of my youth and early career and I'll forget why I was in the library in the first place.
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