On November 14, 2025, we gathered to celebrate the 60th anniversary of McGill’s Music Library, named posthumously in honour of the Faculty of Music’s former Dean and de facto librarian, Marvin Duchow, in 1980. The diamond jubilee offered us a moment to pause and reflect upon the significance of the Marvin Duchow Music Library (MDML) within its user communities. While I undertook in-depth research to document the history of the MDML, the staff embarked on their own reflective journeys. They considered their workplace, its mission, and—most importantly—its meaning for the generations of people who have used the Library over the decades.
One of our library assistants, Gabrielle Kern, captured the relationship of the MDML and its users with clarity, describing it as a continuum shaped by cumulative moments of meaningful interaction over time. My own observations confirmed this and afforded me a clearer perspective on what might be described as intentional engagement: a culture in which little is taken for granted. Within the McGill Schulich School of Music community, this engagement has been manifested as a pronounced sense of pride in, and ownership of, the Library—leaving no doubt that its collections, services, and spaces have always been central to the fulfilment of their academic goals. In fact, beyond any other music library I have worked in, the MDML holds a special place within its primary user community—something I felt keenly from the earliest moments of resuming the Head Librarian position in 2019.
Metaphors can serve as powerful vehicles for defining and making sense of complex wholes
Metaphors can serve as powerful vehicles for defining and making sense of complex wholes. As such, the question “what is an academic music library?” particularly benefits from a strong metaphor—and for the MDML, given its geographic location, one that has always resonated for me is the Jardin botanique de Montréal. The Gardens achieve a complex and intentional gestalt within a singular space, bringing together diverse communities for a panoply of reasons. They offer respite on a warm summer day, provide an ideal setting for schoolchildren, foreground deeply rooted Indigenous values, support both general and specialized education, and even host advanced research laboratories. In short, they constitute an ecosystem of elements and living entities, generating both designed and serendipitous confluences that define this evolving environment within the metropolis.
The MDML too is an evolving entity—an ecosystem of music information and knowledge. It is a curated and living environment, bringing together people for interaction with one another, and with music information in all forms and formats. Similarly to the Gardens, the MDML evolves through intention, gathering, and discovery. The Library provides a variety of meeting and study spaces, along with specialized services such as the Open Lab program, supporting users with audiovisual equipment, computing hardware, and music-specific software. It also facilitates access to primary resources through the preservation and description of cultural heritage relating to the history of music at McGill and in Montreal.
The MDML communities, and their need for discovery and creation of music information, have been central to the mission of the Library and its leaders, from Deborah Longhurst (1965–67) and Kathleen Toomey (1967–85), through the expansive tenure of Cynthia Leive (1985–2018), to the period under my own direction since 2019. The story is one of growth and resilience, of tenacity in the face of challenge, of continuous advocacy, and of service to the community. Constituted on June 1, 1965, in the attic of Olive Hosmer House at 3500 Redpath, shaped by relocations in 1972 and 1991, and ultimately established in its permanent home in 2005 at the heart of the Elizabeth Wirth Music Building after four decades, the history of the MDML reflects a deeply embedded commitment to the study and performance of music at McGill University. With an understanding of the past and an eye to the future, the Marvin Duchow Music Library remains steadfast in its support for the Schulich School of Music, which stands as one of Canada’s leading ambassadors of music and culture.
