Berkeley Symphony violist and music librarian Marta Tobey took up the violin at a summer music program when she was 11. But when she arrived at her Los Altos school that fall, they had run out of violins and the music teacher asked if she would try the viola. From that moment on, says Marta, she never returned to the violin. “The viola suits me,” she remarks, “an inner voice, a supporting role, not the soloist.”
She attended Oberlin College, which is noted for its music conservatory, and while she was a math major, she was able to do a good deal of playing in conservatory groups throughout her time there. Marta joined the Berkeley Promenade in 1975, during a six-year stint as a technical writer and programmer for PG&E, and continued to play while she studied Chinese and earned a master’s in linguistics at UC Berkeley.
For the past ten years, Marta has been the Berkeley Symphony’s music librarian, and for five years has also served as Maestro Nagano’s personal music librarian, helping him organize his ever-growing collection of scores.
Music librarian is one of those jobs that can go unnoticed for months—until something goes wrong. And there are many things that can go wrong. The librarian must determine which edition the conductor wants, find out where to buy or rent the parts, make sure the parts are in the right key (especially when a singer is involved), and get the parts early enough so that the concertmaster can determine how he or she would like the parts to be bowed.
The concertmaster’s bowings must then be passed on to the other principal strings, so that they can bow their sections’ parts in a manner that is consistent with the violins, and then the music librarian must mark the bowings into all the parts. (The final result is that the bows in each of the string sections rise and fall together, creating a unified phrase.)
When Matt Haimovitz played Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme with the orchestra in March, Marta found that the BSO owned a set of parts. But the parts had no measure numbers or rehearsal letters, so she added measure numbers to every part. (Without them, rehearsal can be nearly impossible, because when the conductor stops to correct something there’s no way to easily communicate where the musicians should resume playing.)
There are a million details. For the percussion section, Marta makes several enlarged photocopies of each part. The enlargement helps musicians who must often stand quite a ways from the music see it, and the multiple copies mean that a player who must move from snare drum to xylophone doesn’t have to carry the music from one stand to another, dropping it on the way.
Marta has decided to step down as music librarian with tonight’s concert. While she won’t miss the anxiety, she says there are many rewards, including “working with other people—Operations Manager Heli Roiha, Personnel Manager Diana Dorman, Kent, composers, and then the soloists and concertmasters. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Stuart Canin.” Her job, she adds, “is to give everybody their best chance to play well at the concert.”
Marta and her husband, Roger, live in Albany and have two sons, Vincent, a UC Davis student, and Philip, who starts at UC Santa Cruz in the fall. In addition to the Berkeley Symphony, she plays in the Vallejo Symphony, where she is also music librarian, and subs with the Santa Rosa Symphony and elsewhere.
.