Orchestras’ Unseen Heroes: The Librarians

“We’re there in case some last-minute disaster happens,” said BSO principal librarian D. Wilson Ochoa in an interview at Symphony Hall. “Like, a player forgets their part, or, I did have a player once who said, ‘My dog peed on my music,’ so we had to get new music for him. You would think these things might not happen, but they do.”

Still, the vast bulk of the librarians’ work takes place behind the scenes, away from the lights and the crowds. To put it simply, if it has to do with any sheet music that the orchestra is using or about to use, the librarians take care of it. That’s around 900 pieces of music per year, encompassing the repertoires of the BSO, the Boston Pops, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.

At present, the library is also undergoing a joint project with the BSO archives funded by a National Park Service Save America’s Treasures grant to digitize the orchestra’s oldest scores for public perusal, including a large collection of conductor scores bought by inaugural music director George Henschel in the late 19th century.

“The archive is invested in preserving the history of the organization,” Ochoa said.

“What we have here — ” he gestured to the shelves of working scores — “is eventually history, but right now it’s current.”

When it comes to those current scores, “we do everything to make the musicians’ lives easier,” explained Ochoa, who has held the principal librarian position with the BSO since 2014 but is only the fourth principal librarian since 1917. (By comparison, the orchestra has had 10 music directors in that timespan.)

Some of the orchestra’s parts, like those for Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherezade,” have been in use for almost a century. “Musicians like to see their own markings come back, so we try to use them as long as possible, but we replace the set when we have to,” Ochoa said. Others are brand new, since the Boston Pops always commissions its own arrangements for new repertoire.

But no matter what, if someone is spending rehearsal time fixing a problem in the score, “that’s just lost time and money,” Ochoa said. So the four-person BSO library department tries to anticipate those problems before they happen.

The librarians are the first people in the organization to see the scores for upcoming performances. So when a piece calls for unusual auxiliary instruments, “we have to flag that kind of thing,” said assistant substitute librarian Anna Menkis.

The score for Hannah Kendall’s “O flower of fire,” which the BSO played during the week of Oct. 24, featured a detailed list of everything that had to be procured, including over a dozen music boxes and harmonicas. The librarians appreciate that kind of organization, said Menkis. “It’s the kind of thing people want to know as early as possible.”

“And that was rare,” interjected librarian Mark Fabulich. Usually, “it’s just ‘get these music boxes,’” he said.

The walls of the library’s main office are lined with shelves of orchestral parts, with each piece in its own manila folder organized alphabetically by composer. Plastic dinosaurs hide in empty cubbies, in the hanging lights, and on top of file cabinets. They were originally put there to entertain Fabulich’s children when they visited, Ochoa said, and the kids have “probably grown out of it by now, but we haven’t.”

Pops scores and overflow live in a larger room one floor up, which also houses a combination copier/scanner/printer that’s about the size of an industrial washer and dryer put together.

The librarians’ day to day includes lots of paperwork. Enlarging parts when publishers send over music that’s too small to read. Repairing old or faded pages, and sometimes replacing them entirely when they’re too brittle to use without falling apart. It means FedExing scores to guest conductors if they don’t have their own. Fixing errors that have been printed into the music. Renting music that’s still under copyright, and engraving a whole new set of parts when it’s necessary.

That last one doesn’t happen too often, but “sometimes it comes in and it’s just a horrible manuscript, or it’s difficult to read,” Ochoa said. So when it does, one librarian takes on the task of re-copying the piece, note by note, into their music notation software of choice.

The librarians also ensure that the orchestra has the same version of the piece the conductor does; this can be an issue with the music of Anton Bruckner, who revised his symphonies two or three times. And they fix countless page turns, which are “a huge ongoing problem,” Ochoa said.

Why? “It takes two hands to play an instrument,” he said. “If there’s no rest at the end of a page, you’re not going to turn the page.”

There aren’t many formal training programs for orchestral librarians; the Tanglewood Music Center’s is one of the few. Outside of that, said Fabulich, it’s all “mentorship and apprenticeship stuff.”

But you “can’t do this job without being a trained musician,” said Ochoa, who was a professional French horn player until the chronic illness lupus caused issues with his facial muscles, he said. And just like any member of the orchestra, librarians get their jobs through competitive auditions.

When Ochoa auditioned in 2013, he went through a 2½-hour test, interviews with the orchestra committee and Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart, and a sit-down with then-concertmaster Malcolm Lowe to discuss how Ochoa would prepare the concertmaster’s solo part for Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra.” The page turns in that score are so bad, said Ochoa, that “you can’t play the concertmaster solo from the part that’s provided, so you have to create your own.”

And if all goes according to plan with those scores during a concert, you likely won’t even notice the librarians. “If nothing goes wrong,” said Ochoa, “we’ve done everything right.”

This article has been updated to correct the description of Wilson Ochoa as the fourth principal BSO librarian since 1917.

A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.