Loose pages, handsomely hard-bound volumes with ornate covers, and every configuration in between of sheet music are stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves, cascading out of boxes on top of filing cabinets, strewn across tables, and piled precariously on every available surface including the floor. Inching along the narrow path that wanders through the claustrophobic space brings to mind the homes of hoarders. I’m told there are over one million pieces of sheet music in this long rectangular room that seems to go on and on and on.
I’m torn between awe and bewilderment. “But who,” I ask David Gautschi, Board Chair and our volunteer tour guide, “would borrow sheet music, rather than just buy it?”
A lot of people, it turns out.
It’s a warm, summer day in Blue Hill, Maine, a beautiful coastal town of just over 1,200 residents—the town sits on a peninsula, which puts it just out of the way of the millions of tourists beating a path to Bar Harbor every year—and I’m at Bagaduce Music, a creative endeavor unlike any I’ve ever encountered. Their main “line of business” is a lending library for sheet music—they hold physical copies of over 300,000 titles—though, in recent years, they have expanded to include music education, public performances, and support for musicians. In fact, it’s through this latter programming that I’ve found my way here: I’ve come to
