Sylvia Goldstein became a member of the Joint Committee of the Music Library Association and the Music Publishers Association. (Notes for Notes).
Davidson, Mary Wallace
Sylvia Goldstein became a member of the Joint Committee of the
Music Library Association and the Music Publishers Association in 1985,
and a personal member of the Music Library Association in 1991. That
same year she also became part of the newly created MLA-MPA Task Force
on Music Publishers Archives, a cause she had long advocated as she
watched historical records of several music publishers being dumped by
new corporate owners. (The Task Force was dissolved in 1996, upon the
publication of Kent Underwood, et al., "Archival Guidelines for the
Music Publishing Industry," Notes 52, no. 4 [June 1996]:1112-18.)
She was particularly anxious that an oral history project be undertaken
with retirees who knew the often unwritten history of the music print
publishing industry, and indeed, her own interview, completed in June
2000, is now being transcribed for such a project, inaugurated by the
Music Publishers Association in 1999.
Daughter of Max and Lillian Weitzman, Sylvia was born on 21
February 1919 in Harlem. At the age of five, she moved with her family
to the house in Baldwin, New York, where she died of lymphoma on 21
January 2002. She joined Boosey & Hawkes in 1940 as secretary to
Hans Heinsheimer in the "serious" music department, and
"retired" in 1993 as corporate vice president, although she
still went often to the office. In 1944 she married Joseph Goldstein (d.
1982), and was also admitted to the Bar of the State of New York. From
then on she handled most of the legal work of the company, but that was
not her only responsibility As Ned Rorem wrote in 1990, "Sylvia
Goldstein is Boosey & Hawkes. ... What she doesn't know
isn't worth knowing--about copyright, permissions, recalcitrant
poets, recipes, gardening, travel, sewing, politics, the care and
feeding of cats and dogs, and especially of composers" (Ned Rorem,
"Who Is Sylvia," in his Other Entertainment: Collected Pieces
[New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996], 309). Thanks primarily to the
late Neil Ratliff, she became a good friend of many music librarians,
too, and we will miss her personal warmth, good will, stamina, and
inevitable curiosity about all things great and small.