Faith Nevarez (’25) was in her final year as a music business administration and voice performance major. The Amarillo, Texas, native had one milestone left: her senior recital. And she knew exactly which composition she wanted to perform: “El Pulpero,” a little-known Spanish art song by the Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona.
“The song reminded me of going to the market with my abuela as a little girl,” Nevarez says.
As a student library assistant at the George F. DeVine Music Library, Nevarez had valuable experience assisting students, musicians, and researchers in accessing the library’s resources. But when she went in search of Lecuona’s composition, she found nothing. Nevarez spoke with Chris Durman, the library director, to see if he could help her find a copy of To Lecuona with Love, the songbook where the original score was printed, to add to UT’s collection. Together, they tracked it down through the UT Song Index.
The book arrived just before Christmas. Nevarez entered the information into the library’s database herself. “Putting my personal recital song into the index was very cool,” she says. “It felt like getting to create a piece of history.”
The online database known as the UT Song Index was developed in the early 1980s by music librarian Pauline Bayne. It aimed to solve a simple but universal problem: library catalogs don’t list the individual songs included in songbooks, which makes locating sheet music for specific titles a frustrating and occasionally fruitless ordeal.
“Pauline realized there had to be a separate tool to pull the songs out of the book,” Durman says. “The Song Index—which now stretches to more than 82,000 songs in 82 languages—was built over decades by the hard work of student assistants and librarians to help students and musicians find the pieces they want to perform.”
The index has proven especially helpful for music students in a time crunch. Meticulously organized by composer, song, title of the larger work (such as an opera, stage musical, or film), and language, entries include children’s and folk songs, anthems and patriotic songs, and an array of other genres including pop, spirituals, and musical theater. Using a range of filters, including the song’s first lines or chorus, users can locate exactly where in the library’s stacks to find the scores they seek.
Unlike many online databases, the UT Song Index is free to the public. Other university libraries use it to locate scores within their own collections. “The index is one of those things you make sure to have on your website so users would know about it, and so you could use it when you needed it,” says Liza Weisbrod, a music librarian at Auburn University, which includes a menu link to the UT Song Index under the vocal music category of its library website.
“Anyone around the world with an internet connection can use this,” Weisbrod says. “That is pretty unique, considering the amount of hard work that goes into keeping it updated.”
DeVine Music Library has more than 2,700 songbooks and published collections, containing thousands of individual songs, among its stacks. One exercise that Durman recommends for grasping the scope of the songbooks in UT’s possession is to pick a word at random—say, squirrel—and see how many results pop up. (In this case, there are 15, including “A Squirrel is a Pretty Little Thing” from Folk Songs North America Sings and “The Squirrel Loves a Pleasant Chase” from Book of a Thousand Songs.)
But the total number of songbooks in circulation is vastly more than a single library could possess. That is what makes the library staff’s commitment to exhaustive cataloguing—no matter how painstaking—so important. In fact, it’s what has sustained the index’s growth for nearly half a century. “This is tedious work,” Durman says. “But if your library isn’t doing this, then who is? The answer, frankly, is nobody.”
Without the UT Song Index, locating the sheet music to an obscure German Christmas carol for a local opera performer or a college student rushing to rehearsals between classes can be harrowing or expensive. At the same time, the index is a powerful discovery tool for students in the classical vocal world, who are expected to prepare recital sets spanning multiple languages and genres.
Elena Klein (’24), DeVine Music Library’s daytime public services supervisor, earned her Master of Music in voice performance at UT. She manages a team of student assistants who enter the data when a new songbook is acquired. Klein works with Durman, music librarian Nathalie Hristov, and evening supervisor Joseph McGuire to identify gaps and to make additions to UT’s collection based on current performance trends, faculty specialization areas, and student interests. Last year, she collaborated with Nevarez to expand the university’s collection of Spanish songs.
“No resource is ever comprehensive,” Klein says. “But the index comes close.”
Engaging with new languages, composers, and musical traditions is a joy that, for so many students, has reshaped their understanding of what a music library can be. Nevarez experienced that joy personally while sight-reading the thousands of songs that she entered into the index during the three years she spent working in DeVine Library. Each one seemed to bring the world to Knoxville, if only for a moment.
“Every piece of music has a story to tell, but it also has a history,” Nevarez says. “It makes me happy to know that my contributions were part of something so much bigger that will benefit musicians and students long after I’m gone.”