Meet the Musicians: Carl Wilder

By Leilani Polk

An orchestra member who doesn’t actually play with the orchestra (although you’ve probably seen him discreetly slipping on stage, putting scores on music stands), Carl Wilder is the Seattle Symphony’s Co-Principal Librarian, a role he assumed in the 2022/2023 season. 

The fifth of 11 children to two classical musicians based in Chicago, Carl started on clarinet at age 5 but at 10, switched to bassoon, which became his main focus through college. All his siblings studied music. “We had a little family orchestra growing up.” 

He pursued a career as a bassoonist until his last year as a Wheaton College undergraduate, when his interests shifted. While at Wheaton, he worked in the academic music library and helped the librarian take care of the scores and chamber music parts, which included de-stapling pages and sewing them into binders by hand. “I found that I loved working with the physical music and wanted to find a career that utilized these skills.” Though he graduated with a degree in performance, he no longer wanted to play professionally. Everything clicked after he started interning in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) library. 

There’s no straightforward path to becoming an orchestra librarian outside of doing hands-on work like internships, so he continued at the CSO and got a real sense of what the job entailed. The experience ultimately helped him win a job with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra as librarian and personnel manager. Four years later, he won the position of Principal Librarian with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, where he spent six years before he auditioned for and won the job in Seattle via multiple rounds of anonymous tests, work examples and interviews.  

An orchestra librarian’s main job is acquiring, tracking and preparing all the music that the orchestra performs on stage. Works are either purchased (the Symphony may already own the work and have it in the library from a previous performance) or rented from a publisher (if the work is newer or still under copyright). “If it’s been composed more recently or still copyrighted — we do a lot of commissions here — it might mean getting it directly from a composer.” For the orchestra to be able to perform a work, especially the string section, “we need to mark bowings, which tells the string players which direction the bow goes on each note and how it’s articulated. All parts get distributed to the string principals, who decide on the bowings for that performance, and then we copy their markings into all the other corresponding parts in pencil, because they might need to make changes in rehearsal.” 
 
Duties also include adding other dynamic markings or phrasings, correcting wrong notes or errors and making any requested cuts or directions from the conductor, checking the accuracy of titles and movements, making sure the musicians have all the music in advance of rehearsal for practicing purposes, cataloging music, preparing parts and excerpts for auditions, and serving as a reference resource for musicians. By default, orchestra librarians also tend to be their orchestra’s historians. “We have the performance history going back basically to the start of the orchestra.”  
 
He doesn’t play much bassoon these days, but he does play bagpipes. “A friend of mine started a competitive bagpipe band and he knew I played but I wasn't really that serious about it.” His friend talked Carl into joining and this summer, they will be competing together as a band at the World Championships in Glasgow, Scotland. “There's a strong community around the band, the competitions, and the instrument. It’s been a great way to continue growing and learning as a musician, while exploring a completely different world of music.”  

The Seattle Symphony’s Mrs. Bryant Dunn Music Library is supported in part by the Drs. Janet P. and George Beckmann and Dorothy De Simone Pitts and Jack Coleman Pitts Music Library Fund.