Sir, – By the time this letter is published it may well be too late and the deadly deed will have been decided upon if not actually done.

I refer to the act of gross cultural philistinism which is the proposed closure of the Yorkshire Libraries and Information Music and Drama Loan Service.

This is scheduled (or was at the time of writing) for April 1, 2012. The decision to accept the closure recommendation was due to be made on November 3 but most of us learnt about it too late to write in for publication last Friday.

This service holds about 500,000 items of music and 90,000 copies of plays and these are available to individual users, schools and music and drama groups in the Yorkshire and Humber area as well as to organisations and groups outside the region.

The collection is regarded by Making Music, the federation to which most amateur music groups belong, as one of the best collections in the country.

If it were to be broken up and spread across the authorities who currently own it, that could not possibly be more financially efficient than keeping the whole collection in one place as there would be increased searching for the required items, increased travel between the various storage facilities and the need for more staff with the necessary expertise.

Another option suggested is for another organisation to take over the collection.

Once again this is unlikely to provide a better service as the first thing that would happen in the interests of financial stringency may well be for any music which has been rarely used in recent years being ditched.

Those who are not involved in music making may feel that that is a logical course of action but there are always those ensembles who want to perform a long forgotten work and there are those composers who move in and out of fashion. It is only by chance, for example, that we still have much of the music of JS Bach who was out of fashion for over 100 years after his death.

If this service closes it will mean many amateur musicians, especially in choirs and orchestras, being unable to borrow music at a reasonable cost, it will mean works being lost because they have rarely been performed in recent years which will mean a much narrower repertoire of music at concerts by amateur groups, and it may well mean that many more musicians risk prosecution by using illegally photocopied music when legal copies cannot be found.

So if you sing or play an instrument, if you go to hear choirs sing or bands and orchestras play in concerts even if only carols at Christmas, if you go to see your children or grandchildren in school musicals and concerts or even if you only ever go to hear live professional musicians, you may well have this music loan service to thank somewhere along the line so, please, don’t let it die.

JANET HALL Aldbrough St John