Music Press was a small music publishing firm based in New York City during the 1940s.
Founded in 1940, Music Press was based in New York City's Steinway Building in Midtown Manhattan. [1] Richard Dana, a descendant of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Richard Henry Dana Jr., founded the music publishing firm in 1940 with his cousin, the music librarian Carleton Sprague Smith. [2] [1] The publisher was a conservative representation of the field, and included a New York University composer and a Boston-based music critic among its leadership. Dana was an outsider to New York's music scene and worked to befriend the city's composers. World War II interrupted the publisher's activities. After the war, Music Press began musical imprints based on individual performers, such as John Kirkpatrick's selections for American Piano Music. In 1948, the Music Library Association recognized five Music Press-published works as among its top ten for the year, including Ned Rorem's "The Lordly Hudson". [1] The firm was the first to publish Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's operas Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All . [2]
The publisher was run on a small budget and only had a single staff member. Composers frequently moved between the small music presses of the period. [1] Even with donations from patrons, the firm's financials grew dire by 1948 and the press resorted to passing publishing costs to a composer. With the conclusion that the press had printed too many works too fast, Dana stopped Music Press's publishing in April 1949. A West Coast distribution contract, while explored, did not save the company from revenue issues. Mercury Music acquired Music Press in December 1949. [3]
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.
Arkham House is an American publishing house specializing in weird fiction. It was founded in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to publish hardcover collections of H. P. Lovecraft's best works, which had previously been published only in pulp magazines. The company's name is derived from Lovecraft's fictional New England city, Arkham, Massachusetts. Arkham House editions are noted for the quality of their printing and binding. The colophon for Arkham House was designed by Frank Utpatel.
M. Witmark & Sons was a leading publisher of sheet music for the United States "Tin Pan Alley" music industry.
Carl Ruggles was an American composer, painter and teacher. His pieces employed "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by fellow composer and musicologist Charles Seeger to describe Ruggles' music. His method of atonal counterpoint was based on a non-serial technique of avoiding repeating a pitch class until a generally fixed number of eight pitch classes intervened. He is considered a founder of the ultramodernist movement of American composers that included Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford Seeger, among others. He had no formal musical education, yet was an extreme perfectionist — writing music at a painstakingly slow rate and leaving behind a very small output.
Ralph Leonard Kirkpatrick was an American harpsichordist and musicologist, widely known for his chronological catalog of Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas as well as for his performances and recordings.
Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu was a Tamil poet, editor, critic and publisher, who for many years played a significant part in the literary scenes of London and New York City. In 1939 he founded the respected literary magazine Poetry London, which "soon became the best known poetry periodical in England, and Tambimuttu became widely known as a skillful editor." Four issues of Poetry London–New York were published in the 1950s; the fifth in 1960. Among those published by Tambimuttu were Lawrence Durrell, Kathleen Raine, W. H. Auden, Gavin Ewart, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Roy Campbell, Robin Skelton, Keith Douglas, and many other notable writers. In 1955 Tambimuttu was described by The New York Times as "probably the best-known contemporary Indian poet". He created two publishing houses, Editions Poetry London and Lyrebird Press (1968), both of which published major works.
Columbia University Press is a university press based in New York City, and affiliated with Columbia University. It is currently directed by Jennifer Crewe (2014–present) and publishes titles in the humanities and sciences, including the fields of literary and cultural studies, history, social work, sociology, religion, film, and international studies.
Casa Ricordi is a publisher of primarily classical music and opera. Its classical repertoire represents one of the important sources in the world through its publishing of the work of the major 19th-century Italian composers such as Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini, Giuseppe Verdi, and, later in the century, Giacomo Puccini, composers with whom one or another of the Ricordi family came into close contact.
David McKay Publications was an American book publisher which also published some of the first comic books, including the long-running titles Ace Comics, King Comics, and Magic Comics; as well as collections of such popular comic strips as Blondie, Dick Tracy, and Mandrake the Magician. McKay was also the publisher of the Fodor's travel guides.
Boosey & Hawkes is a British music publisher purported to be the largest specialist classical music publisher in the world. Until 2003, it was also a major manufacturer of brass, string and woodwind musical instruments.
Music publishing is the business of creating, producing and distributing printed musical scores, parts, and books in various types of music notation, while ensuring that the composer, songwriter and other creators receive credit and royalties or other payment. This article outlines the early history of the industry.
G. Schirmer, Inc. is an American classical music publishing company based in New York City, founded in 1861. The oldest active music publisher in the United States, Schirmer publishes sheet music for sale and rental, and represents some well-known European music publishers in North America, such as the Music Sales Affiliates ChesterNovello, Breitkopf & Härtel, Sikorski and many Russian and former Soviet composers' catalogs.
Edition Peters is a classical music publisher founded in Leipzig, Germany in 1800.
Carl Fischer Music is a sheet music publisher originally located in the East Village neighborhood of New York City. In 2013, the company moved to the Wall Street area. The family-owned business publishes both performance and educational music for students, teachers, and virtuosos. Carl Fischer's composers and editors give clinics and sessions nationally. The company claims to serve more than 2000 retailers around the world.
James Hewitt was an American conductor, composer, and music publisher. Born in Dartmoor, England, he was known to have lived in London in 1791 and early 1792, but went to New York City in September of that year. He stayed in New York until 1811, conducting a theater orchestra and composing and arranging music for local ballad operas and musical events. He also gave lessons and sold musical instruments and publications in his "musical repository".
William Barley (1565?–1614) was an English bookseller and publisher. He completed an apprenticeship as a draper in 1587, but was soon working in the London book trade. As a freeman of the Drapers' Company, he was embroiled in a dispute between it and the Stationers' Company over the rights of drapers to function as publishers and booksellers. He found himself in legal tangles throughout his life.
John Walsh was the name of a father and son, two printers and publishers of music, active in London from the late 17th Century, and through the first half of the 18th Century. They published much important Baroque music, including works by William Babell and Handel.
Robert Moffat (variously "Moffatt" and "Moffett") Palmer was an American composer, pianist and educator. He composed more than 90 works, including two symphonies, Nabuchodonosor, a piano concerto, four string quartets, three piano sonatas and numerous works for chamber ensembles.
John Kirkpatrick was an American classical pianist and music scholar, best known for championing the works of Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Carl Ruggles, and Roy Harris. He gave the first complete public performance of Ives's Concord Sonata in 1939, which became a turning point in the composer's public recognition. Kirkpatrick played an important role in Ives scholarship, and he was leader in the Charles Ives Society. One important example is his role in the editing of Memos, which is a collection of Ives's autobiographical writings. At the time of his death Kirkpatrick was a professor emeritus at Yale University, where he had also been the curator of the Charles Ives archives.
Chas. H. Hansen Music Corp. was an American music publisher founded by Charles Henry Hansen (1913–1995) in 1952 and incorporated in New York. Its music covered a broad spectrum of genres that included classical, jazz, folk, rock, country, popular, educational — and music text books. For Beatles fans, the firm was widely known for having been the sole U.S. publisher and distributor of Beatles sheet music, beginning 1964. By the 1980s, Hansen Music ventured away from the pop field, focusing on classics and jazz method books. The firm, in 1980, was also operating 7 retail sheet music stores — two in San Francisco, three in Seattle, and two in Las Vegas. The name — Charles Hansen Music & Books, Inc. — became inactive in 1991. Hansen House Music Publishers — a Florida registered fictitious name of Hansen Publications, Inc. — became inactive December 31, 2009. The Hansen House web page is now inactive, listed as being "parked" by the GoDaddy domain registrar. The internet archive at https://web.archive.org has their latest snapshot of this website being active as in September 2013; contact person listed on earlier versions was Ramon Duran. The larger part of the Charles Hansen catalog was acquired by Warner Brothers Publications, then subsequently sold to Alfred Publications. According to Billboard in 1972, Wometco, headed by Mitchell Wolfson, had a pending offer to acquire Hansen, retaining Hansen and his staff.