In Monday’s (3/2) Wall Street Journal, Corinne Ramey reports, “Frank Music Company has supplied classical sheet music to generations of instrumentalists, singers and composers. On Friday, the retail store will close its doors for good, succumbing to dwindling sales…. The store, on West 54th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, opened in 1937 and provided the city’s musicians scores from the standard— Bach, Beethoven—to the arcane. [Owner Heidi] Rogers bought it in 1978.… Frank Music’s stock, which Ms. Rogers counts as hundreds of thousands of scores, was purchased by an anonymous donor as a gift for the Colburn School” in Los Angeles. “The store’s celebrity clients over the years have included pianists Emanuel Ax and Jeremy Denk, violinist Pamela Frank and cellist David Finckel. One of Ms. Rogers’s favorite memories is a telephone call from the violinist Itzhak Perlman, asking for Kreisler scores…. Joseph Patelson Music House, another longtime sheet-music establishment, closed in 2009, and Dowling Music shut its doors in 2013.… Musicians have plenty of online opportunities to buy sheet music…. The website IMSLP, a digital library of public-domain music, allows users to download scores for free. Some musicians with iPads have dispensed with pesky paper scores altogether.”
Posted March 3, 2015
