Boosey & Hawkes.
Formed in 1930 from the merger of Boosey & Company (1760s) and Hawkes & Son (1865). The publishing home of Stravinsky, Britten, Bartók, Copland, Bernstein, Prokofiev, Strauss, Reich and Adams. Twentieth-century classical, edited and rented from London.
Two London
music houses, merged.
In 1930 Leslie Boosey and Ralph Hawkes brought together two long-standing British music businesses — Boosey & Company, with roots in the bookselling trade of John Boosey in 1760s London, and Hawkes & Son, founded in 1865. Both firms published music and manufactured musical instruments. Combined, they would expand from London to a global enterprise.
Hawkes' final coup before his death was acquiring Édition Russe and the Gutheil catalogues in 1947 — securing Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Petrushka, Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, and Ravel's orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition.
The London imprint
Stravinsky. Britten. Copland. Bartók. Bernstein. Prokofiev. Reich. Adams.Boosey & Hawkes · the catalogue
Boosey & Co · 1878 euphonium
The home of
20th-century music.
Boosey & Hawkes controls the copyright to much of the major 20th-century classical canon. Beyond the names that defined modernism, the catalog now includes John Adams, Steve Reich, Thomas Adès, Mark-Anthony Turnage, James MacMillan and a generation of living composers writing for orchestra, opera house and concert hall.
The firm has also acquired major continental imprints: Bote & Bock in 1996, the Anton J. Benjamin / N. Simrock catalogue in 2001 — extending the reach into the German Romantic and 19th-century repertoire alongside the modern.
