G. Schirmer Inc.

G. Schirmer Inc. is an American classical music publishing company based in New York City, founded in 1861. It 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.

History

The company was founded in 1861 in the United States by German-born Gustav Schirmer, Sr. (1829–1893), the son of a German immigrant. In 1891, the company established its own engraving and printing plant. The next year it inaugurated the Schirmer's Library of Musical Classics. The Musical Quarterly, the oldest academic journal on music in the U.S., was founded by Schirmer in 1915 together with musicologist Oscar Sonneck, who edited the journal until his death in 1928. In 1964, Schirmer acquired Associated Music Publishers (BMI) which had built up an important catalog of American composers including Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, Charles Ives, Walter Piston, and William Schuman, adding to a Schirmer's ASCAP roster which had already included Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Morton Gould, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Virgil Thomson, as well as composers from the earlier part of the century such as Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Charles Martin Loeffler, John Alden Carpenter, and Percy Grainger.