Boosey, Boosée, Thomas, English music publisher and manufacturer of musical instruments. French emigrant from the period of the Great Revolution, he ran a bookstore in London no later than around 1792, and in 1816 he founded the music publishing house Boosey & Co.; from 1819 the company name was Boosey & Sons or T & T Boosey, then Boosey & Co. again. In 1892, the company’s American agency was established, today known as Boosey-Hawkes-Belwin. In 1930, there was a merger with the publishing company Hawkes & Son, henceforth Boosey & Hawkes. After 1930, the company’s representative offices were established in Canada, South Africa, Australia, France and Germany. In the initial period of his activity, Boosey was one of the few importers of foreign music to England. Soon he began publishing works by foreign composers, including Hummel, Bériot, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Mercadante. In 1854, by the decision of the House of Lords, English publishing houses were deprived of the rights to print foreign works. There was a fundamental change in the company’s publishing profile, which now turned to English music, placing particular emphasis on choral and song works, popularised as part of the London Ballad Concerts, organised on the company’s initiative since 1867. These were standard editions with high circulation and low prices. When legal relations in international publishing were regulated based on the Berne Convention, Boosey returned to the old tradition of the publishing house. Its catalogue includes outstanding names of contemporary English and foreign composers. The company is the main publisher of Britten’s works and has printed many works by Copland, Goossens, Holst, Vaughan Williams, and among foreign composers, Kodály, Martinů, Mahler, R. Strauss, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninoff. In 1938, due to the occupation of Austria, a group of experienced publishers and composers moved to B. & H. from Universal Edition and the company obtained the rights to publish Bartók’s last works. In 1943, H. & H. purchased from Fürstner-Verlag the world rights (except for the territories of Germany and Italy) to the operas of R. Strauss, and in 1947, S. Kusevickij transferred to the publisher the rights to works from the Russian Music Publishing House along with numerous works by Stravinsky, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Medtner, Taneyev, Khachaturian, Kabalevsky and Shostakovich. In addition to sheet music production, Boosey & Hawkes also prints books, the catalogue of which opens with an English translation of the biography of J.S. Bach by J.N. Forkel, published in 1820. Since 1939, the company has been publishing the quarterly “Tempo,” devoted to music. Boosey & Hawkes is currently one of the largest and most significant English music publishing companies, greatly contributing to the development of English music editing. It has headquarters in New York, London, Berlin and Sidney, and representation in major countries around the world. It publishes works by the most outstanding contemporary artists, including Górecki, Adams, Reich, MacMillan, Jenkins and more and more jazz composers. It also produces large-scale woodwind and brass instruments, which began around 1850.
Literature: Ch. Humphries, W.C. Smith Music Publishing in the British Isles from the Beginning until the Middle of the Nineteenth Century, Oxford 1970.
