Shortly thereafter, the business was rechristened M. The boys look into the camera sternly, blankly the older two reach barely two-thirds of the way up the doorway. Isidore Witmark and Isaac Goldberg, From Ragtime to Swingtime (New York, 1939). Visible in the window are sheet music title pages, most of which were set in type by eldest brother Isidore. Above the number 402 in the middle is the name the firm originally bore, Witmark Bros., before the brothers incorporated with the help of their father. Sheet music covers are displayed in s ell i n g s o u nd s P.1 The House of Witmark got its start at 402 West Fortieth Street in New York, the same building in which Frank, Julius, Jay, and Eddie Witmark, pictured here, were born. Julius and Eddie hold proof sheets Jay wears an ink-stained apron. A photograph from around this time shows Julius and Jay in front of their shop, flanked by younger brothers Frank and Eddie, who later joined the firm themselves. Soon sheet music production supplanted all other activities. The firm began to publish sheet music in 1886 and achieved some notable success with “President Cleveland’s Wedding March,” penned by Isidore in honor of the president’s impending nuptials. By 1885, Witmark Brothers was a small business operating out of the family home on West Fortieth Street. A lost printing job taught them the need for “speed and efficiency,” and soon they convinced their father to help them buy a steam-powered press. Together with another brother, Julius, thirteen, the boys started printing New Year’s cards, and then business cards, in their home in Hell’s Kitchen. On the advice of his eldest brother, Isidore, age fourteen, he selected the printing press. In 1883, a few weeks before the end of the year, his bright, mildly obstreperous eleven-year-old son Jay won an arithmetic competition at school and for a prize was allowed to choose from among a printing press, a velocipede, a tool chest, and a baseball uniform. He was an immigrant from Prussia, an antebellum slaveholder in Georgia, and a veteran of the Confederate army, wounded at Gettysburg, who moved to New York after the Civil War. M元790.S88 2009 338.497780973-dc22 2008055620 Contents Prologue 1 1 When Songs Became a Business 18 2 Making Hits 56 3 Music without Musicians 90 4 The Traffic in Voices 125 5 Musical Properties 150 6 Perfect Pitch 178 7 The Black Swan 204 8 The Musical Soundscape of Modernity 240 Epilogue 273 Abbreviations in Notes 287 Notes 289 Acknowledgments 339 Index 343 selling sounds Prologue Marcus Witmark had no hand in the operations of the printing and publishing firm bearing his name, M. Music-United States-History and criticism. Includes bibliographical references and index. Selling sounds : the commercial revolution in American music / David Suisman. Selling sounds Selling Sounds RS The Commercial Revolution in American Music davi d s u i s m an h arvard unive rsity pr ess Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2009 Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Suisman, David.
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