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British music publishing company

Boosey & Hawkes is a British music publisher, purported to be the largest specialist classical music publisher in the world. Until 2003, it was also a major manufacturer of brass, string and woodwind musical instruments. Formed in 1930 through the merger of two well established British music businesses, Boosey & Hawkes controls the copyright to much major 20th century music, including works by Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Sergei Prokofiev, and Igor Stravinsky. It also publishes many prominent contemporary composers, including John Adams, Karl Jenkins, James MacMillan, Mark Anthony Turnage, and Steve Reich. With subsidiaries in Berlin and New York, the company also sells sheet music via its online shop.

Boosey & Hawkes was founded in 1930 through the merger of two respected music companies, Boosey & Company and Hawkes & Son. The Boosey family was of Franco–Flemish origin. Boosey & Company traces its roots back to John Boosey, a bookseller in London in the 1760s–1770s. His son Thomas continued the business at 4 Old Bond Street, and from 1819 the bookshop was called Boosey & Sons or T. & T. Boosey. Thomas Boosey's son, also named Thomas (1794/1795–1871), set up a separate musical branch of the company known as T. Boosey & Co. and, in the latter part of the 19th century, Boosey & Company. It initially imported foreign music but soon began publishing in England the works of composers such as Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Saverio Mercadante, Ferdinand Ries and Gioachino Rossini, and subsequently important operas by Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi. Elgar and Vaughan Williams were among its later signings. It also produced books; among its first publications was an English translation of Johann Nikolaus Forkel's book Life of J. S. Bach (1820). The company was seriously affected by the House of Lords' decision in Boosey v. Jeffreys (1854) which deprived English publishers of many of their foreign copyrights. Hawkes & Son (initially Rivière & Hawkes), rescuing it from becoming a permanent dance hall and providing a venue for world class ballet and opera in the capital. Some time during the late 1960s or early 1970s Boosey & Hawkes bought out The Salvation Army Brass Instrument Factory in North London. They continued for some years to manufacture instruments with The Salvation Army name and crest on them such as The Bandmaster cornets. Boosey & Hawkes' musical instruments division was gradually scaled down from the mid 1970s as it became less viable to have such an extensive range of products. Various lines were outsourced and sold off. By the time of the closure of the Edgware factory in 2001, brass instruments were the only thriving part of the instrument range. Production was moved to Watford, Hertfordshire, and the instruments rebranded Besson. It took nearly 20 years for Boosey & Hawkes to regain the leading position in the international music scene that it has today. In 1996 the company acquired Bote & Bock; in 2001, it acquired Anton J. Benjamin, including the N. Simrock catalog.

In 2001, Boosey & Hawkes was put up for sale after accounting irregularities were discovered in its Chicago instrument distribution business, leading to £13m worth of sales being written off, a plummeting share price, and the company's near bankruptcy. It was eventually bought by venture capitalists HgCapital in 2003 for £40 million. On 11 February 2003, Boosey & Hawkes sold its musical instrument division, which included clarinet maker Buffet Crampon and guitar manufacturer Höfner, to The Music Group, a company formed by rescue buyout specialists Rutland Fund Management, for £33.2 million. An archive of musical instruments manufactured or collected by the company throughout its history was passed to the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, South London. One of the interested buyers was Elevation Partners, a private equity firm which counts U2 lead singer Bono as a partner and managing director. Despite offers of about £115 million from a number of parties, the sale was later cancelled in November 2005. In April 2008, Boosey & Hawkes was bought by the Dutch owned Imagem which was subsequently itself acquired by the American based Concord. Concord later purchased Hans Sikorski in 2019, adding the German classical publisher to sit alongside Boosey & Hawkes. Today, partly due to the foresight or business acumen of Ralph Hawkes, the company controls the copyrights in major 20th century music. The company had a major division, BooseyMedia, that commissioned and produced music for radio, television and advertising jingles, and the administration of copyrights owned by media companies. This was split into commercial synchronisation and production music departments, both under the Imagem name. The production library was sold in 2016. In North America, Boosey & Hawkes' print sales catalogue is distributed by the Hal Leonard Corporation. Boosey & Hawkes launched its Online Scores service in 2011, allowing customers to view full scores of works in its catalogue. In January 2017, British Library acquired the archive of Boosey & Hawkes.

The company was lampooned by The Goon Show as "Goosy and Borks" in their episode, "Lurgy Strikes Britain", as well as by musical parodist Peter Schickele who named one of the friends of fictional composer P. D. Q. Bach Jonathan "Boozey" Hawkes, and claimed him as a vital link in the chain whereby manuscripts of PDQ Bach's works had survived. Somewhat more recondite was the punning reference delivered in one of Gerard Hoffnung's parody concerts: "If Boosey's will Hawk it, Schott's will Tippett" (from Punkt Contrapunkt at Hoffnung Interplanetary Music Festival with John Amis, Royal Festival Hall, 21 and 22 November 1958)

Blaikley, D. J. (David James); William C. Smith & Peter Ward Jones. "Boosey & Hawkes". Grove Music Online (L. Macy, ed.). Retrieved 14 June 2007.