Bagdad Boogie
Rockville Centre, NY: Belwin Inc., 1957. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Sheet Music. Format is approximately 9 inches by 12 inches. 6 pages. Decorative front cover, page two is blank, music (no lyrics) on pages 3-5, and information on music books on back page. Wear, soiling, and pencil marks to back cover. John W. Schaum (January 27, 1905, Milwaukee, - July 18, 1988, Milwaukee) was an American pianist, composer, and educator. Schaum received a Bachelor of Music degree from Marquette University in 1931, a Bachelor of Music Education degree from University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and a Master of Music degree from Northwestern University in 1934. Schaum began his career as a piano teacher in the late 1920s. In 1933 he founded the Schaum Piano School in Milwaukee. About the same time he began to compose piano music for teaching purposes. He also founded the first company to produce award stickers specifically for music students. Always on the lookout for better materials for his students, Schaum eventually decided to create his own books, beginning in 1941 with Piano Fun for Boys and Girls, which he later revised as the first in a series of nine piano method books that became the Schaum Piano Course, completed in 1945. These books are still widely used today. Over the course of his career, Schaum wrote many more books and hundreds of pieces of sheet music. His arrangement of the Marines' Hymn, issued during World War II, sold more than a million copies. Though he received only a fixed fee of $15 for this work, its success attracted the attention of Belwin Publications, for whom he went on to produce more than a hundred sheet music arrangements. Max Winkler was not a musician or composer, but as a clerk in music publisher Carl Fischer's office in New York City, he amassed encyclopedic knowledge of thousands of pieces of music that would be suitable to accompany moving pictures. He then came up with a pioneering method of compiling suitable suggestions for cinema musicians and called the result a "cue sheet". Making up a dummy cue sheet for a fictional film, he submitted the idea to Universal's New York office and they hired him to compile cue sheets for their future releases. Soon America's cinemas were supplied with Winkler cue sheets and his idea was copied by many others. Winkler formed his own company and supplied cue sheets for Fox, Vitagraph and Goldwyn. He also hired composers to write original cues, as well as plundering the classical music repertoire. Winkler's business thrived during the 1920s, but with the arrival of sound his tons of printed music ended up in a paper mill for pulping. Winkler’s decision to emigrate to the United States as a teenager with two of his brothers and his father’s blessing would result in what he described as “the greatest honor ever bestowed upon me, my United States citizenship.” The brothers arrived in New York on February 19, 1907 after a journey on land and sea fraught with excitement and danger. Max Winkler was literally down to his last penny and he used it to mail a postcard for a job at Carl Fischer’s Music House. How Winkler got the job that started him on his road to success is an inspiring story in unrelenting doggedness. Winkler would work for years in the basement of the sheet music department at Fischer’s doing back-breaking chores six days a week. He picked up a vast knowledge of music while working there. Winkler would go on to found his own company Belwin, Inc. and eventually become one of largest music publishing houses in the country. Condition: Fair.
Keywords: Piano, Solo, Ethnic, Popular Music, Stereotype
[Book #83119]
Price: $25.00