Boosey & Hawkes
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, and Igor Stravinsky. It also publishes many prominent contemporary composers, including John Adams, Karl Jenkins, James MacMillan, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and Steve Reich.
The company is owned by BMG in Nashville and in addition to its headquarters in London has subsidiaries in Berlin and New York.
History
Pre-merger
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.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Boosey & Hawkes” is british music publishing company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Boosey, Hawkes and British, not as a finished interpretation.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q834648. VIAF identifies the subject as 146663566. The Library of Congress control number is n91000040. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003, 1930, 1819 and 1794.
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This entry incorporates text from “Boosey & Hawkes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.