The Story of the House of Witmark - From Ragtime to Swingtime
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The Chaperons: An Original Musical Comedy in Three Acts (Classic Reprint)
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Excerpt from The Chaperons: An Original Musical Comedy in Three Acts
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Isidore Witmark was an American music publisher and composer.
Background
Isidore Witmark was born on June 15, 1869, in New York City, the eldest of seven children (six sons and one daughter) of Marcus Witmark and Henrietta Peyser. Both parents were of Jewish descent and natives of Prussia. The father had immigrated in 1853 to Fort Gaines, Georgia, where he worked as a peddler and, with the zest and drive that later characterized his children, soon accumulated enough money to buy a store and acquire a few slaves.
Career
While a young man, — Isidore wrote songs for his brother Julius, who performed as a boy soprano, and later as a tenor. His first published composition was "A Mother’s a
Mother After All" which was sung by Julius with the famous Thatcher, Primrose
and West Minstrels. In 1883, Witmark’s brother Jacob won a printing press and the
three brothers set about establishing a publishing company, initially for the
publication of greeting cards and business cards and later specializing in popular
songs.
In 1886 the three older brothers organized the music printing and publishing firm known from that time on as "M. Witmark & Sons, " although the father never directed the business. Isidore Witmark was president, his brother Jacob business manager. As their own printers, the Witmarks had for some time a competitive advantage over other music publishers. Deriving much of their initial capital from sales of Isidore's timely "President Cleveland's Wedding March" (1886), they soon purchased the first of the ten publishing houses they eventually absorbed. Julius, touring coast to coast as a member of leading minstrel companies, promoted Witmark material; in those days before radio or much mechanical reproduction, touring companies were the stellar medium of exploitation. Julius and his singer friends, deluged by composers wishing to get material performed and published, steered the best to Witmark, on terms mutually advantageous to writer and publisher.
Before others had sensed the value of building a catalogue of popular numbers for sale throughout the country, the Witmarks recognized that the biggest market for sheet music lay outside New York, in smaller communities where people stayed home more. Isidore and his brothers tapped this market speedily by aggressive nationwide promotion among vaudeville circuits. The time was ripe. Telegraph and telephone stood ready to rush orders, and fast coast-to-coast railway postal service to deliver sheet music and advertisements. Because they were genuinely absorbed in music, the Witmarks had special rapport with composers, performers, and public. They hired good orchestral arrangers, whose scores they distributed gratis to pit bands, and Julius, a pioneer in "song plugging, " gave free copies of songs to important entertainers. The Witmarks knew their public's tastes. In the late 1880's and early 1890's their catalogue stressed genteel Victorian ballads of romantic love and motherhood, with some voguish Irish comedy numbers. They proudly announced (and continued to announce) that they never published a "dirty song, " although their first fortune was made by a Charles Graham ballad — "The Picture That Is Turned toward the Wall" (1891), lamenting a wayward daughter disowned by her parents — whose oblique treatment of sex fascinated the prurient tastes of that era. More conventional were "The Sunshine of Paradise Alley" (1895) and "My Wild Irish Rose" (1899), by Chauncey Olcott, two of a multitude of waltz ballads, and Harry Armstrong's "Sweet Adeline" (1903).
The Witmark firm built a strong catalogue of "high class" numbers, including works by Ernest R. Ball ("Mother Machree") and Caro Roma, and operettas by Gustav Luders (Prince of Pilsen, 1902), Karl Hoschna (Madame Sherry, 1910), Sigmund Romberg (The Desert Song, 1926; New Moon, 1928), and Victor Herbert, the dean of American (actually European-style) light opera. To these the Witmarks added their own works. Isidore’s brother Frank composed the popular "Zenda Waltzes" (1890) for the Graustarkian historical romance Prisoner of Zenda. Isidore wrote the score for Austerlitz (1889) and many ephemeral songs for his own sometimes bathetic lyrics (including "A Mother's a Mother After All, " 1885, and "Little Woman of the West, " 1908). The Witmarks capitalized on this old-world kitsch without condescension: it was their own taste. Isidore, who collected verse of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, published L. F. Gottschalk's musical setting to her "Laugh and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone" (1899). The Witmarks' own world was sentimentally familial; in 1900 the thriving brothers bought their parents an expensive, floridly furnished home east of Central Park.
By 1900 the Witmark firm had branches in Chicago, San Francisco, London, Paris, and Melbourne; its growth epitomized the dominance of New York City in world music publishing. Called "the Tiffany of the music world" by producer Sam Shubert, the firm originated the lucrative publishing of folios and of completely scored amateur minstrel shows. It also took the lead in promoting the copyright laws which after 1908 protected publishers and writers. After 1920 the Witmark fortunes, contingent primarily on sheet music sales and only secondarily on royalties from phonograph records and player piano rolls, began to decline. The firm was hurt by radio, from which publishers could then derive little remuneration, by musical films, which eliminated theatre musicians, and by the automobile and movies in general, which lured people away from the parlor piano, neighborhood vaudeville, and amateur musicals. Sales were temporarily bolstered by the continuing popularity of Victor Herbert and Sigmund Romberg — the latter in his affection for Isidore refused a more favorable contract from a rival — and by the "symphonic" arrangements of Ferde Grofé, Louis Katzmann, and Archie Bleyer for the growing dance band trade. In 1928 Witmark sold the company to Warner Brothers film studios, which sought to avoid copyright infringements by owning a large music catalogue. Isidore stayed on as an executive in the Warner-absorbed firm, which retained the Witmark name.
Isidore Witmark died on April 9, 1941, at the Polyclinic Hospital in New York City, of pneumonia in his seventy-second year and was buried in Westchester Hills Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.