Wise Music Group

Our many song catalogues reflect a broad range of popular music encompassing, evergreen, jazz, reggae, blues and pop/rock songs from all territories. The Campbell Connelly catalogue alone owns over 100,000 popular titles. Other notable catalogues include Eaton, Noel Gay, The Sparta Florida Music Group, Bosworth & Co., Dorsey Brothers Music, Embassy Music and Tempo Music. Among our more most famous titles are “Lovin’ You”, “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”, “Tainted Love”, “Unchain My Heart”, “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll”, “The Tide Is High”, “Kingston Town”, “Sunny”, “The Twist” and “Try A Little Tenderness”. A complete list of artists and works can be found on wisemusiccreative.com .[8]

Wise Music Group maintains a portfolio that represents the world’s largest independent holdings of classical music. Traditional publishing houses in the Group include Chester Music, Novello & Co, G. Schirmer/AMP, J Curwen, Unión Musical Ediciones, Edition Wilhelm Hansen, Éditions Alphonse Leduc, Le Chant du Monde and Bosworth. The Group also holds international rights to the work of many leading classical composers and maintains its own roster of composers who generate original material that assures the group exclusive rights. The group’s roster includes, among others, Ludovico Einaudi, Philip Glass, Joby Talbot, Igor Stravinsky, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Jean Sibelius, Hans Abrahamsen, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Missy Mazzoli, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Kaija Saariaho, John Tavener, Samuel Barber, John Corigliano and Tan Dun. A complete list of composers and their works can be found on. Wisemusicclassical.com

This division creates original media usage for music in which Wise Music Group holds interests. From offices in London, New York, Santa Monica, Copenhagen, Paris and Berlin; it works with contracted composers as well as with material from its extensive song catalogs.

Music Wise Music Group composers have created scores for many films including The Joker (Hildur Guðnadóttir) The Piano (Michael Nyman), The Wife (Jocelyn Pook), The Happy Prince (Gabriel Yared), McQueen (Michael Nyman), Les Intouchables (Ludovico Einaudi), Whitney (Adam Wiltzie), Calibre (Anne Nikitin) and Puzzle (Dustin O’Halloran). The Group's song catalogs can be found in both classic Hollywood and contemporary films. Examples include,“Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” (Moulin Rouge! ), “La Nativité du Seigneur” (The Favourite), “Lemon Tree”(First Man), “Dance Of The Cuckoos” (Stan & Ollie), “Run Rabbit Run”(Get Out), “Lucky Man” (Blackkklansman) and “Little Liz I Love You” (Fisherman’s Friends).

Wise Music Creative is dedicated to maximizing the value of the group’s music assets, both classical and popular, by promoting their use in theatre, advertising, movies, TV and general broadcasting. Inspired by the global success of the two full-length ballets commissioned by the Royal Ballet for which composer Joby Talbot wrote the scores, Wise Music Creative aims to foster this spirit of innovation, initiative and collaboration in a wider program of movie, dance and theatrical productions including film documentaries.[9]

The Schirmer Theatrical division produces new symphonic cinema concepts (movies screened with live orchestra accompaniment replacing the original soundtrack score). Examples include The Pink Panther, The Red Violin and Ghostbusters. The division also creates a variety of other symphonic experiences and theatrical concert productions including Women Rock and Revolution. Award-winning producers, arrangers, directors, production designers and engineers work with in-house creative and technical teams to create imaginative, high-end live productions. In this way the Group’s substantial worldwide music rights become a valuable core component to new productions. Among the international rights holders who have entrusted Schirmer Theatrical to create new productions are Sony Pictures, MGM Studios, Lionsgate Entertainment Corp, Netflix and Sony/ATV.[10]

Under its respected Omnibus Press imprint Wise Music Group commission and publish substantial biographies and autobiographies of music artists. To date, best-selling biographies include Morrissey, Keith Moon, Kate Bush, The Velvet Underground, ABBA and Bob Marley. Omnibus Press also has a reputation for publishing pop books and high-quality photographic collections featuring the work of some of the world’s top rock and pop photographers.[11] Its website is omnibuspress.com.

Storyville Records is a renowned label featuring recordings of New Orleans jazz, swing, big band, free jazz, blues and contemporary jazz. Founded in 1952 in Copenhagen, it holds a catalog of highly collectible re-issues as well as original recordings made by legendary jazz and blues musicians when they toured Europe and Scandinavia. Classic musicians represented on the label include Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson. Storyville also releases new recordings by contemporary jazz performers such as Thomas Fonnesbæk, Justin Kauflin, Sigurdur Flosason and the Lars Jansson Trio. Its website is www.storyvillerecords.com/.[12]

Node Records is a boutique label that records and releases soundtrack music from ground-breaking films. Recent successes include Stanley Clarke’s score for “Halston”, Jocelyn Pook’s Music+Sound Award-winning best original Composition for “The Wife”, and Marco Beltrami & Brandon Roberts’ Emmy nominated music for “Free Solo”. Releasing recorded music whose rights we represent ensures that it achieves the widest possible exposure and so maximizes its value to the group. Based in Los Angeles and New York, Node Records partners with BFD/The Orchard Sony for marketing and distribution purposes.Its website is www.noderecords.com.[13]

The US Digital Education Division, MusicFirst, is based in the New York office. It offers music teachers and their students easy-to-use, cloud-based tools that enable music learning, creation, assessment, sharing and exploration. Designed to work 24/7 on any browser, the system is based on the proprietary MusicFirst Classroom – the only learning management system designed specifically for K-12 music education. All teacher and student work is saved in the cloud, guaranteeing seamless automatic updates as well as removing to the need involve school IT departments. The MusicFirst team comprises current and former music educators with decades of combined experience of integrating technology into music curricula. Its website is www.musicfirst.com.[14]

Charanga is an award-winning digital education unit for teaching the UK’s New Music Curriculum. Based in Brighton, Sussex, Charanga offers three broad strands of online learning: Musical School (for Primary Teachers), VIP Studio Sessions (for Secondary Teachers and young people aged 12 to 18) and Music Professional (for Instrumental Teachers). Charanga maintains thriving partnerships with over 100 Music Services and Hubs and as well as with several large international teaching organizations. Its website is www.charanga.com.[15]

Part of Wise Music Group international network of publishing houses, G. Schirmer/AMP, is the oldest continuously active North American classical music publisher. Schirmer publishes most of the leading Russian composers, notably Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Khachaturian plus many other celebrated composers of the past and present including Barber, Ives, Menotti, Ellington, Aucoin, Catan, Corigliano, Dennehy, Kernis, Mazzoli and Tan Dun.

This company was founded in 1930 by Alexander Wise and has been family run ever since. It is the holding company for the US based publishing houses with offices based in New York and Santa Monica. It represents a diverse catalogue of pop evergreens such as “Let’s Work Together” (Wilbert Harrison), “Only in My Dreams” (Debbie Gibson), and well known standards such as “Autumn in New York” and “April in Paris” (Vernon Duke), “It’s All in the Game” (Carl Sigman), “Chances Are” (Al Stillman), “Angel Eyes” (Matt Dennis) and “Strange Fruit” (Lewis Allan).

The Embassy catalogue represents contemporary music from the 20th and 21st centuries. The company also publishes many hits and standards, including: “Two Tickets to Paradise” and “Baby Hold On (Eddie Money), “Inside My Love” (Minnie Riperton), “Stay” and “Little Darlin” (Maurice Williams), “Opus One” (Sy Oliver), “Native New Yorker” and “Swearin’ to God” (Denny Randell).

One of France’s oldest and most prestigious music publishing houses, Leduc was founded in 1841. Today its catalogue includes the works of Jacques Ibert, Gabriel Fauré, Darius Milhaud, André Jolivet, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen and Henri Dutilleux among many others.

This prestigious Danish imprint was established in Copenhagen in 1857 and is still managed by the latest generation of the Wilhelm Hansen family. It publishes many renowned Scandinavian composers, including Nielsen and Sibelius and contemporary composers such as Hans Abrahamsen, Per Nørgård, Bent Sørensen and Poul Ruders, as well leading writers from other genres such as Sebastian and Jacob Groth.

This distinguished Paris-based music group is the umbrella company for several publishing companies including Le Chant du Monde, Éditions Choudens, Éditions Alphonse Leduc, Éditions Bleu Blanc Rouge and Éditions Transatlantiques. Authors represented include Henri Salvador, Serge Gainsbourg, Mort Shuman, Alain Bashung and Jean-Max Rivière.

Madrid-based UME was founded in 1900 and has been part of the group since 1990. Its catalogue includes a wealth of Spanish music with works by Joaquín Rodrigo, Manuel de Falla, Joaquín Turina, Isaac Albéniz, Xavier Montsalvatge, Enrique Granados and Federico Mompou.

Based in Berlin, Bosworth is a 126-year old company with a substantial catalogue of rights spanning pop and classical as well as film scores. Composers represented include the perennially popular James Last, American singer songwriter William Fitzsimmons, and Volker Bertelmann, the pianist and composer who mainly performs and records under the name Hauschka. Bosworth also enters into creative collaborations with other publishers for individual ventures.

Established in Australia in 1972, the Australia & New Zealand office made an early catalogue acquisition that featured classic songs, among them Eric Bogle’s outstanding “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” and “No Man’s Land”. It has also acquired the Australia and New Zealand rights for songs of Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and other writers from the Chess Records’ Arc catalogue.

Founded in the 1860s in Sussex, England, Chester Music at first imported and distributed classical editions from Europe. Under new ownership it published Igor Stravinsky, Francis Poulenc and Manuel de Falla. Eventually it became part of the group where it added many prestigious British and European and American composers to its roster, among them Witold Lutosławski, Hans Werner Henze, Henryk Górecki, John Tavener, Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, Kaija Saariaho, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Nico Muhly, Judith Weir, Ludovico Einaudi, Bryce Dessner and Joby Talbot.

Novello was established in London in 1811 by Vincent Novello to publish editions of his own church music. His son subsequently used it to establish a dominant presence in low-cost mass sales of choral music. Educational publishing became an important part of the Novello catalogue which today remains a major choral publisher and champion of new music. Novello composers include Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Malcolm Arnold, Richard Rodney Bennett and Tarik O’Regan.

Eaton Music was founded in 1975. Early signings included Harry Nilsson, Jimmy Webb, Ringo Starr and Status Quo. It soon established a reputation for attracting film composers and today the company maintains publishing relationships with a list of composers that includes Anne Nikitin, Oliver Davis and Andy Price.

One of the legendary names in popular music, the Campbell Connelly publishing imprint was started by Jimmy Campbell and Reg Connelly in 1925. Today it has grown into a vast catalogue of popular music that includes many evergreen popular songs, among them “Try A Little Tenderness”, “Goodnight Sweetheart”, “Show Me The Way To Go Home” and “We’ll Meet Again”.

The origin of Curwen was as an East London printing business but in the early 1900s it became a music publisher with a distinguished catalogue that included Holst’s “The Planets” and “St Paul’s Suite”, and Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”.

In 1938, the composer Noel Gay started a music publishing company to feature his show songs and light music. Today Noel Gay remains a uniquely popular catalogue of British songs dating from the late 1930s and 1940s. Among the best known are “Leaning On A Lamp-Post”, “The Lambeth Walk”, “Run, Rabbit, Run” and “Me and My Girl”.

Choudens is one of the largest French music catalogues and includes famous names like Hector Berlioz, Georges Bizet, Charles Gounod, Jacques Offenbach, André Messager, Paul Landowski and Henri Dutilleux. It also represents many renowned composers of film music.

BBR was established in 1967 by Jean Kluger and his wife Huguette. Jean Kluger would co-write co-wrote the Club Med favourites: “Hands Up”, “D.I.S.C.O.”, “Cuba” and “Aieaoa” as well as hits for Petula Clark, Sheila, Rika Zaraï, Claude François, Dalida, Sacha Distel and Ringo.

Le Chant du Monde Le Chant du Monde has played a prominent part in French musical life for the past eighty years. It holds French publishing rights for some of the greatest Russian composers of the 20th century, including Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian and Dmitri Kabalevsky.

Shawnee Press was established in the 1930s by Fred Waring, businessman, television personality and choral director of the famous Waring’s Pennsylvanians. Its catalogue includes the songs “When You’re Smiling”, “Bugler’s Dream (Olympic Fanfare)”, “Summertime, Summertime” and “Chiquita Banana”.

Sparta Florida was formed in the 1960s by the songwriter, lyricist and entrepreneur Hal Shaper. Shaper’s “Softly As I Leave You” was a major hit for Matt Monro. Later Shaper’s eclectic taste prompted diversification into reggae, and Sparta Florida published hits like “The Tide is High”, “Kingston Town” and “Pass the Dutchie”.