THE ETUDE MUSIC MAGAZINE**MAY 1936

The Etude magazine was established in 1883 by Theodore Presser with $250 saved from his income as a music teacher. The subsequent history of the magazine and the Theodore Presser Company is one of the great entrepreneurial success stories of American music. The Etude remains one of the longest-lived music magazines in American history and is still a ubiquitous presence in flea markets and online auctions.In the early years, each issue published roughly five or six musical scores, but by the 1930's there were upwards of twenty compositions published each month. The resulting list of repertoire comprises well over 10, 000 musical compositions in an eclectic range of styles and difficulty levels. The major composers of Western art music appear side by side with a broad range of popular composers, including a strong representation of American and female composers.This rich resource has never been indexed and has thus been virtually inaccessible to scholars and performers, who now have access to three quarters of a century of music in this valuable repository of scores.

Published from 1883 to 1957, The Etude Music Magazine featured a series of "Master-Lessons" by noted piano virtuosi. Among the chapters in this collection are master-lessons on Paderewski's Minuet in G, Chopin's Military Polonaise, Grieg's Norwegian Bridal Procession, Mendelssohn's Scherzo, and Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata. Authors include Wilhelm Bachaus, Percy Grainger, Edwin Hughes, and Mark Hambourg.

Jan Swynnoe's study is concerned with the special British contribution to film music, detailing how the idiosyncracies of British film, and of the British character, set it apart from its Hollywood counterpart. She shows how the differences between the two industries in all aspects of film making variously affected composers on both sides of the Atlantic.In the mid 1930s, when film composers in America were perfecting the formulae of the classical Hollywood score, film music in Britain scarcely existed; within a year or so, however, top British composers were scoring British films. How this transformation was brought about, and how established British concert composers, including Vaughan Williams and Arnold Bax, faced the challenge of the exacting and often bewildering art of scoring for feature film, is vividly described here, and the resulting scores compared with the work of seasoned Hollywood composers. JAN SWYNNOE researched the material on which her book is based over several years, at the same time