Scholarly and Professional Societies

Trade organization founded in New York in 1855 by 27 leading music publishers in reaction to steps taken by the New York firm William Hall & Sons to halve the list prices of noncopyrighted music. The member publishers of the group, which included Oliver Ditson in Boston, S. Brainard & Sons in Cleveland, and Horace Waters in New York, were able to reach a compromise whereby the prices for this music would be reduced by only 20%. The board issued a Complete Catalogue of Sheet Music and Musical Works (1870/R), a comprehensive list of all the works published by its members and the closest the industry had come to producing a list of music in print. After a slow decline, the board held its last meeting in 1895; it was succeeded in the same year by the Music publishers association of the united states . Any allusions to the Music Publishers’ Association of the Music Publishers’ Board of Trade in historical materials published before ...

The first Serbian choral society in Serbia proper, founded in 1853 as the Belgrade Choral Society (Beogradsko pevačko društvo, henceforth BCS), renamed in 1929 as the First BCS. Working under the auspices of the royal family Obrenović, it was originally a male choir, later a mixed choir, and included a music school. Due to the lack of choir compositions in the Serbian language during the first years of BCS’s work, with Milan Milovuk, the repertoire was based on songs by German, Czech, Russian, and Hungarian composers. The national orientation, resulting in arrangements and stylizations of folk melodies and other compositions, was encouraged by Stevan Todorović, at various times a board member or the president and the main ideologist of the choral society, especially during the engagement of the most prominent Serbian composers as conductors, including Kornelije Stanković, Davorin Jenko, and Josif Marinković, culminating with Stevan Mokranjac. Mokranjac promoted his own choral music, as well as that of his contemporaries and predecessors, not only in the capital of Serbia and the places where a dispersed Serbian population lived (in what is now Vojvodina, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Macedonia), but also in Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, Russia, and Germany, performing concerts for the kings, emperors, and a sultan with great success. This peak in BCS history (...

American organization of composers. The society was founded in 1889 by a group of composers who wished to hear more performances of their works. It presented both public and private performances of mostly unpublished works throughout the 1890s. During its heyday in the early 1890s, the society presented two orchestral concerts and one chamber concert per year in Chickering Hall. A perpetual source of tension was the divergent goals of professional and amateur members, typified by the brief and contentious presidency of Edward A. MacDowell (1899–1900), who wished to broaden the society’s repertoire to include eminent foreign composers. After some notable successes, the members experienced disagreements over procedural issues, and the group’s activities were significantly reduced in 1901. It was disbanded in 1918.

The significance of the organization was to build on the successes of the American Composers’ Concert movement by allowing composers to control the selection and performance of their own works. Especially noteworthy was the large number of female members, who found opportunities that were not available elsewhere. The group inspired the American Composers’ Choral Association (founded in ...