NYC’s Last Classical Sheet Music Store to Close

Frank Music Company has supplied classical sheet
music to generations of instrumentalists, singers and
composers.
On Friday, the retail store will close its doors for good,
succumbing to dwindling sales.
Frank Music has been struggling for years, as music
became readily available online, said Heidi Rogers, the
shop’s owner.
“We went from seeing 15 to 20 people per day to
seeing two or three,” Ms. Rogers said on Monday. “I
went from feeling like I was at the center of the world
to feeling invisible.”
The store, on West 54th Street between Broadway and
Eighth Avenue, opened in 1937 and provided the city’s
musicians scores from the standard— Bach, Beethoven
—to the arcane. Ms. Rogers bought it in 1978.
Frank Music is the last store in the city dedicated to
selling classical sheet music, Ms. Rogers said, although
other places such as the Juilliard School’s bookstore at
Lincoln Center have it on their shelves.
Frank Music’s stock, which Ms. Rogers counts as
hundreds of thousands of scores, was purchased by an
anonymous donor as a gift for the Colburn School, a
music conservatory in Los Angeles.
The school and Ms. Rogers declined to comment on
financial details.
Colburn School’s president and chief executive, Sel
Kardan, called Frank Music’s scores “an invaluable
resource for our students and faculty for years to
come.”

To the 63-year-old Ms. Rogers, nothing is more
important than the arts.
“The idea that classical music is irrelevant is
ridiculous,” she said, bemoaning the comparative
salaries of tubists and stockbrokers. “People should be
paid in terms of what they contribute to people’s well
being.”
The store’s celebrity clients over the years have
included pianists Emanuel Ax and Jeremy Denk,
violinist Pamela Frank and cellist David Finckel.
One of Ms. Rogers’s favorite memories is a telephone
call from the violinist Itzhak Perlman , asking for
Kreisler scores.
The composer Bruce Adolphe, who is resident lecturer
at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center,
described the store as a musical meeting ground.
“Frank’s Music was not just a store but a crucible,” he
said, “a nexus where musicians from Suzuki beginners
and their parents, to Joshua Bell, or the Brentano’s
Mark Steinberg, would meet by chance.