New York’s last classical sheet music store to close

Frank Music Company, New York’s only remaining specialist classical sheet music shop, is to close its doors this week in response to steadily declining sales.

The shop’s owner, Heidi Rogers, told the Wall Street Journal that the shop has been struggling for years because of the rise in online music sales. ‘We went from seeing 15 to 20 people per day to seeing two or three,’ she said.

The store, on West 54th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, opened in 1937. Its stock of thousands of scores has been bought by an anonymous donor as a gift for the Colburn School in Los Angeles.

Clients of the store throughout the years have included violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pamela Frank, and cellist David Finckel.

Joseph Patelson Music House, another historic New York sheet-music store, closed in 2009, and Dowling Music shut its doors in 2013.

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