Publishing house

PWM Edition (Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne SA) has already been active for over sixty years. We are the biggest musical publishing house in Poland and a dynamic centre of musical culture development. We have been continuing the tradition of the pre-war Polish Music Publishing Society. Our first two directors, Tadeusz Ochlewski and Mieczysław Tomaszewski created a go-ahead publishing house with a rich publishing programme on the international level. Our publishing catalogue comprises almost two thousand of our own titles in constant sale and a few hundred imported publications. The overwhelming majority are compositions for various instruments, scores of instrumental and vocal music, educational and entertainment publications, scholarly and popular books, lexicons and encyclopedias. Our output has been a resource for people professionally concerned with music - composers, conductors, performers, educators, learners, as well as a vast array of music lovers.

The editorial department, employing a crew of editors, proof-readers, musical typographers, is the basic division of our house, where the editorial concept of score, book and encyclopedic publications is developed and then realized.

In our editorial office we prepare publications covering a vast area of the field of music, published in our best and most popular series, valued in Poland and abroad. The most important of them are the complete editions of the works of Chopin, Moniuszko, Karłowicz and Szymanowski, the editions of Polish old music, scores of Polish contemporary composers, as well as Musica Viva - an anthology comprising masterpieces of Polish and world music of various epochs.

As far as educational literature, we can boast of a vast range of titles for particular instruments (solo and ensembles), embracing the repertoire from old to contemporary music, of a varied level of difficulty, intended for learners and teachers. Here we can specifically enumerate the series: Educational, 'Per strumenti', Instrumental Miniatures and Vocal Miniatures, as well as schools of playing instruments. The large edition educational repertoire is constantly enriched and broadened by new titles.

Compositions for children, mainly by contemporary Polish composers, which receive great interest in Poland and abroad, are published in the colour series with a cat, a boy, a gnome, an elephant, a nightingale and a cricket.

An important position in the activity of our editorial department is occupied by books published in many interesting thematic series. These are music guides, lexicons, handbooks, scholarly books, thematic catalogues, as well as popular monographs, enriched recently by the series Polish Composers of the 20 th Century as well as Illustrated monographs on great composers , acquainting the readers with the life and the artistic path of eminent Polish and foreign composers, former and contemporary. We also address to a wide circle of readers our latest series The people of the world of music - including conversations with eminent representatives of the Polish musical milieu - composers, conductors, virtuosos of instruments, singers and Music and... - showing the relation of music to various aspects of life. Our most important venture is the publishing of an Encyclopedia of Music (so far 5 volumes have appeared).

PWM is an important centre of development of Polish contemporary music. It is here that Polish leading composers - Penderecki, Lutosławski, Górecki - published their first compositions. It is us who dealt with the publishing of their scores, the arrangement of parts for performance and the promotion of their output. In our office specializing in contemporary musical notation (our own original technique) were published for the first time such significant compositions as the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and the Passion According to St. Luke by Krzysztof Penderecki, the Funeral Music and the Trois poemes d'Henri Michaux by Witold Lutosławski as well as Scontri and the 3 rd Symphony 'Symphony of Mournful Songs' by Henryk Mikołaj Górecki and many other works by eminent Polish composers. Among them were Grażyna Bacewicz, Tadeusz Baird, Kazimierz Serocki, Wojciech Kilar, Marek Stachowski, Zygmunt Krauze, and from the younger generation - Eugeniusz Knapik, Aleksander Lasoń, Hanna Kulenty, Tadeusz Wielecki. Our promotion division deals with the popularizing of their artistic output which can be found in our catalogue, by taking part in festivals and concerts in Poland and abroad, organizing concerts and promotional meetings. Our division provides all the necessary promotional material: scores, recordings, brochures.

One of the more important divisions of our house is a hire library of performance materials for orchestras, choirs, musical theatres, ballets and chamber ensembles. The library lends materials for concert-hall performances as well as for recordings. The library numbers 69993 volumes (including 3945 librettos). Apart from the classics of world literature it includes the single world collection of Polish music from the critical editions of the relics of old music through 18th century symphonies and operas to the works of Chopin, Dobrzyński, Elsner, Moniuszko, Karłowicz, Paderewski, Szymanowski and first of all the entire output of the 20th century composers, available for concerts and festivals in Poland and abroad. The library serves nearly 600 Polish and 70 foreign institutions. Part of its activity is also importing materials from foreign publishers (such as Ricordi, Universal, Leduc, Schott, Theodore Presser) for Polish performers.

Modern publishers do not confine themselves to publishing extensive scores and interesting books only. They try to actively promote various types of publications, gain new clients, search for interesting authors and respond to the needs of the publishing market. To do that our staff participate in various events - fairs, festivals, concerts, meetings with readers - in Poland and abroad. We are always in touch with the whole musical milieu, the journalists and the organizers of musical life, so that we can not only publish compositions but also lead to their performance, not only publish attractive books but also gain for them a forever broader circle of readers.

For several years now PWM Edition has been issuing compact discs together with leading Polish recording companies. They are promotional in character and serve to popularize and promote composers associated with our company. It is worth emphasizing that these are often the first world recordings of compositions (e.g. Lutosławski's Trio for oboe, clarinet and bassoon). The phonographic activities of PWM / DUX have already been twice awarded "Fryderyk" - the prize of the Polish Phonographic Academy for the recording of contemporary string quartets by DAFO. At this point it is worth adding that CD's often form a supplement to didactic publications or form part of the publication of a contemporary score by way of a recording or a tape.

A separate, but extremely important section of PWM's publishing catalogue is made up of orchestral materials, facilitating the performance of symphonies, concertos, ballets, operas and other stage works by larger vocal and instrumental ensembles. Frequently such a publication is a condition of the premiere of a contemporary work. In PWM Edition's catalogue one can find the works of early music composers (inluding Gomółka, Gorczycki, Jarzębski, Mielczewski and Zieleński), figures from the 18th and 19th canturies (including Chopin, Dobrzyński, Elsner, Kurpiński, Lessel, Ogiński, Wieniawski and Żebrowski), as well as the most recent works of contemporary composers. Suites from the film music of the most famous cinema productions (including Wojciech Kilar's score for Francis F. Coppola's Dracula or Andrzej Wajda's Pan Tadeusz and Krzesimir Dębski's music from Jerzy Hofman's By Fire and Sword) have been added to the catalogue in recent years. The catalogue is also supplemented by music works of a quasi-theatrical character (Zygmunt Konieczny: I Play My Heart after The Wedding by Stanisław Wyspiański).

PWM Edition's Section devoted to the Administration od Copyrights and Collections deals with the complex task of copyrights and the acquisition and sale of rights. The Section has existed in PWM dition from the beginning, but it was only in the 1990s that it developed methods and working principles to correspond with those of foreign publishing companies. The section has been gathering over the years a database of works, authors, contracting parties, contracts, publications and accounts, which forms the basis of the firm's activities. In the early 1990s it was transformed into an electronic database. The copyright administration section formalizes all publishing intentions by issuing contracts with a composer, performer or a licensee. At the same time it guards the inviolability and respect of the rights of the artist and publisher both by PWM Edition and third parties. As regards artist-publisher relations it explains and settles formal-legal matters at issue.

PWM Edition's publications are offered above all in our company music bookshops in Cracow, Gdańsk, Katowice, Łódź and Warsaw as well as in hundreds of music and general bookshops throughout the country. An important element of PWM Edition's marketing activities is the organization of promotional meetings with the authors of books as well as the "Music School" action, part of which action is the annual Day of Musical Education. It is a one-day series of presentations of recent didactic publications, in which music school teachers from all over Poland take part. PWM Edition is also the biggest importer into Poland of music published by the renowned publishing companies of Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Austria and France among others. PWM Edition publications are obtainable in almost every European country as well as America and we reach as far as Asia and Australia. Our agents and distributors, active in many countries, make Polish music popular throughout the world.

The language used by musicians all over the world is a universal language from Europe to Asia and America. We make sure that we bring news of our catalogue to the most distant parts of the world. This purpose is served by our website, which gives basic information about PWM Edition, a full catalogue of our products as well as an Internet shop, through which one can order our books, music and records and purchase specific music publications.