Publishing History

To all those who are interested in music I wish to inform them further about the creation of the Jarmandi Edition.

My parents Helga and Walter Wollenweber, both from the book fair city of Leipzig, fled the city for fear of the expected Russian occupation and the coming transformation into the Soviet Zone. Having hardly reached adulthood they ended up in Munich just before the end of the war in 1945.

Consistent with the desperate post-war times when a system of barter was common a book and music trade evolved in the early fifties. When my parents moved to the villa suburb of Gräfelfing near Munich their trading became a regular business and was expanded to include a sales department with a high-quality and sophisticated assortment of music together with record albums. This enlarged supply for the broad and diverse classical music market soon found praise not only in Germany but also all across Europe.

The annually published “Notenpost“ drew particular attention. It was indeed a superbly designed general catalogue with the most recent publications and album releases along with the more traditional ones in the whole field of classical music. It was even sometimes used by the competition and became a sort of secret tip for lovers of the classical music scene.

In charge of the business was my ambitious and committed mother. She had an exceptional knowledge of titles and a phenomenal memory for more than tens of thousand of musical publications from composers. She possessed a nearly pedantic knowledge of German as well as international works registries.

Her outstanding capability of acquiring rare music sheets and albums, and second-hand and no longer deliverable material, her meticulousness and her immense diligence and collector`s passion for second-hand stock secured a large clientele consisting of libraries, choirs, music ensembles, amateur as well as professional musicians.

In the 70`s my father undertook the hazardous business of publishing in an own line quite a number ofworks from the classical and Romantic periods that were either long-forgotten or never published. At that time the production process for sheet music, which used engraved metal plates, was extremely intricate and time-consuming, and therefore the process was a very expensive one, these first productions with the letters pressed onto the paper using a plastic layer of film being very difficult to make.

Only the coming of the much less expensive digital sheet music set in the early 90`s enabled the numerous publishings of many composers, who enriched and filled up the company`s programme till the death of my father with over 200 works.

When my mother died in 2003 at the age of 79 the distribution of sheet music came to a sudden halt, and that was the complete assortment. After the death of my father in 2013 the publishing house was closed, although he had continued to issue a few publishing lines even at a very old age.

The Jarmandi Edition is an attempt to continue this publishing tradition the particular intention being to bring unknown composers and works from the past into an up-to-date and relevant form. This is done by the republishing of updated editions.

As well as the new editions in printed form CD recordings are to be introduced. Also new is the formation of a website which shows the biographies of the published composers, excerpts from works, and soundbites from the upcoming CD`s during the nextweeks.

This whole enterprise is only made possible by the collective cooperation of committed and experienced concert musicians, broadcasting corporations, and musicologists their main emphasis being the chamber music of the classical and Romantic period.

Joachim Wollenweber