Written by Curtis Perry
New York City is supposed to be North America's cultural mecca, but now Ottawa has something distinctly cosmopolitan that the Big Apple doesn’t: a classical sheet music store.
On March 6 of this year, New York City's Frank Music company — the city's last surviving sheet music store — closed its doors. Canada's capital, on the other hand, has Elgin Street's The Leading Note, which isn't simply surviving, but thriving.
So how does The Leading Note's business model succeed when Frank Music Company couldn’t make it work in a place like New York City?
Husband-and-wife team Gary McMillen and Tina Fedeski started The Leading Note in 1999, with the goal of cultivating a reputation for being Canada’s classical sheet music specialist. The location they chose, and continue to occupy, is quaint by design: the Elgin Street store’s space is small, residing on the main floor of an old apartment complex. The Manx Pub (their motto: "Wherever we land, we stand"), Ottawa’s defacto watering hole for artists and their ilk, is nestled just underneath. And proximity to the U.S. border means the ability to reliably pick up international orders from Ogdensburg (New York state, in a small twist of irony), which is just an hour’s drive away.
Shoppers have been able to browse the store’s inventory both in person since first opening, and online as of a few years ago. Publications by local composers share shelf space beside the three Bs. Surprisingly, these are innovative and modern amenities in the rarefied world of classical sheet music shops.
"In European sheet music stores, you'd go up to the counter and say, 'I’d like to look at the Beethoven string quartets,'" McMillen explains. "They’d go back to their stack of stuff, and you could take a look at them. But you can’t really browse the shop, and that’s what the setup was like [at Frank's]. It was just a counter, and then racks and racks of music.”
McMillen and Fedeski visited Frank’s last November, and say it reminded them of Joseph Patelson Music House, another NYC-based shop that had closed its doors in 2009. Even though Patelson’s had referred its shoppers to Frank’s, it wasn’t enough. Frank's owner, Heidi Rogers, had a huge inventory and no computer system. There was no anticipation for the kind of operational flexibility on which The Leading Note relies.
"We actually asked Heidi, out of curiosity, how much her inventory might be worth, and she said she had no idea," McMillen noted.
Frank acted as a community hub for its patrons, and The Leading Note’s management has capitalized on this idea. They created the Leading Note Foundation in 2007, which invests in and engages with the community and school board. One of its programs, OrKidstra, has grown from an enrolment of 27 to more than 350 children and 42 languages. The program is inspired by the El Sistema movement in music education, which emphasizes and promotes the performance of ensembles rather than individuals. The foundation recently received a multi-year Ontario Trillium Foundation grant totalling $204,800, with the aim of providing after-school programs and teacher education to primary schools across Ottawa.
"It’s a matter of tending to one’s own back garden," Fedeski related, paraphrasing Voltaire. "It makes you want to believe in community again."
But there's a business angle as well, which is both innovative and clever, and proves why The Leading Note’s commitment to diversifying its business practices may ensure the sheet music store’s future: Fedeski and McMillen have plans to offer a platform for Sistema-inspired sheet music for other Sistema-inspired programs in the world. These pieces are designed to be multi-level, such that novice and experienced players alike can play in ensemble, and everyone should be sufficiently challenged by the material.
"That’s an entirely new repertoire," Fedeski explained. "We’re pretty excited about taking the initiative with that. We’re excited about being able to pull our two parallel lives [with the store and the foundation] together."
Repertoire for flexible instrumentation has existed for a while, but flexible levels of difficulty within the same piece presents a relatively new philosophy toward the design of educational sheet music.
"It’s good to be in the print music profession. It’s a scary time because changes are happening so rapidly, but if we stay ahead and be creative, I think — it’s not going to be an easy road, but it’s going to be an interesting road," Fedeski says, laughing.
Only time will tell if The Leading Note’s instincts pay off, but it’s clear that it has an ear on the future.
Listen to CBC Music's Essential Classics stream
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