Composer Arnold Schoenberg at work.

In Monday’s (1/13) New York Times, Javier C. Hernández writes, “An estimated 100,000 scores and parts by the groundbreaking 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg were destroyed last week when the wildfires in Southern California burned down the music publishing company founded by his heirs. The company rents and sells the scores to ensembles around the world. ‘It’s brutal,’ said Larry Schoenberg, 83, a son of the composer, who ran the company, Belmont Music Publishers, from his home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles and kept the firm’s inventory in a 2,000-square-foot building behind his house. ‘We lost everything.’ Belmont’s catalog offered a wide range of Schoenberg’s music, from the lush, hyper-Romantic pieces of his youth to the challenging works he wrote after breaking from conventional tonal harmony and developing his 12-tone technique. No original Schoenberg manuscripts were destroyed in the fire. But the loss of Belmont’s collection could create problems for orchestras, chamber music groups and soloists planning performances of Schoenberg’s works … While Belmont, established in 1965, is not the only publisher of Schoenberg’s works, the firm was revered for the authority of its scores and its connection to the composer … Belmont said it would work on creating digital versions of its scores, based on manuscripts by the composer, which are kept at the Schoenberg Center in Vienna. Belmont kept digital backups of scores … but they also burned in the fire.”

The League of American Orchestras’ Disaster Relief and Preparedness site at americanorchestras.org/learn/disaster-relief-and-preparedness/ offers guidance and disaster relief resources.