Galaxy Music Corporation

Galaxy Music Corporation was founded in 1930 in New York by Marshall Kernochan, a cultivated New Yorker who had a great love of classical music. Kernochan quickly surrounded himself with experienced editors, and the company took off with choral and vocal music, moving into other genres along the way. Among its first composers were Katherine K. Davis, John Work, and Douglas Moore. As the firm expanded its catalog to take a more educational focus, there were also new agreements with overseas publishers, such as Stainer & Bell of London, which gave access to the music of composers like Vaughan Williams, Delius, and Jacob. By mid-century, Galaxy composers included Ivan Galamian, George Rochberg, Alice Parker, and Donald Waxman, as well as composer and Galaxy editor Robert Ward, who would go on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, The Crucible. John Kernochan, Marshall’s son, ran the company from his father’s death in 1955 until 1989, when he retired from his day job as a professor and authority on intellectual property at Columbia University Law School. At that time, he sold to E. C. Schirmer Music Company, an enterprise with similar scope and history, and the acquisition came under the name of ECS Publishing. Galaxy’s BMI affiliate is Highgate Press.