De Wolfe Music - History

History

De Wolfe Music Publishers have the longest running independent film and television music library resource in the world. Their music can be heard in, amongst others, The Simpsons Movie, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Death Wish, Brokeback Mountain, Dawn of the Dead, American Gangster, EastEnders, Kavanagh QC, The Royle Family, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Great British Journeys, Spitting Image and Top Gear.

It has provided the hook for advertising campaigns and in recent years has been sampled by the likes of Mark Ronson and Lily Allen, Peshay, Ja Rule, Gorillaz, Unkle and Beyoncé. Countless radio programmes have used De Wolfe for signature tunes, background music, talk show themes, dramatic moments, chart show countdowns and commercials.

The company’s founder, Meyer de Wolfe, left Holland just after the turn of the 20th Century - a graduate of the Dutch Royal Conservatoire of Music, Meyer de Wolfe came to London to work as a musical director, composer, musician, arranger and conductor with the Provincial Cinematograph Theatres Limited. He established De Wolfe Music in 1909 and was responsible for selecting the accompaniment to movies at a time when soundtracks were simply printed as sheet music and played live by musicians sitting inside the late-Edwardian Cinemas, or ‘Kinematograph theatres’ as they were known then. It was in these early years that Meyer de Wolfe offered a sheet music library of original compositions to accompany silent films; he personally selected scores for early silent epics like D. W. Griffith's' The Dishonoured Medal (1914), and Kenean Buel’s production of Rider Haggard’s She (1915), as well as the original Prisoner of Zenda for Adolph Zukor, one of the eventual founders of Paramount Pictures and whose Famous Players Film Company produced an impressive 140 or so silent films between 1912 and 1919.

Meyer de Wolfe’s scores were often produced in collaboration with an extraordinary circle of notable friends from the close-knit orchestral community in London, made up of some of the finest talent of the era, including conductor Sir Landon Ronald, violinist and opera conductor Sir Eugene Goossen, composer Giuseppe Becce and violinist Mantovani, father of the conductor Annunzio Mantovani. De Wolfe Music, as it became known, also encompassed many other related activities such as exclusively importing ‘Wurlitzer’ organs and supplying gut strings for violins, violas, cellos and basses. It was even involved in the manufacture of the Standadt electric organ in Holland which was imported into the UK.