It also publishes many prominent contemporary composers, including John Adams, Karl Jenkins, James MacMillan, Mark-Anthony Turnage, and Steve Reich.

[7] The company was seriously affected by the House of Lords' decision in Boosey v. Jeffreys (1854) which deprived English publishers of many of their foreign copyrights.

Clara Butt, John Sims Reeves and Charles W. Clark performed at these concerts, and their successes included Arthur Sullivan's "The Lost Chord" (1877) and Stephen Adams' "The Holy City".

Boosey & Hawkes seized the opportunity to sign up composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and also rescued Universal's Jewish staff, who later played an important role in developing the company.

Stein was instrumental in founding the modern-music journal Tempo in 1939,[2] which began as Boosey & Hawkes' own newsletter but later became a more independent publication.

By the time World War II broke out in 1939, Boosey & Hawkes had also signed Benjamin Britten and Aaron Copland.

It was Ralph Hawkes who championed Britten when he was still relatively unknown, often against the rest of the board of directors, until the première on 7 June 1945 of Peter Grimes, which was a critical and popular success.

Sheet music sales soared during the War, enabling Boosey & Hawkes to buy Editions Russes which held the rights to the most valuable works of Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky.

[8] By 1950, Boosey & Hawkes was a leading international music company with an extensive catalogue of serious composers and offices in Bonn, Johannesburg, New York, Paris, Toronto and Sydney.

However, from the late 1940s, strains had begun to appear in the relationship between Leslie Boosey and Ralph Hawkes, and this led to factions supporting each man forming in the company.

It was discovered that Hawkes had borrowed capital of £100,000 during the war without the permission of the exchange control authorities, and Boosey was forced to clear up the situation at great personal cost.

However, he died suddenly on 8 September 1950, and representation of his faction was taken over by his flamboyant but unreliable brother Geoffrey who spent much of the company's money on ventures such as the manufacture of mouth organs and ovens, which failed.

[10] Some time during the late 1960s or early 1970s Boosey & Hawkes bought out The Salvation Army Brass Instrument Factory in North London.

[17] An archive of musical instruments manufactured or collected by the company throughout its history was passed to the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, South London.

[20] In April 2008, Boosey & Hawkes was bought by the Dutch owned Imagem which was subsequently itself acquired by the American based Concord.

[21] Concord later purchased Hans Sikorski in 2019, adding the German classical publisher to sit alongside Boosey & Hawkes.

[22] Today, partly due to the foresight or business acumen of Ralph Hawkes, the company controls the copyrights in major 20th-century music.

[26] The company was lampooned by The Goon Show as "Goosy and Borks" in their episode, "Lurgy Strikes Britain", as well as by musical parodist Peter Schickele who named one of the friends of fictional composer P.D.Q.