The Etude was an American print magazine dedicated to music founded by Theodore Presser (1848–1925) at Lynchburg, Virginia, and first published in October 1883.
[2] James Francis Cooke, editor-in-chief from 1909 to 1949, added the phrase "Music Exalts Life!"
to the magazine's masthead, and The Etude became a platform for Cooke's somewhat polemical and militantly optimistic editorials.
The sometimes conservative outlook and contents of the magazine may have contributed to a decline in circulation in the 1930s and '40s, but in many respects it moved with the times, unequivocally supporting the phonograph, radio, and eventually television, and, by the late 1930s, fully embracing jazz.
By the end, George Rochberg was an editor of The Etude under Guy McCoy, who had succeeded Cooke as editor-in-chief after over two decades as an assistant, and the magazine's musical content had come more closely in-step with the contemporary world.