Music Minus One

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Music Minus One (MMO) is a music production and recording company in Westchester, New York. Their recordings are meant to be accompanied by the listener on whichever instrument (or voice type) is excluded from the recording, as an aid to practice, or as an accompaniment to home performance. The technique is the same as the later development of karaoke for the voice.

Background[]

Music Minus One was founded in 1950 by Irv Kratka, a 24-year-old college student. The company's first recording was devoted to Schubert's Trout Quintet, with all five instruments omitted in five different MMO's. This release received a full page review in 1953 in The New York Times. As a result, articles appeared in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, and hundreds of papers across the United States and Europe.^[1]

In the following years, the company continued to release chamber music and jazz rhythm recordings utilizing the best of New York's players at the time, many of whom are legends in music. Such names as Stan Getz, Hank Jones, George Barnes, Max Roach, , Julius Baker, Murray Panitz, Doriot Dwyer, Elaine Douvas, Donald Peck, Armando Ghitalla, Stanley Drucker, Christian Reichert and countless other first chair players in the five major American orchestras were prevailed upon to add their skills to MMO recordings.^[1]

Today, MMO offers close to nine hundred albums, devoted to classical, chamber music, opera, lieder, popular, jazz and religious music from all times and periods, from the Baroque, through the Classical and Romantic periods in music.^[1]

More information[]

• In 2016, the CEO of the Hal Leonard Corporation, Keith Mardak, closed a deal with Irv Kratka to buy Music Minus One.^[2]
• Editions currently are examples of musical scholarship, featuring music printed on acid-free papers designed to outlast the lives of its owners.
• A release features an eleven-CD set of the complete (10) Beethoven violin sonatas.
• Testifying to the company's approach to repertoire, the same period in 2008 saw the release of a Bix Beiderbecke play-along by trumpeter Peter Ecklund and a set devoted to the Count Basie band intended for beginning and intermediate brass players.

References[]

External links[]

• UK Distributors of Music Minus One
• NAMM Oral History Interview Irv Kratka reflects on the development of Music Minus One and the musicians on the recordings, September 13, 2005
• New York Times "Records: Play Along" Sept 13, 1953 review of MMO Trout Quintet recording.