June Emerson's mail order music company celebrates 40 years

June Emerson and June Emerson Wind Music
are featured in the Gazette & Herald newspaper

June Emerson Wind Music in the Gazette & Herald, Wednesday 9^th November

Below is an excerpt from the article on the Gazette & Herald Website:

NATALYA WILSON speaks to a Ryedale artist and musician whose global mail order company, which started as a small concern in her front room, is celebrating 40 years of success.

June Emerson, foreground, and team at the office near Ampleforth, from left, Barbara Jones, Stewart Thorp, Sarah Ware, Jeremy Durant, Rachel Emerson, John Toll and Graham Jeff.

CHILDREN wielding strange-shaped cases containing weird and wonderful instruments at the school gates is hardly an unusual sight, as primary and secondary pupils alike are encouraged to learn an instrument and join their school’s band or orchestra.

Yet rewind several decades and this would have been a much more unusual sight, as peripatetic music teachers weren’t such an available resource in schools and the sheet music that they taught was even scarcer.

This was just the opportunity entrepreneur June Emerson needed when she decided to set up her music publishing and distribution business 40 years ago.

June, herself a bassoonist and teacher, saw this gap in the market and leapt on it, setting up June Emerson Wind Music in 1971.

June Emerson with her bassoon outside her mail order office near Ampleforth

“This was just at the time when teaching of wind instruments in schools was beginning to take off in the UK,” says June.

“Many of my friends, who were also teachers, were finding it difficult to get music for their pupils and that’s what made me start up the business.”

June decided to start this mail order music business specifically for wind players and, with a starting capital of just £11.23 and a great deal of enthusiasm, having developed a love of handling printed music when librarian of the Edinburgh Rehearsal Orchestra (now The Rehearsal Orchestra), she blew away any doubts and entered into it with a sense of adventure that she has applied to other areas of her life ever since.

Starting with music for teaching and branching out into music for professional players, the range grew and now June estimates that she has approximately 40,000 different titles on the shelves of her business, based at Windmill Farm, near Ampleforth.

“I don’t know of any other businesses that do what we do – it’s very specific,” says June, pointing out that they sell printed music for brass, woodwind and ‘those that lie somewhere in between’, such as the harmonica.

As such they order their music from more than 1,000 different publishers worldwide and often send out as many as 100 to 200 orders a day all over the world.

June found out early on that they not only needed to buy in music, but that there was a need to self-publish, especially music suitable to be taught to children in schools.

“We approached some composers to write good but simple music that was worthwhile and possible to play, and that’s how the publishing arm started,” says June. “Now, many exam boards feature our music on their syllabus.”

They have since published 600 different pieces.

June’s business supplies music to individuals and orchestras worldwide, teachers and schools, and has some famous and eminent customers, too.

“Perhaps the Sultan of Oman is the most famous of our customers – he has not only a library of music but also his own orchestra, and we always receive his orders on special headed paper – it’s lovely,” she says.

Other well-known clients include flautist James Galway, the British Library and the BBC, but, at the other extreme, June and her team also number many amateur musicians as some of their most treasured clientele.

“We often get puzzled mothers ring up saying that their child has come home carrying a black case but it needs a book to make it work, so our skilled team, some of whom are players themselves, can talk them through what they need and want,” she says.

June says that many customers have become friends, adding that the company does not have to advertise, relying instead on word of mouth to spread the ‘music’.

Although June stepped down from being so active in the company six or seven years ago, it is still in the hands of the Emerson family, with daughter Rachel being a partner and running the business.

June with her daughter Rachel

June also says that many of the staff are like family, with some having been there for 25 and 30 years.

“It’s a good mixture of musicians and nonmusicians, with a wide range of skills and abilities,” says June. “It’s a very relaxed and happy place.”

June says the success of her business is that they have always stuck to what they are good at, and can do things well in depth, which she believes is more valuable to their customers.

Since passing the business to Rachel, June, who, at 74, doesn’t believe in retirement, has been busy with many other projects. She has taken up painting again and is currently showing her work in a solo exhibition, Oh Wake Up You Flying Bird, at Helmsley Arts Centre – her third there – and is heavily involved in Kirkbymoorside Environment Group.

June with one of her paintings, in the exhibition at Helmsley Art Gallery

“Running the business was so precise. You had to get everything so right the whole time, so my painting means that I can just break loose and turn the brain off – it’s lovely,” she says. “I go into the studio without any idea and come out at the end of it having done something which is as much of a surprise to me as anything else – it’s a complete contrast and exciting and cathartic and I love it.”

Oh Wake Up You Flying Bird runs until November 25. Join June for Sunday Views on Sunday, 1pm-3pm, and on Sunday, November 20, 11am-3pm

Obituary: Richard Adeney

Obituary Written by June Emerson and Featured in the Guardian Newspaper

Principal flute with the LPO who played with easy vitality

Richard Adeney, image: guardian.co.uk

The easy vitality of the flautist Richard Adeney, who has died aged 90, made him a very popular soloist and recitalist. He appeared with several of the chamber orchestras that began to flourish after the second world war, and was a leading light of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) for two separate periods. The first of these started in 1941: the following year he became principal flute, and he stayed until 1950. Then came freelancing with the London Mozart Players, the Goldsbrough Ensemble (later the English Chamber Orchestra), the Boyd Neel Orchestra and the New London Orchestra. As a chamber musician, Adeney was a founder member of the Melos Ensemble.

The Royal College of Music (RCM) offered him a professorship, but after one afternoon of teaching he decided that it was not for him. His lifelong friend Malcolm Arnold – they met at the RCM, and were colleagues in the LPO, where Arnold was principal trumpet – wrote his Sonatina for him, as well as two concertos, which Adeney recorded with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta in 1972. Adeney was also involved in the first performances of a number of Arnold chamber works, starting with a Grand Fantasia for flute, trumpet and piano in 1938, and including, five years later, the Three Shanties for Wind Quintet.

After a decade of freelancing, Adeney found that he missed the discipline of orchestral playing. In 1961 he returned to the LPO as first flute, and remained there for nine years. This second period was less rigorous than the first, and he was able to take time off to travel and develop his considerable skill as a photographer. He played in the Aldeburgh festival for many years, taking part in Benjamin Britten's Church Parables, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Death in Venice, as well as Britten's television opera Owen Wingrave.

In 1970, due to the constant high level of sound in the orchestra, he began to go deaf. So he left the LPO and returned to playing in "quieter music". After a year, his hearing returned to normal, but on a London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) tour to South America with Claudio Abbado in 1972, he began to lose confidence in his playing. He stopped at the age of 70.

Adeney came from an artistic background. At the time of his birth, his father, the painter Bernard Adeney, was married to the artist Thérèse Lessore; she later married Walter Sickert. His mother, Noël (nee Gilford), was also a talented artist, and their circle of friends included Henry Moore and many of the Bloomsbury group.

His love affair with the flute began at Bryanston school in Dorset when he was 14. He happened to hear a recording of the French flautist Marcel Moyse playing a Mozart concerto. It made him cry uncontrollably, completely unaware of his fellow students. On a later visit to an Essex music camp with his parents, he heard the sound of an orchestra for the first time, and it had the same effect on him.

In his own words, he "managed to avoid being educated" at Bryanston. A battered old flute was found for him at the school and he had lessons with a local bandmaster. From the moment he held the flute in his hands he lived from one orchestral rehearsal to the next. The flute also provided an emotional outlet for his feelings of anxiety, and sometimes misery, about his homosexuality.

At the age of 15, he had some lessons with John Francis, who found him a Rudall Carte wooden flute. He had further lessons with Frank Butterworth, who played in the French style, using vibrato on a silver flute. Adeney gained entry to the RCM at the age of 17, studied with Robert Murchie, first flute with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and managed to avoid everything in the curriculum except flute-playing.

After a year he was advised by his teacher and the director of the RCM to try another profession. Supported by his parents, he went to Gordon Walker of the LSO for a second opinion, and was recommended to continue his studies. His first professional engagement, aged 18, was to play in Bach's St Matthew Passion for Ralph Vaughan Williams in Dorking, Surrey, an overwhelming experience. He made many lifelong friends at the RCM – as well as Arnold, the pianist Maria Donska and the viola player Cecil Aronowitz – and from them he caught a new self-confidence and optimism. A conscientious objector, he did not enlist in the armed forces during the second world war. Instead he joined the Wessex Philharmonic under the young conductor Reginald Goodall, and survived on minimal wages in Bournemouth. Then Arnold got him a trial week with the LPO.

Once he stopped playing in orchestras, other interests and friendships took over. Conscious of his good fortune, Adeney had joined the Samaritans in 1965, and served with them for the next 25 years.

When young he had listed three important ambitions: to be the best flute player in the world, to have as much sex as possible and to understand the meaning of life. Although he admitted to having fully achieved only one of these three, he enjoyed a happy and fulfilling existence. He is survived by a nephew.

• Richard Gilford Adeney, flautist, born 25 January 1920; died 16 December 2010

Image and text excertped from the Guardian online.