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| Freddy Bienstock |
Freddy Bienstock, founder of independent music publishing company Carlin, died in New York yesterday (September 20) at the age of 86.
Carlin America is among the world's preeminent independent music publishing corporations. Representing the history of American Popular Music at its finest and most commercial, the Carlin catalog includes over a hundred thousand titles that number such song classics as "Body and Soul," "Chantilly Lace," "Dedicated To the One I Love," "Fever," "Happy Together," "I Got You (I Feel Good)," "Malagueña," "Manhattan," "The Twist," "Under the Boardwalk" and "What A Wonderful World," in addition to the musical scores of Cabaret, Company and Follies.
Freddy Bienstock was born in Austria and emigrated to the United States just before the onset of World War II. He began his music business career in the stock room of Chappell & Company, then and now a major music publisher. Within a few years, after having risen to the post of song plugger for Chappell, Bienstock joined Hill and Range Songs, a publishing firm established by his cousins, Julian and Jean Aberbach, which eventually published a number of songs recorded by Elvis Presley, among others.
In 1966, Bienstock acquired Belinda Music, Hill and Range's English affiliate, renaming it Carlin Music Corporation. In 1969, Bienstock left Hill and Range and formed a joint U.S. venture with songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller called The Hudson Bay Music Company. Hudson Bay's first acquisition was the purchase of the music publishing division of Commonwealth United (which included Bobby Darin's TM Music and Koppelman and Rubin Music). In 1971, the joint venture bought Lin Broadcasting's publishing and record division. This acquisition included Starday Records, an extremely successful Nashville-based company; King Records, the legendary blues entity established by the late Syd Nathan in Cincinnati; and a number of companies that published, among other songs, the bulk of the songs released by the Starday and King record companies. Concurrently, Bienstock was expanding Carlin Music's business in England, and acquired the publishing of such important artists as Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Kinks and the Animals. In addition, in this period, Carlin was the UK subpublisher of the Jobete Music catalog, which contained all the classic Motown hits.
Bienstock's U.S. acquisitions continued with the 1977 purchase by the joint venture of the music publishing wing of the New York Times. These companies, Herald Square Music and Times Square Music, published a number of important Broadway shows, including Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Company, Follies and Godspell, as well as important works by such songwriters as Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager.
In 1980, Bienstock's joint venture with Leiber and Stoller terminated. In 1981, in association with the Oscar Hammerstein II estate, he took over another fabled company: E.B. Marks Music, publisher of such songs as "God Bless the Child," "Malagueña," and many of the works of Jim Steinman. Several years later, in 1984, Bienstock became the single largest stockholder and CEO of Chappell & Company, the publisher in whose stock room his career had begun many years before.
When Chappell was eventually acquired by Warner Communications, Bienstock departed but continued as chairman of his own firms that had never become a part of the Chappell arrangement. Bienstock later entered the background music library business in the UK with the formation of the Carlin Recorded Music Library. In 1995, all of Freddy Bienstock's U.S. companies relocated to new offices in their own building on East 38th Street in Manhattan and were reorganized under the umbrella name Carlin America, Inc.
Freddy Bienstock served as an ASCAP Publisher Board Member from 1995 to 2008.
