Music Minus One
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. 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. In the following years, the company continued to release chamber music and jazz rhythm recordings utilizing New York. Stan Getz, Hank Jones, George Barnes, Max Roach, Julius Baker, Elaine Douvas, Armando Ghitalla, Stanley Drucker, Christian Reichert have contributed to MMO recordings. 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. Sale to Hal Leonard In 2016, the