Early last year Bath lost its sheet music shop. Now it is about to regain one, as Music Dynamics are expanding from their base in Stroud and about to open a shop in Broad St. It’s a shame it wasn’t open for the Mozartfest, but it clearly won’t be long before it’s ready for business.
The website claims they have ‘One of Europe’s largest collection of vocal scores and choral performance CDs’. I hope that they will have someone on their staff who is knowledgeable about church music. I once tried to buy a setting of the Evening Canticles in this shop’s predecessor, only to be served by someone who didn’t know what the term meant and refused to find someone who did, saying ‘It’s a bit specialised’! Never mind ‘the customer is always right’, isn’t a music shop where you’d expect people to know about musical specialisms? And some churches do have significant music budgets!
A display area for forthcoming local events and groups would also be welcome. Bath Compact Discs now has one (it stopped doing so before it moved, because the posters fell down and set off the burglar alarm), but it’s not very large.
I will certainly be through the doors soon after it opens with a checklist of things to test it against.
[I have now been in. There is a small noticeboard you can attach flyers to. But the only choral scores I saw were a few Carols for Choirs. Overall their stock is rather similar to MusicRoom in Bristol, though their shop is not as large as Music Room.]