In 2010, pianist and composer Jonathan Hannau made a necessary detour on a trip to visit his grandmother in Chicago. He’d heard there was a sheet music store at the Fine Arts Building downtown — a rarity — and he resolved to check it out. That shop, Performers Music, proved just as anachronistic as the hand-cranked elevators that had delivered Hannau to the ninth-floor storefront.  Yellowed, handwritten bin labels. A credit card machine from the 1980s. Carbon copy receipts with the originals tucked away in a file cabinet — not a computer. It was all the doing of the shop’s proprietor, Lee Newcomer. Tall, striking, and with a sleek mane of silver hair, Newcomer has been synonymous with Performers Music since it opened in 1981. Most music stores no doubt sell some sheet music, but Performers is, as of this writing, quite likely the only surviving independent brick-and-mortar sheet music store in a major American city. “A lot of sheet music stores these days are university-owned, if anything, rather than a little mom-and-pop store,” says Hannau, who later worked for Newcomer from 2015 to 2017. “Performers Music is the only store that I have known that can locate something very hyper-specific for you.” Until his death in late August at 81, Newcomer ran Performers much the same way he did when the store first opened. The main things that changed, if anything, were his picture walls of famous customers: soloists, conductors, Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera musicians current and former. Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is known to pop in on swings through town. And, yes, Newcomer eventually did get a store computer. Begrudgingly. “Even when Lee got a cellphone during the pandemic, that was a major, major change,” says Kurt Sepmeier, a Performers employee from 2009 to 2019. “Before that, it was a fax machine.” According to Dennis Connor, a cousin, Newcomer failed to appear at work over the weekend of Aug. 17. Chicago police conducted a search of his apartment in Lake View on Aug. 19 and found him deceased, apparently due to natural causes. Performers Music announced Newcomer’s death in social media posts on Aug. 21. Hilary Ortiz, who succeeded Newcomer as store manager, says he was still coming into the shop “five or six days a week” at the time of his death. “He was looking for the staff to take on the daily tasks more and more, although he still wanted to be at the store as much as he could,” she says. Lee Robert Newcomer was born on May 21, 1943, in Cleveland, Ohio, to Helena (née Lieske) and Galen Newcomer, a pharmaceutical salesman. Newcomer graduated with an English degree from Wittenberg University, a Lutheran liberal arts college in Springfield, Ohio, in 1965. In a 2021 interview with the Recorder Reporter, a newsletter of the American Recorder Society, Newcomer said he spent his post-college months hitchhiking, “on a whim.” One of his drivers hoped to catch a rodeo in Salt Lake City. Newcomer agreed to share the driving. “In 1965, you could be a little footloose,” he told the Recorder Reporter. Newcomer ended up living there until 1970, earning a doctorate at the University of Utah and writing his dissertation on classical mythology in the American Renaissance. He ended up on the tenure track of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s English department, where he taught a class on health science writing. His father’s death in 1978 caused him to reevaluate. Newcomer had played violin since he was nine years old; while studying at Wittenberg, he played German Baroque music in church ensembles. Instead of settling into a cushy academic appointment, Newcomer used proceeds from the sale of his family’s home to open a music store in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building. He was won over by the building’s camaraderie — “personal for an office building” — and marveled at its legendary elevator operators. “No one said what floor they were going (to). They just knew,” Newcomer told the Tribune last year. Performers Music on the ninth floor of the Fine Arts Building in 2023. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune) When Performers Music opened on Valentine’s Day in 1981, the shop was even nicher than it is today. At the time, publisher Carl Fischer had a location in the Loop; instrument maker Lyon & Healy, in a pivot to their harp manufacturing arm, had just closed its downtown storefront. Newcomer intended to distinguish his venture by selling exclusively recorders and recorder music — a love letter to the repertoire for which he developed a special fondness in college. He learned soon enough that recorder music by Dietrich Buxtehude and Heinrich Schütz was a tough sell for most customers, most of whom were looking for repertoire on the way back from piano or violin lessons in the Fine Arts Building. “That’s what I was imagining — that you could have a shop devoted to early music,” Newcomer told the Recorder Reporter. “That turned out not to be the case.” Newcomer’s own musical tastes were eclectic. He loved everything from 15th century Tyrolean minstrel Oswald von Wolkenstein to Cream. After his death, employees were surprised to discover a trove of Elvis memorabilia among his personal effects. Like his store, Newcomer seemed to be of another time. He dressed casually but sharply, never leaving the house without his cane and flat cap. His past as a literary scholar also occasionally resurfaced; he sometimes printed off and shared favorite poems by Robert Frost and Percy Bysshe Shelley for employees. After Newcomer’s death, Sepmeier visited the store in hopes of recovering some of Newcomer’s notebooks and personal library, only to find he’d jotted all over them in Greek. “Another reason Lee liked the Fine Arts Building was for its (literary) history,” Sepmeier says, citing Poetry magazine’s early presence in the building. “He liked collecting that kind of history.” The offerings at Performers Music reflected Newcomer’s erudition and generous ear.  Miniature scores, jazz technique books, art song anthologies — Performers carried it all, plus the odd accessory or two. Sometimes, Newcomer and Sepmeier would steal away to read recently arrived duets together in the store’s practice rooms. By then, Newcomer had mostly set violin aside in favor of the mellower and more collegial viola. “He was an accomplished musician. He had a good tone. He could read all clefs and keys; he had no trouble transposing. He just wasn’t a professional — and he wasn’t striving to be, anyway,” Sepmeier says. At the Fine Arts Building, an artist’s commune in the highrise time forgot Whatever the shop’s array, it always proudly championed Chicago-based composers and performers. Violinist Rachel Barton Pine — among the faces on the store’s photo wall — remembers unearthing David Baker’s “Blues (Deliver My Soul)” in the store’s stacks as a teenager.  It was one of her earliest experiences learning a piece by an African American composer. She now credits the experience, and Newcomer, with planting the seeds for her project anthologizing music by Black composers. Newcomer supported the series from its inception and dutifully kept copies in stock. “His recommendations — his wonderful curation in what he stocked — were so much more intelligent than anything an algorithm could ever do,” Barton Pine says. Indeed, Newcomer’s knowledge of the sheet music industry was encyclopedic.  When asked, he could — and would — sound off on preferred editions of repertoire works, or tunnel down rabbit holes to find pieces fitting customers’ specifications. One customer, a cantorial musician, says Newcomer found Hebrew a cappella pieces to bring to his congregation. Another, an organist, enlisted Newcomer to help him source pieces for pipe organ and percussion, which Newcomer eagerly and efficiently tracked down. “He remembered people’s names and what instrument they played. If we got new publications in, he would think of people that might be interested and tell them about it,” Ortiz says. As the 21st century marches on, Performers’ viability only grows more and more precarious. The bulk of sheet music sales has moved online, Amazon-ifying that industry like all others. Meanwhile, digital resources like the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) make scores in the public domain available for free, leading many to print off music they would have otherwise ordered in bound editions. The only way Newcomer kept Performers’ doors open for more than four decades was by pouring all his assets into the shop and living frugally. (Two former employees recalled, with some amusement, being offered bites from Newcomer’s “lunch”: raw beets and turnips.)  Nor did he have a spouse and children to support — unlike Sepmeier, who turned down an opportunity to take over the store. “Ultimately, we crunched the numbers, and my wife and I decided that maybe the store was unsustainable for what we had in mind, future-wise,” Sepmeier says. Connor — Newcomer’s cousin — says he bought Newcomer’s violin some years ago. He suspected the sale was a last-ditch effort to funnel more funds towards the shop. “When he was talking to me about being the executor of his will, he said, ‘Well, it’s going to be simple. I don’t have a car; I don’t have any investments; I don’t have any money,” Connor says. “I didn’t realize how true that was until he died.” Lee Newcomer at his childhood home in Cleveland, Ohio, in Dec. 1954. Newcomer was the owner of Performers Music in the Fine Arts Building in Chicago. (Provided by Dennis Connor)Lee Newcomer's portrait after graduating from Wittenberg University, a Lutheran liberal arts college in Springfield, Ohio, in 1965. (Provided by Dennis Connor)Lee Newcomer with his mother Helena in Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1948. Newcomer was the owner of Performers Music in the Fine Arts Building in Chicago. (Provided by Dennis Connor)Show Caption1 of 3Lee Newcomer at his childhood home in Cleveland, Ohio, in Dec. 1954. Newcomer was the owner of Performers Music in the Fine Arts Building in Chicago. (Provided by Dennis Connor)Expand Luckily, Performers has already survived one crisis. When business dried up during COVID-19, Newcomer’s employees — then and now predominantly young conservatory students — urged him to crowdsource to support the store. Newcomer was reluctant, doubtful that musicians, themselves suffering from an acute loss of income, would donate to a for-profit business. He underestimated their loyalty. The campaign raised more than $40,000. Newcomer received his first donation five minutes after publishing the GoFundMe page. “As long as the store still stands, I will always buy my music from them,” Hannau vows. Walk into Performers Music today, and you’ll notice an unusual expansion from its usual offerings: books, VCRs, CDs. A conspicuous amount of Elvis. For the time being, Performers has added some of Newcomer’s personal effects to its shelves. No doubt Newcomer would have approved, his scrappy, single-minded commitment to keeping Performers alive continuing beyond the grave. “I am hoping that the store will survive me,” Newcomer told the Recorder Reporter. “An employee once asked me why I keep up. The store is a living thing.” Newcomer is survived by nine first cousins, including Dennis’s father, John Connor of Rolling Meadows, Ill; Elizabeth George of Willoughby, Ohio; Charles Lieske of Mentor, Ohio; Donald and William Lieske of Painesville, Ohio; Robert Lieske of Greensboro, North Carolina; Jack Lieske and Marilyn Carter of Hudson, Ohio; and Virginia Pinardo of Toledo, Ohio. A GoFundMe is accepting contributions to help cover funeral costs, with a service date to be announced. Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.