Orphaned Scores

I've recently been involved with trying to bring back into print some scores for interesting — and, to my ears, significant — music that have gone out of print due to publishers' neglect or demise. (And often a mixture of the two, as the waves of mergers in music publishing have often meant that the multinational behemoths that are the new owners have literally no idea what is in their catalogs, especially in the tiny business niche that is sheet music for new and experimental concert music, and when called attention to what ought to be there (as witnessed by, say, contracts with composers or rights assignments with PROs), they have no idea where to find the sheet music.)  I won't go into details now, but I've had some modest successes and there seem to be promising developments in the works. Renewable Music, indeed.

But let me take this occasion, as a publishing composer, to give my composer colleagues some simple advice: Don't enter into a sheet music publishing contract unless it is clear and explicit what will happen if the publisher fails to keep a work in print, whether by sale or by rental, or fails to perform any promotional or rights management services stipulated in the contract, or should the firm be merged into another publisher or should the firm be shut down.  While the standard operating basis is that an assignment of publishing rights is permanent, this is not necessarily the case.  A composer and a publisher may enter into a contract with a restricted term and there is no reason why a composer should not be able to avoid having her or his work get orphaned by a publisher by requiring the publisher either perform to the terms of the contract or return the pre-publication or pre-editorial materials and all publishing rights to the composer, thus allowing the composer to publish the work directly or to reassign the rights to another publisher.  Yes, a publisher who keeps the work available and otherwise performs properly — even in the event of extreme downturns in the market for the work in question (and they will happen!) — should be assured of the continuing status of the contract (after all, each contracted work is an asset contributing to the present and future well-being of the publishing house) and, yes, when a contract is terminated the publisher's investment in editing and/or printed stock should be compensated by either the right to continuing selling for some period, or the right of the composer to purchase, that stock (a factor that may be less important in this age of publish-on-demand and electronic publishing.)

And, as a composing publisher, let me remind my publishing colleagues that this is, indeed a niche business, with very modest stakes and amortization of investment only in either the very short or the very long haul and for most music, never at all, and that in the end we keep scores and other performance materials available because of a plain selfish reason: we want to keep our musical lives lively with the music which we believe in. Nevertheless, I will cheerfully contend that if a publisher goes into this understanding upfront the modest scale and potential of the market and organizes and economizes accordingly, perhaps in some complementary combination with other repertoires or services, this can be a viable business and, if you respect the composer and the music, there is no reason why this should not be reflected in the contract through terms which guarantee that the work will be able to stay available,  should your activity on behalf of the work stop or even if your firm expires.

Leonardo Music Journal CD

Just a note: I curated the CD accompanying the current issue of the Leonardo Music Journal, with the theme "Acoustics."   To be honest, when editor Nicolas Collins corralled me into this project, I had major reservations (which shouldn't be surprising, given my personal differences with sound recording as a medium for transmitting music), but in this instance these were overcome by a wide ranging suite of strong exploratory pieces by the composers Judy Dunaway, Miguel Frasconi, Hauke Harder, Chris Molla, Kiyomitsu Odai, and Ann Warde, all of whom I thank profusely for their music.  Leonardo Music Journal's web site is here. 

Free & Open Musicology, Publishing, Recording

The "Open Goldberg Variations" project seems to have slipped under the professional music making and scholarship radar although it's quite possible that it is providing a substantial challenge to the traditional structure of producing and publishing performing editions and recordings of music in the public domain.  The project encompasses the production of a new edition, from source, using crowd editing, of Bach's "Goldberg" Variations, in Musescore notation format, which produces a payback-able score with audio as well as independent notation and midi files and, for this particular project, a studio quality recording of the piece by pianist Kimiko Ishizaka, all of which will be placed in the public domain with Creative Commons licenses and be available for free downloading and, as open source material, unrestricted further use. The Kickstarter page is here, the page at the Musescore site with the current version of the edition is here.

The challenge that a project like this poses to traditional score and recording publication is clear, but the challenge to musicology should also be recognized.  Although the "golden age" of the production of critical editions as a central activity for musicologists is a bit behind us, when professional musicologists are involved with editing, the old conventions of editorial territoriality and priority still tend to hold — finders keepers — just like on the playground and publishers entering into multi-year (and often multi-decade) commitments to put out expensive complete editions expect, correctly, to have some return on their investment, so they expect the exclusivity afforded by a copyright on the edition.  But opening up the entire process, as online publishing and cooperation makes possible, has the potential to change everything.  Volunteer labor has already produced a mass of performance materials available free and immediately, if not in the beautiful paper editions the traditional publishers did so well. But the quality of production outside of the traditional publishing system has improved spectacularly. And, in extreme cases, as when a significant manuscript (or, as the case might well be, an insignificant manuscript by a major composer) is first located, traditionally, the finder had the right of first edition and could usually keep the manuscript under wraps until he or she is done and only then begins the open vetting process over authority, provenance, and quality. That exclusivity, I believe, is no longer sustainable. Imagine what the process would be like if a newly-discovered manuscript image was made available to crowd scrutiny immediately upon  discovery!

This Goldberg project happens to have been funded (and actually funded well in excess of what the organizers had sought) and it remains to be seen what kinds of projects will happen in the future without such a foundation. (Personally, as nice as it is, I don't think that the sponsored audio recording is also necessary. One also wonders if the public funders, which have, in the past, supported the research that effectively subsidizes many private publications of scholarly editions, will adjust to the cost-effective sourcing of this work and actually support open-source projects as well or even instead. The open aspect here, I think is key, for it has a more natural fit to the public aspect of scholarly publication.  The serious move, chiefly among scientists, engineers and mathematicians, to boycott some private journals in favor of free and open alternatives, as those journals profit from the material and in-kind contributions of academics paid by the public hand and then turn around and sell their journals at high prices to academic libraries addresses very closely related concerns..

Publication today.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson has a couple (here and here) of good items on the state of new music publishing with some lively comment threads.

Traditionally, music publishers had effective monopolies over music engraving and printing as well as distribution to local music shops. They had more-or-less efficient systems for dealing with rental catalogs and they had promotional capacity, both through schmoozing with prospective musicians and managers and through direct advertising for sheet music. Having made investments in their sheet music that could only amortize over long periods, they kept close control over their catalogs and inventory and they were often staffed with musically knowledgeable employees who could watch for errata and make sure that the materials sent out were the ones required to make a piece work. Moreover, getting published by a name house carried a professional caché, with which the road to tenure, for example, could be paved, and without which, one could be considered professionally deprecated.

None of this is true any more. Engraving and printing, although getting them done right remains an art, are no longer tightly-held secrets of the "industry". Every composer can, in principle, engrave and print her or his own work to a high level of quality. The local music shop with a large inventory of sheet music has basically gone the way of the dodo and was never that good, anyways, in ordering anything even slightly obscure. Publishers, always reluctant and sometimes even loathe to dealing directly with the end consumer of sheet music, have, for the most part, not warmed or gotten more efficient at the job and, again with a few exceptions, though they tend to be staffed with highly educated and truly music-loving musicians, they have downsized to the point where they only rarely can deal with errata or that second violin part with the impossible page turns. Advertising budgets do remain for a few houses, but it tends to be reinforcing the dwindling existing markets (i.e. to the handful of specialist journals and in festival programs) rather than reaching any significant mass (i.e. in the days when a Schirmer ad could be found in the Christian Science Monitor, right next to Nicolas Slonimsky's column on the kid's page.) Finally, the prestige of big name sheet music publication has diminished even in the most ivy-covered of tenure cases.

Instead, composers can pretty much go it alone (the great models here are Tom Johnson and Karlheinz Stockhausen) or in cooperation with colleagues (like Frog Peak or Material Press or Wandelweiser), with their own web sites serving as catalogs and ordering platforms for score delivery by post or email. The most immediate advantages for the composer are that he or she gets to keep all the license fees (instead of ceding the usual 50% to the publisher), has control over the quality of the materials produced, and has oversight over score sales and to some extent performances, recordings, and broadcasts. Scores in your own catalog will not get neglected or orphaned as they might in a publishing house that loses interest or get merged with or acquired by larger concerns. On the other hand, investment in score production and part extraction is all your own, you are on your own for promotion and you have to be available to answer inquiries and to send your materials out at any time (and yes, many score orders will come your way Sunday morning at 4:00 am, with a request that it be sent ASAP and preferably earlier than that.) The disadvantages also include not being able to use sales and license fees from the back catalog to subsidize new catalog items as well as having to organize promotional contacts and networks from scratch.

Clearly, each composer has to work out the balance of advantages and disadvantages between going with a traditional publisher and going it alone for herself or himself. Personally, the greater advantage for me is not to got to a traditional publisher, but if my catalog had more choral and school band or orchestra music, the distribution logistics for handling the volume might throw the balance in the other direction. (That said, it appears that a number of composers are now able to use direct sales of school ensemble music to earn a fair income, so if you can deal with a large volume, go for it.) In any case, if you do decide to go with a traditional publisher, it seems wise to insist on these terms as a minimum: (1) the composer should not have to pay in any cash up front for publication, especially when print-ready scores or parts are delivered by the composer, (b) the amount and form of promotion to be made by the publisher should be defined in detail in the contract and may be reflected in the publisher's share of license fees or sheet music sales/rentals, and (c) should promotion not be carried out by the terms of the contract or should the materials be orphaned by the publisher, all publication rights should revert to the composer.

Rescuing Orphans

A must-read article by Severo Ornstein, son and devoted editor of the composer Leo Ornstein, has some particularly clear illustrations of the how disfunctional traditional music publishing can get. In Ornstein's case, former-global-media-behemoth-now-fragile-subsidiary-of-Citigroup EMI apparently earns license fees for works it has never actually published, and EMI's refusal to communicate and the understood threat of unmatchable legal power keep them from even entering into a dialogue to do what is most reasonable for the music itself. And of course, Ornstein's rights organization, BMI, lacks the human resources to support the Ornstein family in sorting their side of this out. Any reasonable person will recognize that Ornstein's catalog is never going to earn meaning royalties for EMI, but the huge size of their catalog and their massively downsized staff probably make it impossible for EMI to afford the labor required to look into the matter. What is required for cases like this is some legislation freeing up works effectively orphaned by negligent publishers, either returning full rights to the works in cases where there are heirs willing to assert their rights and promote the work as Severo Ornstein has so admirably done in his father's behalf, or automatically releasing orphaned and unclaimed works irrevocably into the public domain. But I suspect that any hopes for such a reasonable treatment of creative work are hopelessly optimistic.

[Let me also note that my small publishing project, Material Press, has recently begun, with pieces by Jerry Hunt and Barney Childs, to publish orphaned landmarks of the avant garde. Any other suggestions for this project are more than welcome.]

To publish or not to publish (1)

Colin Holter has a post at the New Music Box noting Terry Riley's decision to now publish his scores through G. Schirmer. From what I understand, this decision comes out of Riley's preference, at this point in career and life, to get away from the everyday burdens of running his own publishing operation. In the far past, Riley made some of his scores rather widely available — with the original LP of In C including the score and Olson III available in a well-known anthology — but in general he held onto the music he performed himself or reserved for other musicians with whom he had a close, personal working arrangement and only in recent years committed the bulk of his notated works to his own publishing enterprise.

The decision for a composer not to be published for so many years by a conventional publisher has both practical and artistic grounds. Practically, the composer keeps all of his or her publishing and license fees (as opposed to forking over half to a publisher) and maintains a better overview of performances and subsequent fee collections, including exclusive performance rights (which are not unimportant when a composer makes a large part of his or her income from performing his or her own work; the whole issue of "cover" recordings is included here as is the question of a work's market saturation.) Artistically, it allows the composer considerably liberty to continue to define the contents, character, and performance practice of the work that a fixed and sold score might well discourage.

(At the end of Holter's post, he asks specifically about the works of La Monte Young. Having worked with Young in a publishing capacity before my time in Budapest, I can say a couple of things. The first is that although Young's control over access to his score may have frustrated many, Young has given a lot of thought about the matter and has had some very concrete experiences — many of them appallingly disrespectful towards both him and the work itself — with all aspects of the question and come to quite rational decisions about the optimal dissemination of the performance materials, based on a realistic assessment of the market for his work, his need to make an income for himself from his work, and his desire to maintain artistic control over work for which he has unique expectations — no shared programming, performance in specific physical environment, minimum durations and rehearsal periods, his own (or selected colleagues') participation in rehearsal, etc. — and which he clearly understands as very much still in-progress as both compositions and performance practices. Rest assured that Young has long-term plans for all of his works.)

Getting Paid: Still Looking for a Model that Works

If big-time, commercial music can't make a commercial success out of selling recordings, what expectations can we have for music from a commercially negligible genre?  

It's no news that there is no really good model for paying for new and experimental music.  To some extent, new "classical" or "serious" music has either sought to find advantage in low-verhead niche production or been able to parlay its prestige into a modest bit of piggybacking on the success of more commercially successful  musics in rights organizations like GEMA, but the former stream, that fabled "long tail", seems not to have played out as hoped and the latter has seriously declined in the face of stagnant or declining mainstream music revenues.  I've written recently about the inherent difficulties with reproducible media as a commodified form of music, (see also this item) and here are a couple of recent items from musicians representing more popular which reinforce this viewpoint.  

Here's rock star Prince, in the Mirror: 

He explains that he decided the album will be released in CD format only in the Mirror. There'll be no downloads anywhere in the world because of his ongoing battles against internet abuses.

Unlike most other rock stars, he has banned YouTube and iTunes from using any of his music and has even closed down his own official website.

He says: "The internet's completely over. I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it.

"The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.

"They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you."

Also read this blog item by musical composer Jason Robert Brown, confronting a teenager who wants to download copies of his sheet music for free from a "sharing" site. 

We really, urgently, need to find a better model. I often wonder what such a model would look like if we were were able to start from scratch, without the cumbersome institutions (including rights organizations, management, and production firms)  and legal framework (copyright laws, in particular) that have, like Topsy, just grewed.

More free scores

TauKay Edizioni Musicali has a large number of free-to-download scores online, yet another example of the way the winds are blowing for sheet music.   While there will likely remain a role for sheet music printed on paper and physically delivered to musicians and libraries — and a particular niche for elegant editions — the time and cost efficiencies of direct downloads are increasingly hard to ignore.  Sheet music, on its own, for new and experimental music, is not an especially profitable business, the larger profit is in commissions and licensing for performances, broadcasts, and recordings; sheet music is an instrument in realizing performances, broadcasts, and recordings.  If traditional sheet music publishing is either slow or expensive, it runs the risk of leading to fewer rather than more performances, which makes publishing more of an obstacle than an assist to the music.

Sheet music in the form of scores and parts for choral groups, bands, and orchestras which becomes widely used (especially by educational institutions) can be profitable as a sale or rental operation.  The individual composer must decide whether he or she can handle such operations on their own, the profit expected covering his or her costs in time and materials, or be willing to share  license fees in return for allowing a traditional publisher to carry and promote their work, or to go the download route instead.  At present, I can well imagine many composers using a tactical mix of publication methods, with solo and chamber works largely issued online and ensemble works intended for institutional use promoted via online perusal/study scores but available as rental or purchase sets of scores and parts.

One reminder to performers:  if you download a work and perform it, identify the piece accurately on your program and also let the composer know about the performance directly.  In many cases, institutions pay blanket fees for to licensing organizations, so the particular performance will not cost you anything more and the main obstacle to the composer from eventually getting her or his fee is a lack of reporting.   Reporting is the least that you can do when the composer has provided the performance materials for free.

 

   

Setting the Price

A bleg:  In my sideline as music publisher, we're having some serious discussions about the price of sheet music.  We're not exactly operating in a perfectly balanced supply and demand environment, and there are real costs in materials and time in handling individually printed and shipped orders of sheet music (often with some unusual formating issues), so the calculation is far from easy.  For my own music, and the music of some others at Material Press, I'm usually happy to give away electronic copies of scores (knowing that, if all is reported correctly, I'll earn money from performance licenses), but sell paper scores to libraries or others who don't like to roll their own.  But setting the price for those paper copies is tricky, particularly (a) when a single piece has a relatively modest — by page count — size, or (b) when text or graphic scores are involved, or (c) the score is published on demand.   Peters gets 5.95US$ for a copy of 4'33", perhaps two photocopied pages in a folder.  Peer Southern sells Thomson's Piano Sonata No. 3 — 6 pages of engraved music in a folder — for five bucks.     Anthologies of smaller works by either of these composers, in an engraved and staple-bound format, range from 5 to 25 dollars.  What would you be willing to pay for a single page of instructions for a piece of music?  For a piece 5, 10, or 30 pages long?  How about a cd of recorded sound required for performance of a work?

Prescribed

The power of the Texas Board of Education over the content in school textbooks is well-known.  Given the large size of the Texan schoolbook market, publishers go out of their way to modify their books in order to satisfy the criteria of the censors there, which maked the Texan standards effective in much of the rest of the country.  Periodically, this errupts into controversies over Texan Board of Ed. members cutting something out of, or getting something else stuck into, textbooks, sometimes leading to serious reductions in the quality of those books.

Now, I'm a bit shocked to learn that the University Insterscholastic League in Texas — which, although "voluntary" in membership, effectively controls athletic, academic, and musical competitions among public schools throughout the state — maintains a list of "Prescribed Music" for in-state competitions by bands, orchestras, solo vocalists and choirs.  Sheet music publishers take listing by the UIL seriously as without it, sheet music sales to schools in Texas, one of the largest markets in the US, will be limited.  

Above and beyond the issue of whether musical competition organized along the lines of sporting events is a good idea,  a list like this is really problematic.  It's one thing to provide the service to school music teachers of grading pieces according to difficulty or of assessing the physical qualities of the performance materials or even for an organization of music teachers to share recommendations, but to make a "Prescribed" list for competitions, with exceptions allowed only under strict limitations (the work must be approved in advance, can only be a single item on the program, and cannot be the first in a school's program) , is controlling students' access to information, which is nothing other than censorship.  Yes, I think it's a problem if a choir director has to apply for exceptional permission to have his choir sing the Machaut Messe, (Texas-born) Pauline Oliveros's Sound Patterns, or any Monteverdi madrigal other than the four which publishers happened to have submitted to the list.

Musical works composed for school ensembles are not likely to be libelous, obscene, incite to violence, treat currently controversial topics in education (like maybe I should write an Evolution March or a Fantasy on Intelligent Design?) , or otherwise corrupt the nation's youth. So one has to wonder what the rationale for censorship here must be.  One appears to be to keep the competition repertoire well-within the "classical" or "serious" music domain, particularly against the great pressure to perform more popular, "entertainment" repertoire.   I understand this problem and I recognize the difficulty of precisely defining the aesthetic, technical, and stylistic qualities one wants to hear, but the difficulty of making that definition is not an excuse for making a list like this, for there is really no educationally or musically valid reason to exclude (or contribute to the exclusion) of work which would meet those qualities, so one should be obliged to do the heavy lifting and try to make definitions rather than simply point at works (in the Potter Stewart manner of identifying pornography).  Otherwise, one has to suppose that the basic function of the list is the preservation of market position for those in the know about UIL, a trade secret held tightly by publishers and a handful composers more tightly connected to school music networks.  Indeed, the criteria listed in the application for the substitution of an unlisted work for band (read it here) is strongly biases towards composers and publishers with established relationships to the UIL system.

Evermore onward with publishing

Composer Taylan Susam, in a comment to an earlier item here, pointed to a new site with downloadable new music scores, Upload .. Download .. Perform.   It's in a Wiki format and does not involve a sales component, which makes it an interesting alternative to both traditional publishing and the site I mentioned before, ThatNewMusicWebsite.com.   The more alternatives, the better.

(This too: we urgently need a high quality Wiki to replace harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration textbooks.  Essentially, these books house a definition of terms and notation, a relatively small set of principles or "rules" derived from practice, and perhaps some more personal aesthetic observations; a large number of examples from real repertoire illustrating the principals and "rules";and some exercises illustrating the same.  Perfect for a Wiki, which when done well, could accomodate a variety of theoretical approaches and teaching styles, include a wider variety of examples than any single textbook out there, and do it for free, which in these times, with extreme pressures on student pocketbooks, is definitely a good thing. (See also this thread from Crooked Timber on the economics of textbooks.  Sure, the few professors in on the textbook racket may feel a pinch, but it's an acceptable pinch if it can help make college more affordable)). 

Music Publishing Moves On

ThatNewMusicWebsite.com is a new distribution site for new music scores that seems to be doing things right. The model here contrasts with the recent experiment by UE of placing a study score online and anticipating earnings via parts rentals and the traditional publisher's share of royalties.  Composers at ThatNewMusicWebsite will keep all of their royalties and get a large share of sales, but are responsible for preparing their materials themselves, an arrangement which seems a good fit to present web technology.

The earth moves. Slowly. But moves all the same.

Universal Edition (hat tip: Alex Ross),  has placed the complete score to Arvo Pärt's new Symphony No.  4  "Los Angeles" online, here.  This is an example of exactly what traditional music publishers should be doing now:  making perusal scores freely available online as study and promotional materials.  The money to be made in publishing is attached to performances, broadcasts, and recordings, through licenses and rentals of large-format bound scores, extracted parts, and other performance materials,  not to sales of study scores.   When a composer assigns work to a publisher (as opposed to doing his or her own publishing), he or she should expect that the publisher promote the work, manage the performance materials, and watch out for licenses.  In return, the composer and publisher split the license fees.  Putting the score out is an excellent form of promotion, addressed directly to musicians and organizers planning programs but, as importantly,  to the larger musical community, for whom the presence of the score is a real sign that the work exists, can be played from and studied and understood as a part of a living repertoire.  New music has too long been a repertoire of obscurities, with standard music history texts loaded with the titles of works you'll never hear (and scores you'll never see), due largely to the lousy delivery system that has been music publishing.  UE's online publication of the Pärt score should create addition interest in advance of the premier, interest that should be profitable to the composer, publisher, and performers as well as to potential critics and audiences. (For example, in local college music classes, instructors can assign both study of the score, concert attendence, and critical reading of any concert reviews.)

This is an especially welcome move following UE's missteps earlier this year with legal threats that temporarily disabled the International Music Score Library Project.  The future of music licencing is likely to be well in the middle ground between traditional publishing arrangements and the copyright-free utopia, so it's nice to learn that an old institution like UE both recognizes and is agile enough to explore this.

Material

In the early 90's, the composer Hauke Harder & I started a music publishing project which we called Material Press.   We never actually discussed precisely why Material was the right name, but I recall an instantaneous agreement on the matter, which is not untypical of my chats with Hauke.  I suppose that the immediate rationale was that we simply wanted to provide performance materials — scores, some recordings, some special equipment — for music  (by ourselves, some contemporaries, like Markus Trunk and Ann Warde and some esteemed senior figures, Lucier, Mumma, and, for a time, Young),  which we thought was important.  But, with all the benefits of hindsight, it's become increasingly clear that Material was exactly the right word, if, increasingly, because of a paradoxical effect: the moment in which musical material is articulated as a central feature is the same moment in which the ephemeral nature of musical material is most clear.  (Together now, with that nostalgic refrain: All that is solid melts into air.)

Material Press is not an unusual development in terms of composers controlling their own publishing (Tom Johnson and Stockhausen provided some models), or in terms of doing it cooperatively (the Feedback Studio was one model, and both Frog Peak Music and the Thürmchen Verlag were like-minded contemporary efforts), but we were perhaps unique in a few aspects: our composers kept all of their royalties (that is to say, we're not registered as a publisher with a rights organization), have individual control over pricing, and are free to distribute the materials in any other ways they see fit.  There are some things we could do better — the editions could be more beautiful (i.e. more suitable for library purchases), we could promote more, and we could use the web more wisely (i.e. making more scores available for download) — but, on balance, I think we do a good job on a break-even basis in supplying materials so that performances can take place.

In the new year, I'll be resuming a more active role in Material Press (Hauke took over when I moved to Budapest in 2000).  Expect topics related to publishing, especially to doing publishing better, to appear here more often. 

 

 

Once more about publishing

I recently had an email exchange with a young colleague who asked for some advice about publishers. I realize that I've gone on about this at length before, but it is an important topic, so here's what I wrote to her:

With certain exceptions (those sold in large editions -- educational scores for ensembles, piano albums for domestic use, and, more recently, music-minus-one-style packages) publishers do not make money from the sale of scores and sheet music. In fact, for contemporary art music, the sheet music is a net loss business, and many publishers have actually turned to billing their own composers for the costs of editing and producing scores and parts, leaving many composers in a net negative balance with their publishers against which further score sales and performance licenses are debited.

Publishers, with repertoire like contemporary music, make money from licenses for performances, recordings, and broadcasts and, to some extent, from the rental of score-&-part sets. As far as a contemporary composer is concerned, the function of a publisher, should a composer choose to work with a publisher and not do it on her/his own, is to promote the work and manage the performance materials, making certain that they are in good order and in the hand of performers in a timely manner. For these services, a publisher receives 1/2 of the composer's licensing fees from the responsible rights organization (ASCAP, BMI, GEMA, etc.). The primary function of score distribution today is promotion, as perusal materials to encourage performances, recordings, and broadcasts, with the sale of scores for private use, study, or archival purposes a distant secondary function. Licenses are collected from performances, recordings and broadcasts regardless of whether the performance materials are purchased, rented, stolen, or even non-existant (e.g. most cover bands don't need scores and parts). From a rational point of view, the fastest and most efficient way to get scores into the hands of prospective players and program directors is electronic and any publisher who doesn't allow such distribution is failing to promote their artists adequately, making the argument for the 50% take of licenses hardly sustainable.

The optimal relationship between a publisher and a composer is one in which a publisher recognizes an interesting composer and makes an investment in the composer's present and future work, speculating both that the composer will continue to create music of interest to players and managers and that the publisher be able to successfully place that work onto concert programs, recordings, and broadcasts, with the return on investment to come from the half-share of licenses and, perhaps, rental of parts. Arrangements in which a publisher is essentially acting as a vanity press for the composer — i.e. producing a beautiful score at the artist's expense and not further promoting the work — are to be avoided.

The advice I always give colleagues is this: don't enter into a relationship with a publisher unless (a) you are unwilling or unable to do the work yourself, (b) the contract stipulates precisely which editorial and promotional services the publisher will provide, with no costs to the artist beyond the assignment of the publisher's share of license fees, (c) the contract allows for the free distribution of perusal scores, preferably by electronic means, as a means of promotion, and (d) there is a mechanism for the artist to end the contract in case the publisher fails to provide the services agreed upon.

Finally, since you have interest in an academic as well as a compositional career, you may well come under some pressure to have your work published by a traditional music publisher. If you decide to go this route, fine, but it is also very important to help make it clear to your institution that sheet music publication is not the equivalent of peer-reviewed academic publication. The essential form of publication for a composer is in the form of performances, recordings and broadcasts and if a sheet music publishing arrangement doesn't lead to (or actually leads to fewer) performances, recordings or broadcasts, then avoid it.

Old Publishing/New Publishing

An old topic on this blog has been the obsolescence of traditional music publishing for composers of new music. I believe that there is and will continue to be a niche role for traditional publishing houses, but only when,

(A) at a minimum, the publisher offers these three services:

(1) Promotion of the composers' work.
(2) Production and editing, at the publisher's own expense (and not charged against future royalties) of adequate scores, parts, and other performance materials for perusal, sale or rental.
(3) Management of the timely and convenient distribution, rental, and or sale of those materials, including internet distribution of materials in the form of electronic documents.

and

(B) the composer:

(1) doesn't have the time, patience, or desire to do any of the above.
(2) is willing to give up half their performance and mechanical royalties in return for the services.
(3) is willing to trust a publisher to provide the above services over a sustained period of time and in a fashion appropriate to the composer's own interests.

Traditional publishing does continue to carry a certain caché -- it is indeed cool to be able to claim the same publisher as Brahms or Stravinsky, and many a young academic composer facing a tenure decision will be told that they need to get one of their works printed by such a house. But that status has little or nothing to do with the actual tasks of getting music played and heard nowadays, and the current interests of traditional publishers have moved significantly beyond traditional practice.

Take, for example, the case of Boosey & Hawkes, one of the best old firms. In a press release dated Friday, we learn that B&H has been sold by its current owner, HgCapital, to IMAGEMMUSIC,* the music publishing fund of All Pensions Group (APG) and CP Masters BV. This is real success for HgCapital, which paid 75mGBP for B&H in 2003 and now sells it for 126mGBP. Moreover, we learn that, in the past four years, B&H has been significantly restructured, "executing a transformation of the business from a traditional classical music publisher into a 21st century music rights group", and that it has "outsourced a number of non-core activities such as printing and distribution and developed a series of new revenue streams. In particular it has developed a strong presence in the market for music in advertising and film, where revenues are currently growing at approximately 30% per annum." While it is likely that some composers will benefit from this restructuring, it is far from clear that this will be the case for the majority of classical composers, whose interests will necessarily be seen as even more minor within the context of an ever-larger concern.

The alternative is of course, self-publication, as a solo effort (the Stockhausen Verlag or Tom Johnson's Editions 75 are good examples) or in some cooperative arrangement with like-minded musicians (Frogpeak Music, Thürmchen Verlag, Material Press are some examples). The advantages are control over the services provided, retention of royalties by the composer, and direct communication between performers and composers with regard to materials and performances. Electronic publication of scores is a perfect fit both for self-publication and for a musical world in which prospective players want materials now, if not sooner. In a few cases, composers have even been able to give up their day jobs, or have even had to hire help to run their publishing activities. The disadvantages are costs in terms of time and energy and, perhaps, the loss of that caché of being carried by a famous name.

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* IMAGEMMUSIC was itself formed in February 2008 when a number of music publishing assets of the Universal Music Group (UMG) were purchased by the Dutch fund ABP, the world's third largest pension fund, and CP Masters BV, an "independent" music publisher.

Free Study Scores!

I've had a long argument with an open software advocate about music. My contention has been that music is already essentially an open source medium, as the combination of a good recording and good listening skills can often make the construction of a piece of music transparent. However, as good as one's ears can get, it is still often very useful to have a look at a score, both to see how the composer has indicated his or her ideas, but also to find interpretive possibilities not taken in the performance at hand. Some of the most important learning experiences for me as a musican came about from copying out scores by hand (I did that a lot, as I was on a paper-route income and photocopying was expensive for me).

Unfortunately, getting your hands on scores in the first place is often difficult and expensive. Study scores -- small format editions -- are increasingly rare, and they are sometimes sold at shockingly high prices. So in schools or universities, we tend to get taught either from questionably legal photocopies or from the same few pieces that are widely available in study editions or packaged into anthologies (the two volumes of the Norton Anthology will set you back 71USD), or a student is sent to the dreaded reserve desk in the library in hopes that no one else has checked out the score.

It's understandable why publishers have had little interest in making study scores available. The profit in sheet music of any sort is never high unless a publication can have a large audience over a long period of time, and the chief business of a publisher is the mix of score and parts rentals to professionals and collecting the publisher's share of royalties from works under copyright.

Sometimes, however, publishers have realized that making their materials more widely available at more reasonable prices can both create income producing sheet music, and create, via the promotional opportunity, more royalty-income. The recent Peters editions of collected smaller piano works by Cage and Feldman are a good example. Whereas, in the past, getting a look at all of these scores required many small purchases, and were both troublesome to order and troublesome for Peters to produce as the pieces were largely published as on demand ozalids or photocopies, now a pianist or a music student can have a substantial repertoire of contrasting pieces all at once in a single anthology, the price of which is modest when compared with the old price for all the separate pieces. Unfortunately, not enough publishers are following the Peters example -- assembling a complete set of Webern study scores (ca 3 hours of music total) piece-by-piece would cost many hundreds of dollars, for example, and a Stravinsky set would cost thousands. Why isn't there a single volume complete Webern*, Varese, or Ruggles?

More publishers need to get wise and realize that they have a real promotion opportunity for their scores if they simply put them online. The editions don't have to be beautiful, and they can be watermarked with great big "DO NOT COPY" messages. This will not diminish their income from the pieces, as they will continue to rent hard-copies of the full-sized and bound scores and parts needed for performances, and they will continue to be paid royalties for performances and mechanicals.

Here's a concrete example: The late Robert Erickson was an excellent and inventive orchestrator. But his pieces are too little known and played infrequently. His scores would be very useful in teaching orchestration, but although they are all available through Smith Publications, the editions are extremely expensive, affordable only by the small coterie of major research libraries with score collections. If only a few of the larger scores were made available in cheap study score format or -- even better -- free and online you can bet use of his scores in teaching orchestration and perusal of his scores by concert or recording organizers would increase substantially.

Erickson is far from the only composer to whom this applies. For a real survey of recent orchestration, study scores need to be more widely available of works by Goeyvaerts, Feldman, Cage, Xenakis, Ligeti, Reich, Scelsi, Sariaaho, Lindberg, Nono, Kondo, Takemitsu, Brant, Lucier, Adams, Tenney, Barlow, and many others. As long as these scores are not available, the status of the entire new music project with the larger musical culture may be very effectively questioned if not discounted altogether. The music has to be present -- in performances, recordings, and in scores.

There is a vicious circle here: music students don't encounter scores like those of Erickson in school, and when they grow up and start making concerts of their own they don't play any Erickson, all because they simply are unaware of his works. Here is an opportunity for publishers -- as well as for those composers who have chosen not to work through third-party publishers -- to get out of this vicious circle, to establish the works as fixed presences in the musical culture, and to promote the works at a modest cost, while offering potentially substantial benefits in terms of the real income that a piece can generate.

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* An elegant, hardbound, but pocketbook-sized volume of Webern works was actually published in the last days of the Soviet Union. This was a "pirated" edition, of course, but why the heck didn't Universal get the idea and start publishing the thing itself?

Handmade

Computer notation programs are now so obiquitous, that it's easy to forget how the work was done before we had these machines. Courtesy of Henle Editions, the most traditional of the traditional German music publishers, is a must-see video (WMV format) featuring one of the last virtuoso Notenstecher (music engraver) at work, scratching and hammering a metal plate in preparation for printing. Virtuosity here means eight hours work for a single page of music. This video, which I heard about via the Finale Users's list, is something I'd show to everyone studying music, if only to restore a little wonder about something we tend to take for granted.

The Future of Sheet Music Publishing

As a student, I received a lot of advice about publishing sheet music. Funny thing was, none of those teachers giving me advice, all of it traditional (i.e. write your scores on ozalids, use sizes of paper other than letter or legal, do not photocopy, write a good cover letter), were conventionally published themselves. Already by the early 1980's, things had clearly changed in the music publishing world*, and no one on the composers' side of things seemed to be talking about it directly. The historical importance of publishing was clear -- publishers had helped composers secure their rights and the income from those rights, they produced useable (and sometimes beautiful) editions of the music, they dealt with all the details of getting materials here and there and back again, and, not least, they promoted the works in their catalogs. But are publishers still providing these services? And if so, are traditional publishers now the optimal providers of these services?

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First some anecdotes:

About ten years ago, I joined a composer friend (whom we'll call C.)for a few hours at the Musik Messe (Music Trade Fair) in Frankfurt. C. publishes his own music, and he had hired space at the Fair to promote his scores to presenters and retailers. At that time, C's evening-length comic opera, in German, was in the middle of extremely successful parallel runs at a number of opera houses throughout Germany. I watched that afternoon, in astonishment, as one big music publisher's rep. after another sauntered over to the table and offered to "publish" his opera. What exactly were they offering? They weren't offering to typset the score, as the existing score had proved sufficient for performing. They weren't really offering to promote the piece, which, as one representative put it, was both a guaranteed audience draw and so easily presented on a limited budget that it "really sold itself". What they were offering to do was manage the rentals of the materials (all of which C. had prepared by her/himself), in return for half the royalties.

More recently, another composer friend ("D.") took a moment to show me a recent statement from her/his publisher. The balance of the statement was a negative number; it turns out that the publisher was billing the composer, D., for making corrections so that the score would fit the "house style" of formatting. The composer was not being asked to pay for wrong notes, or any other errors on the composer's part, but for comformity with the house editorial style. This wasn't publishing in any form that I could recognize, but rather a partnership between composer and publisher in which the composer was clearly assuming a portion of the financial risk.

And then there are all of those big publishers, for whom an overpriced, spiral-bound photocopy of the composer's manuscript is considered state-of-the-art publication.** That and fifty percent of the royalties, of course. Plus, consider the case of any of those big publishers with a huge back catalog of work still under copyright protection: getting existing catalog items broadcast, recorded, or played in concert is going to have a natural financial priority over acquiring and preparing new works for the catalog, as the old properties represent sleeping investments that can be milked until the copyrights run out. As attractive as it would appear to share a publisher with Richard Strauss or Orff or Schreker, a more contemporary composer is always going to be at a disadvantage in getting services from her or his publisher, as that would represent a new and risky capital outlay.

*****

I'll be blunt: Traditional music publishing does not now offer a good deal for most contemporary composers. This comes at an interesting moment, in which ownership of the means of reproduction is no longer monopolized by publishers. Because of this, more than a few composers have recognized the writing on the wall and begun to take alternative paths to music publication. The first alternative is for composers, alone or collectively, to go into the cottage industry of publishing their own work, printing and selling sheet music, essentially duplicating the work done by traditional publishers.

There are two objections that come up again'n'again when self-publication is discussed. The first is that giving scores away for free eliminates the possibility of making money from the sale of a score. Answer: unless you can guarantee that a score will sell many copies (many = at least 500) and that it will continue to sell for generations, then there is no money to be made in selling sheet music. That is why publishers will invest editorial time in a new edition of the Beethoven sonatas, designed to sell for scores of years, but not in preparing editions of your scores. Real money comes from commissions, licenses, and royalties. A very small number of composers might eventually be able to sell their original manuscripts, but don't do your retirement planning on that basis. This is one of the great lessons seldom taught to young composers. All together now: There is no money in selling sheet music. Real money comes from commissions, licenses, and royalties. The second objection is that self-publication is vanity publication. Short and snappy answer: let me know the name of a composer who isn't vain about her/his music. Longer answer: Publication of musical scores has never been the equivalent of academic publication vetted by editorial or peer review; editorial and peer review in music comes about from performances, broadcasts, and recordings. Publication, and that includes self-publication, is simply a means toward getting those performances, broadcasts, and recordings.

There are many examples of self- and composer-organized group publication (e.g. the Wa-Wan Press, Charles Ives' publishing his 114 Songs, or helping to subsidize the operations of Henry Cowell's New Music Edition). A more recent operation, and still a going concern, is that of Karlheinz Stockhausen, who, dissatisfied with both his sheet music publisher and his recording firm, set up his own shop. The initial impulse seems to have been a need for greater control over the quality of the publications, and dissatisfaction with production delays, but I believe that the added advantage of retaining all of the licenses and royalties soon became just as important an impulse. Stockhausen is far from the only cottage publisher -- Tom Johnson, Christopher Fox, Hans-Joachim Hespos also come to mind. In addition to self-publishing solo composers there are the entrepreneurs and collectivists, with catalogues of music by several composers -- Composer/Performer Edition, Feedback Verlag, Frog Peak Music, Material Press, or the Thürmchen Verlag. But all of these ventures are still basically dealing with paper -- whether published in advance or on demand -- and still have to deal with packing that paper, figuring out how to ship it from point a to b, and sometimes back again, figuring out how to pay for it (currency transactions can often cost more than it's worth) and doing it all within a reasonable period of time. (For musicians, a "reasonable amount of time" for getting a score is usually "now", and not infrequently, "yesterday").

The second alternative, and the one I believe that is most important to the future of new music is to get out of the paper-handling business and bypass the post altogether. Already, with my own commissioned works, the usual practice has become one of producing Postscript or PDF files and emailing them directly to commissioners or players. With the resources of my own home studio, I can produce scores in any format the players would like to have (American or European paper norms, miniature, short, or full scores, and sets of parts, transposed or not) and don't have to worry about packaging. This flexibility is particularly useful for new music, as some musicians prefer to play from score, others from parts, and almost every musician has their own preferences about how pages should be hooked together or pasted to poster board or shrunk or blown-up to suit eyes or fit music stands. Moreover, musicians can get a score as soon as it's been proofread (and -- admittedly a down-side -- often before that) or a score can be put online for even wider access. By putting the score online and making it available free to the public, the traditional composer-publisher-retailer-player chain is shortened dramatically. Players can peruse scores online, download and print out whatever they like, and any royalties or licenses, should they choose to publicly perform or record a piece, can go undivided back to the composer via their rights organizations. And in the best of cases, such a shortened chain of transmission invites more direct communication between composers and performers.

Is there still room for beautiful, bound editions of music? Absolutely, and sales to libraries and collectors may still be a vital market for some scores, but such editions are not essential to getting music played. Is there room left for traditional publishers? Sure, if they can provide services to those composers who cannot or will not do them on their own and are willing to share their royalties.

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* The early 1980's also mark the point in time when traditional engraving was dying off and computer "engraving" was not yet practiced widely.
** A particularly poignant example of this is to be found in the catalog of C.F. Peters. Why did it take so many years -- and years after the deaths of both composers -- to figure out that more money could be made by collecting piano (and prepared piano) scores by Cage and Feldman into modestly-priced anthologies than by continuing to sell handmade ozalids and photocopies of individual pieces one-by-one? On the basis of sales to academic libraries alone, such anthologies had guaranteed sales in the hundreds. But not only institutional sales -- buying up expensive Peters scores one-by-one with hard-earned paper-route money was a real bummer, and for the price of one score published the old way kids now can get a whole repertoire of pieces in a single volume. This is good all-around -- for the composers' estates, for Peters, for players, and for young people trying to get a sense of these musical landmarks.