Keeping the Score

The other day I heard a music publisher inveigh against composers who post their scores for free as PDFs on their web pages. I am one of that tribe. His argument, which was new to me and interested me, was that those composers pose unfair competition to the composers whose scores are published, and thus cost money. I have trouble crediting this argument. As much as I’d love to think that my music has an inside track because people can get the scores for free, it’s difficult for me to believe that any performer or ensemble ever makes a repertoire choice based on the cost of the score. The only such cases I’ve ever heard of are orchestras that have decided against performing certain pieces because the orchestral parts cost too much to rent, and those cases didn’t even involve living composers. I suppose it’s possible that if, say, John Adams were giving his scores away for free and David Del Tredici wasn’t, perhaps there are a few ensembles who would choose Adams over Del Tredici for that reason, but I doubt even that. It seems to me that people choose repertoire based on what music fits their ensemble, or their performance technique, or their stylistic programming, and score prices are hardly so exorbitant as to become a determinant.

I currently haveÂ 66 of my scores availableÂ on my web site as free PDFs. The scores I haven’t made available all fit one of the following three categories:

1. The notation needs considerable work to be readable; these are pieces that are either microtonal (often in indecipherable MIDI notation), or partly improvisatory, or electronically produced without a full score, or incidental music for a dramatic production that would hardly make sense out of context, or otherwise insufficiently notated.

2. Scores that were commissioned by performers who requested temporary exclusivity over performance, and I consider such exclusivity rather expensive, though certainly negotiable.

3. Scores on which I imagine that I could eventually make a considerable amount of money. The only score that falls into this category so far is Transcendental Sonnets, of which I post the orchestral score but not the vocal score or the two-piano performance version. Choral pieces have the potential of selling a tremendous number of vocal scores because so many singers are involved, and so I have thought it unwise to send vocal scores out into the world for free – although I have done that with My father moved through dooms of love, which has no score other than the full score. Since I will gladly send a PDF of the vocal score to any chorus interested in a performance, even this small scruple on my part seems superfluous, though I might change that policy if the piece became wildly popular.

I do not, on the other hand, make instrumental or orchestral parts available indiscriminately. I keep all those on my web site as well at unpublished URLs, and if anyone wants to perform the work I simply e-mail them the URL, so it can be done quickly and efficiently. I do this to be sure that I am apprised of performances and given some control, though in the case of solo works it’s easy for someone to download the score and perform the piece without telling me. This hasn’t happened, as far as I know. A few musicians have organized performances without any input from me, and let me know about it. Occasionally I’ll attend a gig somewhere and find that someone has made his or her own bound copy of one or more of my scores, which is fine with me – saves me trouble that would hardly been justified by whatever tiny sum I might have made.

Many of my scores are also available though Larry Polansky’s Frog Peak Music. This is a nice arrangement because Larry sells a lot of scores in bulk to libraries, but he’s not trying to make money off of it. Those who want to buy from him get the scores with a spiral binding, and pay him basically the expense of making a bound copy. Nominally my publisher is Monroe Street Music (Bill Duckworth’s company), which collects the publishing royalties, which, however minimal, pay them back for little services they’ve done me.

For me, trying to make money off of scores is just a dubious proposition. The amount I might make seems trivial compared to the wider distribution I get from having interested musicians be able to check out my works whenever they want. There’s also a certain resentment of the music publishing industry involved, since no publisher is likely to accept any music as commercially unprofitable as mine, and my understanding (from Philip Glass and many others) is that, even if a publisher takes your work, the most likely result is that they will print a few copies, keep them in boxes in warehouses as a tax write-off, tie up the copyright, and make your music more difficult to obtain even for those willing to buy it. Of all the friends whose music I write about, the few whose music is officially published are the ones whose scores I have a devil of a time trying to get. When the scores are available for perusal only, I sometimes can’t get access to them at all. I’m also conditioned by my score-starved youth: so many of the scores I desperately needed to see when I was a young, studying composer couldn’t be had under any circumstances. If young composers are burning with interest to see how my music works, I’m happy to satisfy them, and without giving them the hurdle of having to contact me personally. I wish Boulez, Pousseur, Glass, and co. had done the same for me. I bought a ton of scores and would have bought many more i was curious about, but many were impossible to get. I’m just not convinced that the music publishing industry, in its current form, deserves to survive. [UPDATE: I should add, though, that I know some fine, dedicated people in the music publishing business who put their heart and soul into meticulously editing scores by famous dead composers. I guess we still need the business around for that, but they’ll never do all that for me, and I can do it for myself.]

I would hardly be too upset to think that I am undercutting my competing fellow composers by doing it this way, but that way of looking at it seems almost delusional. It’s true – as the publisher mentioned – that I can afford to subsidize my composing career through my academic day job, but I can’t imagine this affecting anyone else. If someone else needs to charge for scores to make a living, indigent performers interested in that person’s music are hardly going to be driven to play my music instead. If anyone besides music publishers thinks there is any social inequity I’m promoting by doing it this way, I’d be curious to know about it.