At a concert the other night given by a chamber offshoot of Philadelphia Baroque orchestra known as Tempesta di Mare, which I wrote about for the Palm Beach Daily News, a sentence in the program notes about the pioneering English publisher John Walsh brought me up short.
In it, the writer Susan Halpern pointed out that Walsh’s method of engraving music on metal plates led to the start of an international system that “made it possible for composers’ music to be profitable to them as it was published without their paying for it themselves and was distributed without their having to do it themselves.”
This made me laugh, because nowadays we’ve done away with 300 years or so of progress and reverted to the practice of the late 17th century. Most composers today who want to be heard have to do everything themselves, founding their own companies, setting up their own distribution networks. The old days of the publisher and his representative have retreated in the face of changes in the marketplace for music.
But just because technology allows us to self-market our music and reach people all over the world, that doesn’t necessarily make it a better system. Publishers and their representatives are a good thing to have, especially if you are working yourself to the bone on creative output and you’re just too tired after that to have to get up and then go “sell your smart ass door to door,” as John Hiatt once said.
Notation software is a perfect example. I love my Sibelius software; it makes everything look beautiful, and it presents next to no problems for performers, who in my experience are now not willing to read any handwritten manuscript, unless it’s from the past. But putting my pieces together on Sibelius is a different craft than actually writing it. What I’m doing there is essentially working as a graphic artist, and those are the concerns I have: how does it look, what about this typeface, should I put another bar on this page or is the whole thing too crowded?
I like doing that work, and always have. I’m a newspaperman, after all, with years of design experience on copy desks in addition to my writing. But it’s adding another job onto the burden of the actual composition, and that takes valuable time away from writing. Time was when Beethoven, whose scores were a horrible mess, could hand them off to a trusted copyist and turn his attention immediately back to the next piece he was writing.
Having to do everything yourself is good in one respect, and that’s that you get to make the final call on how things look and include whatever editor’s notes you want, and things like that. But aside from that, it’s a pain, and it’s another way in which technology, because it makes it possible for one person to do three jobs at once, has made it mandatory.
What we really need is another John Walsh who wants to take on the task of promoting composers, printing their music, and getting it out into the marketplace, while the composer gets back to the work of composing.
2 Comments
March 11, 2009 at 2:26 pm
You make some good points here, Greg, to which I’d add that not only do composers need publishers to help free up their time for creative endeavour, but they could also use patrons with deep pocket books. In such economically uncertain times as these, however, I doubt very much that most composers will be lucky enough to benefit from either.
FK
March 12, 2009 at 7:35 pm
[...] This post from Florida newspaperman and Sibelius user Greg Stepanich got me thinking. He says: Most composers today who want to be heard have to do everything themselves, founding their own companies, setting up their own distribution networks. The old days of the publisher and his representative have retreated in the face of changes in the marketplace for music. But just because technology allows us to self-market our music and reach people all over the world, that doesn’t necessarily make it a better system. Publishers and their representatives are a good thing to have, especially if you are working yourself to the bone on creative output and you’re just too tired after that to have to get up and then go “sell your smart ass door to door,” as John Hiatt once said. [...]