Category Archives: Blessays

You’re Doing It Right

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Cross-posted from http://NewMusicShelf.com/News.

I want to point out a composition competition that’s making a point of being completely above-board. It’s a nice counter-example to the skeevy one I mentioned in my recent post about composition competitions.

This is from the ACDA Illinois Choral Composition Contest guidelines:

WHAT RIGHTS ARE GRANTED TO ACDA-ILLINOIS?
a) The following dedication must be included in all manuscript and published editions of the winning compositions: “Winner of the 2011 ACDA Illinois Choral Composition Contest”
b) IL-ACDA will have the right to make copies for distribution to the members of the summer 2011 IL- ACDA Directors’ Chorus, its conductor, and accompanist.
c) Each winning composer will be asked to provide biographical information for publicity purposes. IL-ACDA will have the right to use the composer’s name and composition title in the future IL-ACDA Communications.

WHAT RIGHTS ARE GRANTED TO THE COMPOSER?
a) Copyright ownership will be retained by the composer.
b) Publication rights will be retained by the composer.
c) The composer will be given the privilege to display/advertise other compositions at the Summer Retreat.

There’s nothing “slick” here – no one’s trying to dress up a crappy deal in vague, misleadingly positive language. I really appreciate that the ACDA has made a point of spelling out exactly what they expect of the composer, and exactly what the composer can expect of them. ACDA reserves the right to make sufficient copies of the winning score to prepare and perform it. There’s no talk of perpetuity or recording rights. They require that the composer note in the published score that it won the contest – a very reasonable request, especially considering that the works can’t have been performed before, so it’s a safe assumption that most of the entries were written specifically for the competition. And ACDA can use the composer’s name and the title of the winning work on their website, in their newsletter, and in their promotional materials – publicity for the composer.

They’re also not making a grab at the copyright, publication, or mechanical rights, which sometimes happens.

ACDA Illinois: You’re doing it right.

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Speculation

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Allow me to speculate for a moment.

Getting music performed live is difficult. Very difficult. I know because I’ve produced a series of new music concerts in Manhattan for several years, now. It’s a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. A vital one, though.

But I’ve been wondering about the future of concert music. Specifically, I’ve been wondering about audience development and making a career as a composer a financially viable one – viable without resorting to academia as a primary means of income before having established oneself and gained some measure of success solely as a composer.

Can we continue to build our audiences almost solely through live performance, or should we be expanding our public image to a more diverse array of media?

Unlike writers, we can’t spread our musical gospels through printed scores. Scores aren’t for reading on the subway – they are for those who intend to perform our music, or for those who intend to study our music to some academic end – both rarefied pursuits. Granted, our primary targets are and should be performers, the evangelists of our works. But should we not also preach our own gospels? (I don’t know where this religious analogy came from, but it seems to be working….) As I tell all of the composers who join the NewMusicShelf – you are your own best salesman.

To rely on performers to bring our music to the masses requires that we have a solid and enthusiastic base of performers who want to expose their audiences to our works. Enthusiasm is never enough, though. Successfully relying on our performers presupposes that they have their own loyal listenership and plenty of performance opportunities where they are in control of the works that they bring to the stage, neither of which criteria we can rely on always being the case.

So should we, in addition to finding ways to get our works publicly performed, be attempting to record our music and make it widely available? The average new music aficionado may not whip out a score on the subway instead of the latest James Patterson potboiler, but they most likely do whip out their iPod or other similar device capable of playing digital audio. Like novels (I swear, I will run the writer-composer comparison into the ground), people consume recorded music at a fantastic rate. Though unlike novels, recorded music is much quicker to get through, and therefore more easily consumable. It’s also much more easily re-consumed, which often results in a more loyal listenership. And a loyal listenership is often in search of the next release….

The downside here is that recording music at a high level of professional quality is expensive. Prohibitively so. And without a wide listenership, we probably can’t expect a return on our initial financial outlay for a recording project.

Of course, we can defray these costs in a number of different ways.

One way is to involve our existing audience base in the creation of the recording, i.e, fundraising. Inviting friends, family, and other fans of your work to be a part of the creative process by helping to fund the project (notice the careful wording there) can bring them much closer to your work merely by having become literally invested in it. A gracious thanks to your financial supporters in the liner notes of the disc and on the disc’s page on your website can be very gratifying, and these supporters may be more likely to recommend the recording to other music lovers because of their own involvement in its creation.

Another way to keep costs down is to split studio/editing time and costs with other composers, or with performers working on their own recording projects. This approach has its own potential difficulties, not the least of which is the diminished time allotted for your works, but it at least allows for some portion of your music to be recorded for less than it would cost for a whole album’s worth.

The whole recording idea, of course, hinges on the expectation of a return on your investment. I propose this in contrast to the financial outlay for a live performance, which may not earn back in ticket sales what it cost to put on the event, especially since there’s only one chance to earn back that investment, whereas a recording can earn indefinitely.

The point at which you break even on the project will most likely be 5 or more years out, so this truly is an investment in your own career, and should be seen as such. And, like all investments, it should be expected to bring in a return once the up-front costs are paid back through album/MP3 sales.

The math for this sort of project may be a little daunting to some. But bear with me, and let’s take a quick look at some numbers. I promise to be gentle.

Selling a full-length digital album through your own website and using PayPal to handle the transactions (PayPal charges a 2.9% + $0.30 fee per transaction) leaves you with the following returns:
On a $10.00 digital album: $9.41. Not bad.
On a $0.99 digital track: $0.66. Not horrible.

Now let’s assume that the album costs $8,000 to produce. I’m basing this figure on a recording that I turned pages for last year. It was solo piano music, so performer costs weren’t an issue. It was also done in a well-respected studio in Manhattan, which skewed the price a bit higher. So let’s assume that the lack of performer costs and the NY studio prices cancel each other out, and stick with $8,000 as our number. (By the way, the recording will be released on Naxos American Masters, so that tells you something about the level of quality that was being aimed for – that level of quality being another of the base assumptions for our hypothetical project here.)

Taking these numbers as our base, we would have to sell 850 copies of the full digital album to break even. That’s 170 copies per year over 5 years. A little daunting, maybe, for composers who are still growing their base. But remember that this recording will be available for the rest of your life – it’s an investment. And we can break that number down again to make it even more easily palatable: you would have to sell one copy of the album every 2 days over 5 years to break even. Not quite so bad. We can even take 8½ years and sell 100 copies per year, or 85 copies a year over 10 years. That’s one copy every 3.5 or 4.25 days, respectively.

Now, of course selling solely through our own website rather limits our exposure. We’ll want to get the album in front of as many people as possible. So, let’s put our imaginary album up on CDBaby, which seems to be the most well-respected of the independent music distributors.

As I understand it (please correct me if I’m wrong), CDBaby charges $4 per CD sold, regardless of the gross price, and 25% ($0.29 minimum) for MP3 downloads. They also partner with iTunes and other services for digital distribution; iTunes takes 30%, on top of which CDBaby takes 9%, leaving you roughly $0.63 per $0.99 track. In actual numbers, this all means:

On a $9.99 CD through CDBaby: $5.99.
On a $0.99 track through CDBaby: $0.70.
On a $9.99 album through CDBaby/iTunes: $6.36
On a $0.99 track through CDBaby/iTunes: $0.63.

You’re going to get much wider potential exposure (potential exposure – there are no guarantees, here) for a smaller cut of the profits. That’s the game. And these are reasonable cuts for distribution.

So to go solely through CDBaby and iTunes (you can’t sell directly through iTunes yet at this stage of the game – you still need an intermediary like CDBaby), you’d need to sell 1,333 hard copies of the CD or 1,258 copies of the digital album.

So if we split sales evenly between your site and CDBaby, you have to sell 1,039 copies, or 208 copies per year for 5 years, or one copy every one and a half days over the same period.

Notice I haven’t touched on the number of individual tracks you’d have to sell in order to break even. It’s a lot. But the bulk of your sales are probably going to be albums/discs. Individual tracks will serve to speed you to your goal. And you want to meet your goal sooner rather than later. The further you push back the date where you break even, the longer you’re out the initial investment. And the idea is to spend money to make money, not to spend money period.

If you don’t expect a return on the recording, then it becomes a “vanity project”, which does very little for your career but still manages to make a sizable dent in your pocketbook.

I think I’ve finished with the math portion of this little blessay.

But all of this math and blathering on about investments and costs/returns is my way of speculating about self-produced recordings being the way of the future for concert music.

My scores may be my musical representatives to performers and other composers, but recordings are my ambassadors to the world at large, especially since there are potentially lots of people who may enjoy my music but who aren’t geographically able to make it to concerts of my works. I have most of my works recorded in live performance, but typically the recording quality (and sometimes the performance quality) isn’t up to snuff, and I don’t want garbled, noisy recordings with weird rhythms and wrong notes to be people’s introduction to my music. Consequently, I’m planning a series of recordings over the next few years. It will be time-consuming, and probably fairly expensive, but ultimately worth it, I expect.

I’ll keep you all posted.

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Free Kittens Scores

Friday, February 25, 2011

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be cross-posting a series of short essays that I wrote at the NewMusicShelf about self-publishing and making good financial decisions as an artist.

Giving away scores. We’ve all done it. You meet a performer, the two of you talk, and they say that they’d love to see a copy of that piece you wrote for their instrument (because it just happens that you have one – quelle coïncidence!). The two of you exchange cards. You rush home – giddy at the prospect of a performance – and mail off a prettily bound copy of the score.

What happens next?

Probably nothing, aside from the performer having a copy of your piece in a pile somewhere in their apartment.

You’ve done this. I’ve done this. We’ve all done this.

I think we should probably stop.

We don’t need to stop entirely, but we do need to take a step back and look at the situation for a moment.

The thing that bothers me about giving away scores for free (ok, there are several things that bother me about it) is that it can devalue the scores and the work that went into creating them. Not to mention the fact that we’ve just spent our own money to print and bind a score – and maybe mail it, too – for someone else who will in all likelihood ignore it. And this is considered to be a perfectly acceptable scenario (the rudeness of the ignoring part aside). It’s not only generally acceptable for a composer to go to the expense of printing, binding, and mailing a score at their own expense so that someone else can have it for free, but it’s expected.

One of the problems is that quite often we’re asked to give someone a copy of the score. It’s not so outright as, “Hey, will you give me a copy of that for free?” But that’s the underlying message. That said: I’m absolutely positive that the intention is never to weasel a free score out of us. (How awful would that be?) It comes from a place of good intentions and even genuine interest, I’m sure, but these things add up, and they can add up quickly. The unintended implication here, though, is that our work isn’t really worth offering to pay for.

Another, bigger problem is that we (young-and/or-emerging-in-particular) composers, in our desperation to be loved and performed everywhere, give away our scores higgledy-piggledy. We meet a performer (who we probably just heard on stage), go all a-twitter at her performerliness, and throw anything at her that we’ve written and that happens to make use of her instrument. Go dignity!

Regardless of whether we are asked for a score or offer it, there’s an element of “insult to injury” to the scenario – in the latter scenario, we just happen to be insulting ourselves. The injury is that we’ve spent our own money to print, etc the score. The insult is manifold. First, someone (the composer and/or the score-requester) thinks it’s ok for the composer to spend their own money to print, blah blah blah. Second, beyond the score itself, there’s the whole element of the composer having spent years and years and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars studying and preparing to be able to spend the days/weeks/months writing the music and engraving the score that was given away for free. I, for one, didn’t spend all that time and tuition on my degrees or all that money and time on private study so that I could spend more money to just give away the fruits of my labor and education.

In the case of composers throwing scores at anyone they come into contact with, I’d like to see us be a little more dignified. There’s nothing wrong with wanting this new, exciting person to perform our works, but maybe we can create a more significant bond with them that will make it a bit more likely that they would perform our works in public.

In the case of being asked for scores, I do see less and less of this going on, which I like. In my own experience, I’ve had a growing number of people offer to purchase copies of my scores rather than ask for them outright. I think the difference is that, while yes the culture may be changing, these people also know that my scores are available on my website and on the NewMusicShelf (yay!), and that they’re affordable.

So, some potential solutions as I see them.

Solution 1: Stop treating scores like noodles and performers like walls, throwing one at the other and hoping they’ll stick. Instead, create relationships with performers, which will hopefully make them genuinely interested in your music and in performing it regularly. Then you can give them all the scores you want for free – it’s much more meaningful, and will probably be infinitely more fruitful.

Solution 2: If a performer says, “Yeah, I’d like to check out your piece for kazoo and nose flute,” direct them to your website where they can hear audio of the piece, and buy a copy of the score if they’re so inclined. This, of course, necessitates that you a) have a website (if you don’t: shame, shame, shame! Do it now!), b) have MP3s of your works, and c) have a set-up on your site or somewhere else to sell your scores (admittedly harder to do without a certain level of Web Skillz or someone to do it for you).

Solution 3: If a performer wants to check out your work, and you want to give it to them for free – email it. Save yourself the printing and postage costs. Not to mention the tree.

We’ve all gone through a lot of expensive preparation for our chosen careers, be we composer or performer, and we’re all in this strange, maybe-sinking ship (if you listen to any number of critics, which I don’t) of concert music together. While I’m not advocating a stance of “pay me or you get nothing”, I am a big advocate of working together in a way that’s fair to everyone, and not treating your work as something without value beyond the purely artistic.

Now, I do like giving away scores, I’ll be the first to admit, but I try to be judicious in who I give them to. Someone just performed one of my works? They get a signed copy of the score in thanks, and maybe second one – something I’d like to hear them do next. A close friend’s birthday? I write them a song and present them with a copy. I set a poet’s words? Signed copy, absolutely. Someone is a big advocate of new music in general, and my works in particular? You better bet that they get scores from me! But performers I just met? Not likely. I’m more interested in having it mean something when I give away a score.

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Pricing: The Goldilocks Zone

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be cross-posting a series of short essays that I wrote at the NewMusicShelf about self-publishing and making good financial decisions as an artist.

When I’ve talked to other composers about self-publishing and selling their own works, one of the most consistent stumbling blocks is the issue of pricing. It can be very difficult to evaluate whether a given price is too high or too low.

The worry is that if a score is priced too high, no one will want to shell out the money because it’s too expensive, and consequently won’t buy it; but if it’s priced too low, people may think it must not be any good, and they still won’t buy it. Also, pricing a score on the lower end of the spectrum gives a smaller return to the composer, which may be undesirable because of all of the time and effort that went into composing the piece and engraving the score; but pricing on the higher end of the spectrum, while maybe “fairer” to the composer considering his efforts, may still turn people off, thus depriving him of any income at all.

It’s a difficult situation.

An element that adds to the confusion is what we might consider to be the pricing “standards” set by currently available scores that are published by the big music publishing houses. Let’s take for example two song cycles of roughly equal duration, difficulty, and quality. A major publisher will charge upwards of $20 where I would probably ask for $7. The major difference is that they have to charge that much because they have a much higher per-score production cost than I do – they have editors, engravers, marketing, art, and legal departments to pay; not to mention the costs of printing and materials. And while more publishers are doing print-on-demand, it’s much less efficient and cost-effective than printing a larger run of scores. So, like any business, they’re going to pass the added expense onto the consumer. Again, they have to charge more to stay in business.

I think that we shouldn’t be pricing our scores in a similar range as those that are traditionally published. I think, instead, that we should be competing – and you don’t compete by charging the same as your competitor. By which I don’t mean that we should adopt the Always-The-Lowest-Price, cut-throat, Wal-mart-style approach to slashing prices maniacally and attempting to drive out all other business. I mean instead that we aren’t burdened by anywhere near the overhead costs as traditional publishers, so we have the luxury of pricing accordingly. Plus, even when pricing my song cycle at $7, I can expect a much higher return than had it been sold at $20 by a traditional publisher (especially if I’m selling digital copies, where there are no printing or other overhead costs).

Personally, although I like buying new scores, I find most traditionally published scores to be prohibitively expensive. I just can’t afford them. Consequently, I take myself as a model customer. If I were looking for new material to perform, or at least to consider performing, what price range would I find most comfortable and inviting? Is that price range fair to the composer given the length and instrumentation of the piece?

Unlike the world of novels, where standardized pricing is the norm and sales expectations are much higher, we have a much tougher row to hoe, I think. One current argument in the book world is for ebooks to be priced at $2.99. Another argument is for a tiered method. We don’t have the luxury of such clear delineation of categories as is required by the tiered pricing method – we have to balance duration, instrumentation, and (potentially) difficulty in our pricing decisions. We also have the question of whether or not to sell parts bundled with a score or separately, and how to price those.

I like the sentiment behind the current arguments for ebook pricing: encourage sales and foster long-term growth through affordability. Simple, really. We certainly can’t expect the sheer number of sales that a successful novel can generate, but we can definitely encourage more performers to take a chance on our music by making it affordable. Affordable without underselling yourself.

I think it’s a much easier task when you stop trying to assign Monetary Worth to your works, and start thinking in terms of affordability, fairness, and long-term growth.

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We Don’t Need No (Business) Education

Monday, February 21, 2011

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be cross-posting a series of short essays that I wrote at the NewMusicShelf about self-publishing and making good financial decisions as an artist.

So I’ve already written about the problems of pricing and why we should (mostly) stop giving away scores for free, but these two topics are part of a larger issue – the lack of education we receive on the business aspects of the concert music business.

I had a great undergraduate education. I was encouraged to push myself academically, personally, and artistically, and I got way more experience than I had dreamed possible – 17 commissions and over 120 performances of my works during those four years. But I was never formally taught about commissions or contracts or royalties. I was very lucky when I left school to have had a private teacher who was well-acquainted with such matters, and who made it a point to educate me on the business side of things. I was taught how to register my works with ASCAP and maintain my performance records; I was given advice on how to negotiate text setting permissions / royalty agreements with poets; I was shown how to present my works professionally; and I was even taught what expenses I could claim as a composer on my taxes and how to organize them to be prepared for an audit. I’ve also “inherited” two separate filing systems to keep my works and my correspondence organized (I use a hybrid of the two, which I’ve in turn passed along to two people who have hired me to organize their archives). But most young composers I know haven’t gotten that sort of education.

Fortunately, more and more schools are offering courses that tackle business matters, but the culture is still very much anti-business. We would much rather focus our energies on our Art and leave the dirty stuff – the money matters – to others. Or we’ll deal with the money when it starts coming in. Except that it won’t come in if we don’t make it come in. We can’t be ostriches with our heads in the sand if we want to survive as both individuals and a community.

Now, we don’t need to get a whole new degree in all things financial, but we should know some basics, because there are some real consequences if we don’t. Indulge me for a moment and let me continue to draw parallels between the field of concert music and the field of prose writing. There was a recent incident involving Columbia University’s MFA writing program, a very famous, very unscrupulous writer, and a lot of screwed-over young people. These young people were offered very unrealistic returns on a very unrealistic amount of work if they signed a very slippery contract written up by said unscrupulous writer’s unscrupulous lawyers. Some sort of education in how to deal with contracts (consult a lawyer before you sign anything!?) would have served these students incredibly well. You can read a great account of the events, as well as a well-written dissection of the underlying issues here.

Composers need a basic knowledge of contracts and their rights just as much as aspiring novelists. Although I obviously advocate self-publication, I know it’s not for everyone, so composers should be aware of what’s in their contracts with traditional publishers. And film composers are especially exposed to being screwed over, however inadvertently.

Let me offer an example of how contracts with a traditional publisher can cause problems. A friend of mine had a chamber piece published about 30 years ago by one of the major publishers. Standard contract. The contract, however, didn’t stipulate that the piece be engraved or that parts be created. So, whenever anyone wants to buy a copy of the score, they can’t. They have to buy three copies. Of a xeroxed manuscript. Because no one engraved it or made parts. And it costs $110. Who would ever buy that? And because of his contract, he can’t get the rights back to do it properly and sell it himself under his own publishing imprint.

I should hope that that story alone would send every composer on the planet scrambling for a book on the subject of contracts, or a crash course from a lawyer friend. It probably won’t, but a boy can dream, can’t he?

Unfortunately, the most common attitudes I see are either of haughty disdain for any activity that might sully the arts with the stink of financial gain, or a general wide-eyed naïveté when it comes to anything remotely financial. And I can’t figure out which one bugs me more.

Let me eviscerate the former first, though. Ignorance, I understand. That “I smell poo” nose-wrinkling, I loathe. Loathe. Loathe. Loathe.

One of my favorite examples is recent Pulitzer Prize winner, Jennifer Higdon. I heard a story recently from a friend who has attended some rather distinguished music schools. A remarkable number of composition students during his time in school had nothing but snarky things to say about Ms. Higdon because she has… a publicist! How dare she! How dare she hire a professional to bring her performances and commissions, the central goal of composerdom! How dare she attempt to support herself through the career that she has chosen for herself! How dare she!

I really only have contempt for that sort of behavior, and I don’t event try to mask it. I think it’s undignified, and I think it’s petty. It’s a purely negative behavior that benefits no one, and only serves to hold up success to derision. It’s also potentially very damaging to the derider, should his badmouthing reach the ears of someone in a position of power who happens to feel warmly toward her maligned colleague. The world of concert music is a small one; the world of composers even more so.

In the case of the monetarily naive and uneducated, it seems as though the general attitude is that they don’t expect to make much money from their works, and they’re fine with that; but if something eventually happens to come along, surely someone will take care of them. That’s an awfully laissez-faire attitude, don’t you think? “I’m going to write what I write, stick it on a shelf in my apartment, hope somebody performs it (but I won’t go after the royalties if they do), and not try to

But it’s not uncommon. There’s a real squeamishness and embarrassment about monetary gain from art music – very much related to the active sneering at financially successful composers – but turned inward, as if to say, “Who am I to think that my works have some sort of value beyond the purely artistic?” (“I don’t even like to admit that they have artistic value – I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I don’t have the proper humility in the face of my Art.”)

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Publishing renaissance

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be cross-posting a series of short essays that I wrote at the NewMusicShelf about self-publishing and making good financial decisions as an artist.

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing a lot (a LOT) of reading about publishing and self-publishing, and it’s been particularly enlightening.

Pretty much all of my reading has been about publishing books. I haven’t bothered reading about music publishing for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the dearth of writings on the subject.

There is, however, a TON of writing available about self-publishing books. There’s a renaissance going on amongst our prose and poetry writing brethren that I find incredibly intriguing – more and more authors are “going indie” and publishing their own works. Some are established authors branching out into different genres and trying something outside of the Brand that they and their publishers have created for them; some are established authors who want to take control of their works and their profits; some are non-established authors who found no interest in their work from the big publishers; and some have never had any experience with major publishers at all. This shift that’s happening is really exciting to read about because everything is changing so rapidly for the industry, and people keep finding new and ingenious ways to get their work out there. What’s also interesting to read about is the vitriol being spewed at some of these authors by people in their own industry. Not heartening, surely, but interesting.

I’m really inspired by the writers who are doing so well at self-publishing, self-marketing, self-distributing, self-etc. – there are a lot of them, and many more are joining those ranks. I find it inspiring in large part because I know the phenomenon can be translated to the concert music world. We’ve actually already started on the path toward our own publishing renaissance, but I think we’ve stalled. Not out of any inherent laziness – although I think that we as composers have been trained to avoid self-promotion and any act that may make us seem as though we actually want to make a living at this career for which we’ve spent so much time and money educating and preparing ourselves (a conversation for another day). Our stalling has been due mostly, I think, to a lack of outlets for self-publishing composers to showcase their works. [Insert preaching-to-the-choir-style plug for NewMusicShelf here.]

I want to point out two blogs that I’ve found particularly interesting and motivational: author Joe Konrath’s blog and Zoe Winters’ posts over at IndieReader.com. They have a lot to say about their industry that I feel is pertinent to the discussion of self-publishing in music.

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Getting over the hump

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Thanks to the economy tanking in September 2008, everyone seems to have had a difficult time making ends meet. I certainly know that I have. Being a composer is not a particularly lucrative vocation, being a young composer especially so. As a result, since moving to New York City in September 2004, I’ve made my living as a temp.

I give up roughly 40 hours of my week hopping from office to office in Manhattan. I’ll spend days, weeks, or even months in an office, performing mostly menial tasks – filing, data entry, and rarely (very rarely) a bit of reception work (which I invariably loathe). I was very fortunate prior to the economic crash – I had found a great long-term temp gig in the Alternative Fund Services department of HSBC. The VP who oversaw the area that I assisted was also a musician, so he understood my situation and did his best to keep me on for as long as possible. Ultimately, I was there for three and a half years, not including a several-month stint where I temped for a jewelry company. In the middle of this 3.5 years, I spent about six months as a full-time, salaried employee of HSBC – I was a Fund of Funds Administrator (basically, I was an administrator for a particular type of hedge fund) – but it was too great of a draw on my time, so I quit, left on very good terms, and was called back again as a temp when I finished with the jewelry company. I stayed until about two weeks before the crash, when every single temp in the company was let go at once.

After that, the economy was so terrible that my temp agencies had a very difficult time finding me work. From September 2008 until August 2010, I worked a total of maybe 10 weeks – not because I didn’t want to, but because the work just wasn’t there. I was fortunate in that I could draw Unemployment for a year, and I was able to design a website or two, but none of this was enough to pay the rent, let alone bills. After my Unemployment ran out, I was in pretty dire straits. Consequently, I got myself into a bit of a financial pickle, and was fortunately bailed out by my parents earlier this year. (Hooray for parents!)

The constant financial worry was obviously a major draw on my mental abilities. The anxiety and subsequent depression made it pretty much impossible to write. I even had a rough go of it during my stays at artist colonies – I couldn’t maintain my concentration, and kept feeling as though maybe I shouldn’t be there at all, if only because I couldn’t afford to travel or be away from potential jobs. And while I was in the City, I spent almost zero time writing – I would sleep embarrassingly late and then fritter away the remainder of the day. Not an existence indicative of a healthy mind.

I managed to write only a handful of works during that period, most of which had pretty strict deadlines, and it was still like pulling teeth to get me to sit down to write, even with the promise of money.

For quite a while I thought that the problem was that I didn’t have a draw on my time – that I needed to have less of my time available to me so that I would value what little time I had to write and use it properly. Now there may be some validity to this, but it never once crossed my mind until a few weeks ago that my problem was that I couldn’t think except to worry about the five dollars in my checking account and thirteen cents in savings. The worry would keep me up at night. I was afraid to buy anything. I was terrified every time I swiped my debit card, expecting that the tiniest purchase would be denied because I might not have enough money in my account.

Some of the haze finally cleared a few weeks ago on the plane en route to Santa Fe, NM to see my friends Danny and Kaity get married and hear the premiere of The Gallant Weaver, which I arranged for solo guitar as their processional. In August, my boyfriend’s sister recommended me for a freelance temp job in the Finance office at New York City Center, where she had worked in Development. That assignment lasted “officially” from mid-August to October 1. I say “officially” and put it in quotes for two reasons: 1. I’ve been asked back for a while to help out in the Capital Projects office, and 2. I’ve been offered (and I’ve accepted) a full-time position in Finance starting December 13. I’ll be taking over for a really great guy who’s been at City Center for quite a while, and is retiring at the end of the year. Big shoes to fill!

It was around the time that my boss-to-be began making job-style overtures in my direction that I started to realize that my compositional problem hasn’t been too much time on my hands – it’s been incessant, gut-wrenching, debilitating anxiety/depression over the fact that I’ve had no money for the past two years! So once there was a light at the end of the tunnel, an oasis on the horizon, I was finally able to think more clearly and realize that my creative process had been hijacked by paralyzing anxiety and a real, deep depression.

Now it feels as though a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I still have to live a little frugally until the job starts in mid-December, but I’ve been able to breathe and sleep easier.

And the music has begun to flow again! In a matter of days, I wrote a 4-minute choral work that I’m really excited to hear when it’s premiered at Illinois State University the weekend before I start full-time at City Center. I feel energized to write and write and write!

I intend to attack the Songbook Project again, and I’ve got an interesting series of short chamber works bubbling away in my brain. Also, I’ve found a direction for the orchestral piece I started at Ucross last year that I think is going to propel it into something quite good – important, even. So let’s get to work!

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Mistakes and Revision

Friday, February 19, 2010

I remember a time (as surely anyone who has ever created anything can) when every note I wrote was sacrosanct.  <em>That</em> is how I wrote this, and <em>that</em> is how it shall remain.  Fortunately, that period was incredibly short-lived.  Maybe it’s because I started life as a performer.  And maybe because, as a performer, I tended toward Broadway, where the written note, the written rhythm, are the barest guidelines for performance: the great Broadway singers transform the square quarter- and eighth notes on the page into something altogether different and more alive.  Even pitch material gets reworked in performance so that the original melodies become forever changed – the <em>definitive</em> performance often bears little resemblance to the composer’s written score.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that such a thing should be done in the concert realm.  Concert music as we know it is very controlled in the ways that works should be performed: if the score says X, do X.  But I’ve definitely been marked by my experience.

That being said: often, particularly in vocal music, a performer will accidentally play/sing what is technically a wrong note – viz, it is not written in the score.  I’ve often rewritten passages in my songs to integrate a particularly felicitous “mistake” in performance or rehearsal.  Maybe a soprano, in rehearsals, doesn’t realize she’s singing something slightly off from how it was notated; I hear it, love it, and point out to the soprano what she’s been singing wrong, but instruct her not to change a thing – her error is more elegant and beautiful than what I had originally written.

I had a similar thing happen during the rehearsal process for the re-launch of the Tobenski-Algera Concerts last month.  Tim Kiah, the composer of one of the songs on the program, attended a rehearsal during the week before the concert, and Marc and I ran through his song so that he could offer observations, criticisms, and corrections.  After a few instructions on phrasing, he mentioned that I was singing the final phrase wrong: rather than singing X note, I was singing Y, something I’d not noticed myself since what I had been singing was in perfect keeping with similar motives that had come before.  His instruction, though, was to keep doing what I was doing: sing it “wrong”, because he was going to integrate that change into the score because he liked it better.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard a performance or rehearsal of a work of mine, noticed a “wrong note”, and decided to keep it.  Or the number of times a performer has asked for a slight revision to ease a particularly difficult passage.  Invariably, the change is so minor to the overall effect of the score, yet so major because it allows the performer more ease in performance, that not to make the change would be pure folly.  And honestly, had they made the change without my knowledge, I’d be none the wiser, so imperceptible are most of these shifts.

And then there are those composers whose work I’ve performed who wouldn’t accept suggestions of this kind: they had written it <em>this</em> way, so I should work harder to do exactly what was on the page.  There’s something here that’s more than a little off-putting.  Chances are that I’m being poorly paid (if I’m being paid at all) to put in a lot of rehearsal time for a single performance of a work.  And chances are that all I’m asking for is an entrance to be doubled in the accompaniment, or that the vocal line be in some way supported.  I (or anyone else who might perform the work) am doing this composer a favor.  So why is he looking down his nose at me for trying to perform his piece well?  I’m not stupid for not being able to find my pitch – there’s a good reason for it.  And I’m less likely to want to perform works by this composer again because of this experience.

I see this form of revision as good faith toward my performers.  If there’s something I can do to make their lives easier, I’m happy to (within reason, of course) in hopes that they will appreciate my efforts on their behalf and a) perform my music well, and b) perform my music <em>again</em>.

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Engraving: A Hobby-Horse

Friday, February 19, 2010

A man and his Hobby-Horse, tho’ I cannot say that they act and re-act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon each other: Yet doubtless there is a communication between them of some kind; and my opinion rather is, that there is something in it more of the manner of electrified bodies,—and that, by means of the heated parts of the rider, which come immediately into contact with the back of the Hobby-Horse,—by long journies and much friction, it so happens, that the body of the rider is at length fill’d as full of Hobby-Horsical matter as it can hold;—so that if you are able to give but a clear description of the nature of the one, you may form a pretty exact notion of the genius and character of the other.

— Laurence Stern, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

One of my favorite musical Hobby-Horses – one that I can ride for hours on end — is engraving: That is, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, the art of putting the notes on the page so as to make the score legible and attractive – a far more important aspect of composing than most people, many composers included — mostly young, but surprisingly often not —, realize.

A brief history of my own engraving abilities, practices, and standards: I started my compositional life using a scaled-down version of Finale called Notepad, which allowed me to put on paper what was in my head. The results, although essentially accurate, were unattractive at best. It seemed to me, still about 5 years away from my first composition lesson, that the important thing was to get the notes out, and that the score was good so long as the individual notes were legible and not literally piled on top of one another (a frequent issue with Notepad, and later, albeit to a lesser degree, Finale itself). My earliest scores were a bit of a wreck – the notes were crammed together on the staff with no regard for proportional spacing, and elements of the score often collided. The scores were legible, but barely.

In college, my engraving improved (though I was still completely unaware that such a term existed, let alone that there were standards to such a thing). Since my works were being performed with some regularity, I found that I had to put more work into making the score readable, which wasn’t exactly the most pleasing realization at the time, as I much preferred sitting down at the piano and hammering out something new than sitting in front of the computer, clicking away entering notes and dragging things around to create more space and take up more paper. At a certain point, though, one of my composition teachers started getting frustrated with the legibility of my scores, and would spend more and more of our lesson time marking up the score with a red pen, pointing out the problems with the engraving. I seriously resisted most of his suggestions – they weren’t musical criticisms, and therefore weren’t worth much of my attentions. (Ah, youth!)

The idea of attractive engraving as a desirable thing started to leak into my brain toward the end of my undergrad career. I was recommended a book written by a friend of one of my professors, which purported to set down exact rules and procedures for staff sizes, positioning of articulations (down to the pixel!), etc. I realize in retrospect that this is all pure foolishness. This made a science of engraving, when it is in reality an art.

When I was invited to study privately in NYC, my new teacher, who had spent much of his youth as a Broadway copyist and an engraver for Ned Rorem and Virgil Thomson, among others, made a number of immediate, sweeping changes. I was forced to buy Sibelius. Having been a Finale Man for eight years, I hated the idea of switching software (the Finale/Sibelius debate is nearly as heated as the PC/Mac silliness, both sides being completely entrenched and unbudgeable). And we spent a sizable portion of our lesson time discussing engraving practices: how to avoid collisions, proper spacing, the general rule for how many measures should be in a system, etc.

In time, I came to love Sibelius. Rather quickly, actually. I can’t imagine myself going back.

And in time, I came to be quite proficient at professional-level engraving. I now do some freelance engraving work from time to time. And I’ve integrated the engraving process into my compositional process. As I input a score into Sibelius, even if I’m still composing it, I do a significant level of tidying up and formatting as I go. It saves time later, and really helps me to see the score for what it is, and helps me to assess where I am and where I want to go with the piece.

I end up seeing a lot of scores by young composers, now, and the quality of engraving I see varies rather widely. Some scores are super clear and very attractive; others have clearly received little attention in the way of formatting or “beautifying”.

I understand the mindset of those young composers who don’t put the time into their engraving – “The music should speak for itself.” I agree – the music should speak for itself. But it can’t unless it is properly engraved. Reading a score that hasn’t been given attention to visual detail is like listening to someone speak with a very heavy accent. Or reading horrible handwriting. The content may be there, but it’s so much work to figure it out.

Even looking through a stack of well-engraved scores is a frankly tiring endeavor. That, plus the additional effort required to decipher any number of poorly-engraved scores, is absolutely exhausting!  It’s all too easy to dismiss a poorly-engraved score out of hand.

So what can composers do to make their scores clearer and more attractive? Think about the performer – consider what you can do to make the performer’s life easier.

A few points to consider:

1) Are the beats clear? Can the performer easily make out the basic division of beats in each measure? (I.e., does a 4/4 bar look like two sets of two quarter notes? Do your 3/4 bars look like 3/4 bars, and not 6/8 bars, and vice versa? Are the rhythms – especially complicated rhythms – notated in a way that facilitates counting them out?)

2) Do the notes have enough room to breathe? (Are there too many or too few bars per system so that the system feels cramped or empty? Are lyrics spaced so that they are easy to read?)

3) Are the staves and notes a reasonable size? Too many composers leave their software at the default size settings so that everything seems far too large, which gives it the sense of being “easy” – music for beginners: the notes are large and safe.

4) Are your articulations and markings placed clearly and correctly? (Expressive instructions are italicized, instructions for playing techniques are non-italicized, articulations generally go on the side of the notehead rather than the stem….etc)

5) Are you consistent with your accidentals, and are your intervals properly spelled? Nothing is more maddening than constant switching between sharps and flats. There are occasions when sharps and flats may peacefully co-exist in the same measure, but generally one should stick with one or the other for as long as possible. And few things are more confusing in the moment than augmented or diminished intervals. These should be respelled – especially for vocalists – to be as immediately-readable as possible.

The general idea is to consider how you would like the score to look if you hadn’t seen it before and had to perform it with virtually no rehearsal time. That doesn’t mean dumb down your music. It means make your hard music as easy to learn (and perform) as possible.

Look at professionally published scores, and see how they’re formatted. And – most importantly – ask your performers if there’s anything that they found particularly difficult, or if a particular element of your notation was confusing. Then change it!

For my hobby-horse, if you recollect a little, is no way a vicious beast; he has scarce one hair or lineament of the ass about him—’Tis the sporting little filly-folly which carries you out for the present hour—a maggot, a butterfly, a picture, a fiddlestick—an uncle Toby’s siege—or an any thing, which a man makes a shift to get a-stride on, to canter it away from the cares and solicitudes of life—’Tis as useful a beast as is in the whole creation—nor do I really see how the world could do without it—

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Looking Back and Looking Forward

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

2009 turned out to be a particularly slow composing year for any number of reasons. Last year I finished the final quarter of “Permanently” from at least a moment; wrote one choral work and four short songs; and started – but didn’t finish – a short work for orchestra.

One reason for my lack of significant output turned out to be a little surprising – I didn’t have a teacher anymore! I’ve always been quite a self-starter, so I was a little surprised to realize that one reason why I wasn’t churning out music was that no one was looking over my shoulder, and I didn’t have to have a certain amount written each week for someone else to look at. I’ve temporarily changed that state of affairs – this past weekend, I started private study with Chester Biscardi, a web client and good friend (also the Director of the Music Program at Sarah Lawrence College). We’ve decided to use the orchestra piece I started in Ucross as a jumping-off point. I’m glad to be finishing the work finally, and to be working with Chet because he’s a fantastic composer – and by all reports a great teacher, as well!

While working on the orchestra piece (still as yet untitled!), I’ll also be working on a paraphrase of at least a moment for solo piano. Marc Peloquin and I have been putting together the next Tobenski-Algera Concert lately, and, while I didn’t plan on having one of my own works on the progrm for once, Marc insisted that I write a new piece for him to help balance the program. So, rather than wrack my brains for new material under such a tight deadline (the concert is March 9!), I’ve decided to rework the Koch cycle – shorten it considerably, and fold the vocal line into the piano. I consider it a “paraphrase” – a la DDT’s Acrostic Paraphrase, but I’m making the work shorter rather than three times the original length! I’ve made the bulk of the cuts already, so my next task is to start folding the vocal line into the piano part. I’ve been aching for a premiere of the cycle, so this performance will be a bit of a palliative.

In keeping with the arrangement kick…. Last year, I showed Chet the finished score of at least a moment – or, rather, emailed him the PDF of the score with MP3s of the MIDI playback from Sibelius. Since I loathe the voice sample used in Sibelius’s Kontakt Player, I always use flute instead. After listening to the MP3s and looking at the score, Chet made the comment that the vocal line stands so well on its own that I could easily pull out the text and use it as a flute piece. So, I shall! The only decision that remains to be made before I jump in with the Delete button is whether to transpose it or not. As it stands, the piece goes a minor third too low for a standard flute (the piece bottoms out at A3), though it’s ideal for an alto flute. So I have to decide whether to leave it as is and say it’s for alto flute, or bump it up a minor third. Or I could do a version of both!

Further on the compositional horizon – past the completion of several other works that have been in my compositional queue for far too long (completing the piccolo trumpet & string quartet piece for David Glukh; writing a duo for violin & piano for Roger Zahab) – I’ve been thinking quite a lot on a musical subject that I’ve frequently been told I should pursue: opera. Probably the main impetus for my starting to think seriously in this vein (I’ve frequently, and idly, thought about writing opera throughout the years, and have several ideas for larger-scale projects that I won’t tackle for a little while) is the fact that I’ve been lucky enough to go to the Met several times in the past few months: I saw Janacek’s From the House of the Dead (liked the music, hated the production) and Strauss’s Elektra (wonderful) and Ariadne auf Naxos (absolutely divine). I’ve started grabbing recordings of operas where I can find them and putting them on my iPod to listen to at work. (Recently heard Der Rosenkavalier for the first time and was absolutely transported!)

So I’ve been thinking about how I would go about writing an opera – what a good starting point would be. I may start with an existing short play, since that would probably be the simplest in terms of getting started and working on my own. I’ve definitely got my eyes peeled for a potential librettist, though. There are a few ideas bouncing around in my skull at the moment that have got me excited (not so much plot ideas, as structure and general concept), and I’d like to pitch them to a librettist. That is, if I can find one! I suspect that I could make one of my large-scale ideas happen fairly easily (and, frankly, I need to do it quickly if it’s going to happen!), but I’d like to have a chamber opera or two under my belt first. More details as things progress.

This sudden burst of compositional thought and action ties in closely with the second reason for my dearth of output last year. I spent all but a month and a half of 2009 unemployed (2009 didn’t manage to be the Year of Buying DVDs – instead it was the Year of Falling Behind on Rent!), which left me with a lot of free time. By all rights, I should have been churning out new works right and left! The problem, though, was that I had too much free time, and I fell into a horrible habit of intense procrastination. I would wake up late every day (between 10:30 and noon), putter around the apartment for a while, then settle in front of the computer for the rest of the day – frittering away the hours with blogs, silly internet videos, and watching movies and TV shows on Netflix. Needless to say, there was a bit of honest-to-goodness depression involved here, which also stemmed from the fact of my unemployment. I found that when I don’t have a draw on my time, my time tends to become somewhat valueless, and therefore meaningless. A day job – the eternal enemy – is actually a necessity at the moment. And for more than just paying the bills!

I recently started a new day job – some temp work, which allows me the flexibility to function as a musician – and the result is that I can now both pay the bills and feel as though I want to write again!

Now that I’ve discovered two creative danger zones for me, I can address the issues and fix them.

Hopefully 2010 will be a Year of Writing a Lot of Music. 2009 was a let-down in a lot of ways. Compositionally, I wrote far too little. Financially, I was always anxious and falling behind. Economically in general, things just sucked. And politically, the year was a little disappointing – although some good things were accomplished, those accomplishments went largely unnoticed amid the noise of Balloon Boy; the hyped-up, insane expectations of The First 100 Days; the utter absurdity of The Second 100 Days (as though we hadn’t head enough talking heads talking about other talking heads’ evaluations of etc); etc. But with the success of the first new T-A Concert, and the start of a new day job, I’m feeling energized and positive about this year.

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