I speak to all performers of new music who have ever had the experience of dealing with antiquated publishers whose ways remain unchanged since the days of quill and parchment!
When a great living composer has a premiere in some metropolitan center and your
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| How much $ has John Harbison already lost? |
interest is piqued, rare is the publisher who can actually show you the score without weeks, if not months, of wrangling and miscommunication. If you are a clarinetist, and you see that a new piece has been written by a German composer for your instrument, good luck to you on securing a copy of the score for performance the next month. You will have an easier time imagining what the piece might sound like and writing it down yourself.
I have, at times, waited half a year for publishers to respond to my requests for scores, and it’s not as if I requested a block of cheese from a cobbler. These pieces are listed in the publishers’ catalogues, clearly advertised for sale! Why then should it take a publisher six months just to figure out if they can actually sell it to you?
The technology exists to send a score across the world instantaneously, but rare is the publisher who could even fathom the notion, let alone put it into practice!
George Gershwin used to sit in a window and plug his latest tunes so that you could walk in off the street and buy it on the spot. Woe to the composer who advertises his latest work on his blog. Unless he’s self-published, that fellow turns his readers over to the incompetents in charge of his canon.
It’s been a decade since Amazon, and half that since iTunes. Why the music publishers cannot adjust to the modern age should be a cause for concern for every musician. How many dollars have composers lost because their publisher bungled their catalogue? How many performances of new works have been abandoned because of the demoralizing morass that is the music publishing industry?
We demand:
- Digital delivery of any score in a publishers catalogue
- Instantaneous access to new musical works through online previews
- For composers to demand better representation from their publishers!
