Composer Institute: publishing seminars

Earlier this week, the participants and auditors of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute observed presentations about the technical and financial demands of music publication.

Stephen Paulus, a local Minnesota composer mainly of choral music, decided to publish his own music after a stint with a major New York publisher in the 1970s.  In a seminar on Monday, he offered advice to emerging composers who may be deciding whether to self-publish or to work with a publishing company, which likely would do a better job marketing their music.  While large businesses can afford to take chances and risk failure, an individual who decides to self-publish will experience a greater amount of financial and artistic flexibility.  In his contract with a major publishing house, for instance, Paulus was required to submit accessible, short anthems in exchange for publication of his more serious, academic music.  Now in control of his own output creatively and physically, he makes money both for writing and for publishing his music.

Paulus reminded composers that the copyright on their music is what makes it valuable and that "copyright" actually indicates a bundle of rights for diverse usages.  He urged young composers to be confident and to advocate for themselves.  Sometimes, feedback will be hurtful or discouraging as they try to sell their music; using humorous anecdotes for illustration, Paulus explained that this is just a natural part of the challenge they would face.  Their music, he reminded them, has indisputable legal and financial worth on the printed page and on recording.

The next morning, Bill Holab led a seminar about the production of "exceptional scores and parts," which he started by stating that music, as an interpretive art, must be easy to read.  Holab stated that today's music publishers, including composers using notation software like Finale or Sibelius, are book designers who must learn the conventions and traditions of the craft (but stresses clarity always as the most important trait).  He has a long history in the publishing business, in which staff copyists formerly produced orchestral scores among a team of colleagues: one person to draw the staves, another the bar lines, another the note heads, and still more to transfer the accidentals, stems, and articulation markings from rubbing paper to the score.  This painstaking process has been simplified and expedited, but a publisher must still remain meticulous about the product.

I personally wish that more composers would write out their music by hand; handwritten parts make performers engage with the music in a different and one might say deeper way.  When I am handed a piece of music on an 8.5x11" piece of paper with a title in Times New Roman, that piece immediately has little or no character to me at all, no matter what the content looks like. 

Holab used a projector to show examples of music that had been engraved or copied poorly and he asked his audience for comments on how it might be improved.  Inappropriate visual spacing, both vertical and horizontal,  frequently disrupts or complicates the flow of information on the page.  He showed a sample of a Ferneyhough score, which made me laugh; some might say that the whole point of this music is that it's hard to read!  Holab asserted that he was talking strictly about the demanding and aesthetically displeasing layout of the page -- the horribly overlapping dynamic markings and phrasing indications, plus almost no empty space between the staves of the individual orchestral parts -- and not about the complexist style. 

Holab explained that he is always careful to print many cues in the parts in order to orient the players and put them at ease during long passages of rest.  He showed an example, measure after measure of uninterrupted monotonous eighth-note patterns.  "You're going to say, 'This cue looked repetitive.' -- This is a Philip Glass piece!"  Holab has worked for Glass and is thus well acquainted with his hyper-minimalist rhetoric.