“Is your music published?”

Many people have asked me, upon learning that I am a composer, “Is your music published?”, and I usually find it a difficult question to answer.

Admittedly, I know what these questioners probably mean: sending a composition off to a specialist sheet music publishing house; persuading them to add it to their catalogue; selling my rights to them; standing back while they print, market, and hopefully sell hundreds of copies; and collecting a small percentage of the sales as a royalty.

Of course this is exactly what music publishing has been for most of the past two centuries. But these days, individual composers have many other options for presenting their music directly to performers and trying to interest them in obtaining copies, rather than waiting for the entire traditional method of publishing to run its course. This is what gives numerous composers (including me) the option of saying, “I am self-published.”

I think this topic deserves to be discussed publicly because until very recently, these seems to have been an idea that music needs to be accepted by a publisher in order to be worthy of presentation to people outside the local community. In other words, the music derives its worth from the approval of the publisher. This belief is completely untrue—it confuses opinion with fact—yet various forces continue to impose it on composers and performers as the norm.

My own crisis point in all of this occurred shortly after the start of my career while I was working tirelessly to get my concert band works into the hands of editors. I would do some small-scale marketing in an attempt to build interest (“X number of performers like it already, so you should like it too, and buy it from me”), and I began to realize that direct contact with performers was actually far more rewarding on the whole than the dialogue with publishers.

However, since this approach has not translated into commercially successful self-publishing (the music does not yet earn its own keep), I am now a bit confused about how to proceed. I thought it might be helpful to get my thoughts into the open and take a good look at them. And a second motivation for this blog is the fact that many obstacles have been beyond my individual control, but if enough people are aware of them and challenge them, it might be possible to make a difference that benefits all composers.

Please understand that I have no intention of alienating traditional publishing houses through my work. I believe they still play a vital role in the music industry, and I will be sure to explain more about my ambivalence later.

For now, all I want is to start persuading composers and performers alike that the palette has expanded. Composers can obtain some compensation for their hard work, or at least understand how to distribute their own music while waiting to hear back from big publishers. Performers can still get bread-and-butter repertoire from vendors they know and trust, and thanks to the internet, they can also try new things more readily than ever before. They might even find they really like some of it.

I believe more and more that it is justified to tell people my music is published, and I am absolutely sure there is a great deal more out there—good music, published by other composers, that likewise has not yet received the recognition it deserves.

Let’s see what we can do about that.