Posted on 10-10-2002

Click to Download Scores by New American Composers
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI, NYT 9 Oct02 (Photo shows Richard Kessler, director of
the American Music Center)

In March 1939 Aaron Copland convened a meeting of activist New York
composers at his studio on West 63rd Street in Manhattan to discuss
challenges facing American music and strategize. Like his colleagues at
that gathering (Otto Luening, Harrison Kerr, Marion Bauer, Quincy Porter
and Howard Hanson), Copland believed that after decades of struggle,
American music was finally overcoming the widespread assumption that
composers of concert music by definition must be European. Publishers and
recording companies had at long last begun to take on American composers.
Still, composers had trouble bringing their music to wider attention, or
getting scores, recordings and information to one another.

What came out of that meeting was the founding of the American Music
Center, an organization to aid in the distribution of music and serve as an
information clearinghouse. When the center opened an office on West 42nd
Street later that year, it quickly became a command post and drop-in site.
In 1990 the center moved to airy offices on West 26th Street. In the last
few years the kind of networking the center was founded for has been
shifting to its Web site (amc.net), which includes an online magazine
called New Music Box.

This afternoon the American Music Center takes a bold leap into the
Internet future when it formally introduces New Music Jukebox
(newmusicjukebox.org) in a briefing at Avery Fisher Hall. This free site
promises to be a powerful Web portal for contemporary American music and
the composers who create it, as well as performers, professionals in the
larger field and the musically curious. New Music Jukebox offers a 24-hour
"virtual" listening room with streaming and downloadable sound files, as
well as extensive composer biographies, works lists, publishers,
performance data and other information, all cross-referenced. If things go
well, browsing through New Music Jukebox may give today's online users some
sense of what it was like to hang out at the center's bustling, ramshackle
office some 60 years ago, to talk shop and trade scores with other people
in the field.

But legal thickets could slow down the process. Besides using sound files
from commercial recordings, which are protected by copyright, New Music
Jukebox will also include scores online, either excerpted or complete,
which users will be able to view and in many cases print out or download
for free. To date, printed scores have been strictly protected;
photocopying them is illegal. In order to include scores online, the
American Music Center has been engaged in case-by-case negotiations with
composers, publishers and record producers. Their success could represent a
breakthrough in copyright law.

With the rising costs of printing and with fewer houses taking on fewer
composers, the system of distributing and promoting new works has
languished. Composers have increasingly turned to self-publishing. The
Internet offers an alternative way to distribute scores, yet there are
legal complications, as Richard Kessler, 43, the center's executive
director since 1997, acknowledges. "At its core, New Music Jukebox is based
on the idea that everyone is struggling with in the music field, namely,
that technology provides access to information and music in ways we have
never experienced before," Mr. Kessler said in a recent interview. "But
that great potential is being wrestled to the ground by
intellectual-property-rights issues." Comparable wrestling matches are
going on in all fields that involve the exchange of creative work and
information, notably pop music, which was made clear by the legal ruckus
provoked free file-sharing Web sites.

Mr. Kessler, an accomplished trombonist and a firebrand on behalf of
contemporary American music, and his colleagues at the center have proven
better at bringing about cooperation between publishers, recording
companies and composers. Paradoxically, because the field of contemporary
classical music involves vastly fewer people, products and dollars, they
had an advantage of sorts. Still, their success may serve as a model to
other fields of how to bridge conflicting interests. In every case
involving the inclusion of a score on Jukebox, Mr. Kessler said, "the
copyright holder determines how people will access it." A particular
composer or publisher might only want the score listed as a bibliographical
entry with information on how to obtain it, as well as listings of past
performances and reviews. Some scores will be available only in excerpted
form, as an inducement for later purchase. But other scores, especially
shorter works, will be available complete. For larger chamber works,
interested users must still rent individual parts to perform them, and pay
appropriate fees to Ascap and B.M.I. (Broadcast Music Inc.), the
organizations that regulate the performances and broadcast of music.

Still, isn't New Music Jukebox inviting trouble by posting manuscripts on
the Web? "We're not that worried," Mr. Kessler said. In many cases scores
are posted in nonperformable formats. For example, a chamber work for eight
instruments might appear only in a miniature-size full score. To perform
the work, individual parts would still have to be rented. Some scores, a
solo piano work, for example, could be downloaded in usable formats. But
Mr. Kessler said: "Are musicians who are going to the trouble of performing
these works in concert likely to avoid the royalty process? We don't think
so." Besides, as all parties to the negotiations acknowledge, no one in
classical music makes much money from the sales of printed scores. Even a
score by a living master like Elliott Carter, who is published by Boosey &
Hawkes, rarely exceeds $50 and might sell only a couple of hundred of
copies a year, a significant sales figure in this field.

As Jennifer Bilfield, the general manager of Boosey & Hawkes, explained
recently, a printed score should be seen more as "a testimony to a
publisher's and composer's mutual commitment to a work." It is like a
composition's "calling card," she added.

A publishing house spends the bulk of its time on the complex task of
making music available by promoting a work, maintaining rental parts, and
fostering performances over the long term. In this effort a service like
New Music Jukebox could actually be a help, which is why Boosey & Hawkes
has been cooperative, despite the potential conflicts. "It's at the
discretion of the composer and the publisher to decide how much or how
little to participate," Ms. Bilfield said, while everyone continues to
grapple step by step with "the more gnarly elements of the matter."

There are 142 composers taking part in New Music Jukebox, with 237 sound
files and 242 score files. In a year's time, the program is expected to
offer a round-the-clock Web radio station and an online marketplace that
will connect users to potentially thousands of composers and their works.
Thousands? "Absolutely," Mr. Kessler said. "Of the American Music Center's
2,500 official members, some 2,000 are composers." And, he added, Ascap
estimates that there might be as many as 40,000 American composers working
in the concert music field.

His hope is that a wide variety of users will rely on the center's
services, particularly New Music Jukebox. A concertgoer could find out more
about a composer online and even see a score or listen to a sound file. A
filmmaker looking for a composer could review potential collaborators. A
flutist who learns that a work for flute and marimba was given its premiere
but doesn't know who wrote it or where it was performed, could find it
online using the search terms "flute" or "marimba."

Over the years the center has introduced many programs to support the
publication and recording of music, including pragmatic workshops on topics
like "Every Composer's Business" and "Self-Produced CD's." The center has a
staff of 14 and a budget of $4.8 million derived from fund-raising,
foundation awards, and fees for administering grant programs for other
agencies.

Earlier this year the center transferred its historic collection of more
than 60,000 scores and recordings of works by American composers (including
a vast quantity of unpublished scores and private recordings) to the New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, which can do
a better job of maintaining them while still assuring access.

Moving the collection was a tacit acknowledgment that the center's
essential work can no longer be confined to its office. Whether the New
Music Jukebox site accomplishes its goals and grows exponentially the way
its planners hope will depend on whether officials at the center can
continue to wrestle with the legal complications and forge compromises with
publishers and recording companies. Their counterparts in other fields will
likely be paying attention.