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 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.
Now, the American Music Center has taken a bold leap into the Internet future with the introduction of New Music Jukebox (newmusicjukebox.org). 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.
Listening room
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,” Kessler said. “But that great potential is being wrestled to the ground by intellectual-property-rights issues.”
In every case involving the inclusion of a score on Jukebox, 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 BMI (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,” 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 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.
Testimony to commitment
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.”
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.
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,” 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.
