I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast this morning called "There's no such thing as a free appetizer," and it started me thinking about consequences of offering musical stuff to people for free. As a composer I unfortunately came of musical age at the time when music publishing was on the wane. I suppose I caught the tail end of it when I worked with Seesaw Music. I felt very good about the professional relationship I had with Raoul Ronson, and felt that he earned his (and the standard) 90% of the sale of every piece of music he sold because he promoted my music. I got some hefty royalty checks during the last few years of his Raoul's life, which happened to be my first few years as a published composer. After Raoul died they reduced substantially, trickling down to almost nothing. Nobody was there to advocate for me in the company that took over the Seesaw inventory.
I didn't have the resources at the time (or now, come to think of it) to set up my own publishing house for my not-yet-written music, and I did not have the strength of ego at the time (or now, come to think of it) to withstand possible market rejection. In order to offset the price of a high-quality photocopying machine and binding equipment, and renting office space for it (there's no room in our house), I would have had to sell a lot of music. I had a choice to make. Not wanting all my hard work to go to waste sitting in either my drawer or the shelves of a company that wasn't interested in promoting my work, I decided to put everything I wrote from 2006 onward into the Werner Icking Music Archive which was then absorbed into the IMSLP Petrucci Library. I thought of my contributions as a kind of Tzedakah.
From the numbers on the IMSLP website it seems that a lot of people download my contributions, but it is very rare that I hear from anyone who does (though I am thrilled when someone does write). I rarely hear about performances, which leads me to think that performances are indeed very rare. Occasionally (very occasionally) people write to me asking if I could re-write something for their instrumental combination (and I always do), and once the music is finished I don't hear anything more from them. It's as if my very act of giving something to someone I do not know makes the thing that I give have so little value that it is not worth acknowledging. It becomes a non-transaction, which becomes, in our market-oriented society, a non-relationship.
Maybe the act of Tzedakah is only properly realized when it involves someone with money giving money to someone without money. I used to think that giving music to people was a form of Tzedakah, but now I question that belief. Here are Maimonides' Eight Levels of Giving (in descending order):
1. Giving an interest-free loan to a person in need; forming a partnership with a person in need; giving a grant to a person in need; finding a job for a person in need; so long as that loan, grant, partnership, or job results in the person no longer living by relying upon others.
2. Giving tzedakah anonymously to an unknown recipient via a person (or public fund) which is trustworthy, wise, and can perform acts of tzedakah with your money in a most impeccable fashion.
3. Giving tzedakah anonymously to a known recipient.
4. Giving tzedakah publicly to an unknown recipient.
5. Giving tzedakah before being asked.
6. Giving adequately after being asked.
7. Giving willingly, but inadequately.
8. Giving "in sadness" (giving out of pity) or giving unwillingly.
In the highest level it is not possible to substitute the word "music" for "tzedakah," or "money," but for the longest time the word "music" seemed to be a sensible substitution to me, particularly in #4. Perhaps, not being a person who deals much in money, I misunderstood the meaning of the word.
2. Giving music anonymously to an unknown recipient via a person (or public fund) which is trustworthy, wise, and can perform acts of tzedakah with your music in a most impeccable fashion. (This would be an entity like the IMSLP.)
3. Giving music anonymously to a known recipient. (I would count instances when the composer is not acknowledged on a program in this group.)
4. Giving music publicly to an unknown recipient.
5. Giving music before being asked.
6. Giving adequately after being asked.
7. Giving willingly, but inadequately.
8. Giving "in sadness" (giving out of pity) or giving unwillingly.
Giving, when reciprocal (in some way or other), is a wonderful thing. When it is not reciprocal (in some way or other) giving creates sadness and emptiness on the part of the person doing the giving. People experience this kind of sadness and emptiness in personal relationships with friends, lovers, and family members, and discuss them with other friends, other family members, and therapists.
Musical relationships (i.e. the relationship between a composer and a person play his or her music) are personal relationships. Perhaps we, as a musical culture, are so used to playing music by people who are either dead or inaccessible that we forget.
2 comments:
"Musical relationships (i.e. the relationship between a composer and a person play his or her music) are personal relationships. Perhaps we, as a musical culture, are so used to playing music by people who are either dead or inaccessible that we forget." The long term fact is that we all are dead composers, soon to be should we care to admit it. Before the rise of music publishing and the still very new ASCAP/BMI guilds when seen from the perspective of centuries, musicians were usually employed by city or state, church or the "rich." The century-new mentality of money-making for most living classical composers, of which there might be simply too many for a functioning marketplace, is not the same mentality as caused an Ives to self-publish. IMSLP's PDF library seems quite like Ives' Redding, Connecticut, printed works. Marx' great error about the value theory of labor and the perhaps-error of a rise of capital-rich publishing, both about 150 years old, both forgot that someone like Emily Dickinson was unpublished and unknown until after her demise. And yet her work abides, fitting neither the production theory of Marx nor reality of capital-driven, contract-captured music publishing. I suspect that our classical heroes of ages past did not have the modern angst. What do we "forget" when playing music by dead composers? That they lived? That composers live today? I think we forget little, for it is the music which counted, counts today and will count in some time to come when you as a dead composer will never know a work has touched someone, somewhere. Such giving of music as you describe when you cannot know of its performance "creates sadness and emptiness?" I think this sadness comes from the first assumption above, that musical relationships are personal. I cannot see that, or perhaps I refuse to acknowledge it as you do. Picking up a Haydn work to play or study does not prove a personal relationship with Haydn, does it? And yet a composer from Illinois wrote on this blog about playing some Haydn, very-much-alive music from a long dead composer. Might I suggest reconsidering the notion of a "personal relationship" to one of a "musical relationship" which is not personal. Just musical? It certainly addresses some existential angst by changing the underlying assumptions. I like musical assumptions, but I confess to being suspicious often of personal assumptions of all but the closet of my circle. Have I a personal relationship with Haydn? I see none, but most assuredly he and I still have this very day a very real musical relationship. And since we write with the notion of traditional tzedakah as a cultural marker as part of the subject, I have a musical relationship with Ernst Bloch too, but personally I will never know the man. Whether a deeply religious Catholic like Haydn or quasi-modern Jew like Bloch, I know their works, have performed them but I cannot know the men. Perhaps the problem causing some angst is one of seeking to know personally to whom you are "giving." But like some folks' Facebook pages, if one were to be even a moderately popular composer and try to keep up personal relationships with those to whom you would have "given," there would be no time left. My old mentor used to advise, work. Don't look around; just work. It seems even now as was then quite the antidote. Besides wouldn't you have to change your blog's name from Musical Assumptions to Personal Assumptions? As to your first thoughts about titling your essay, your blog entry was read. It would have been read had you titled it "Some Consequences of Giving Away Music for Free." I see none. You see some. Therein is a personal difference, but it is no musical difference. Best wishes.
Thank you, Anonymous.
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