“One of the most serious crimes in our musical community is that of choral directors photocopying the music of living composers in order to illegally perform their music…It is time for singers to report these atrocities!”

“Can we establish some sort of collective to reward whistle blowers?”

“Stealing is stealing. Don’t rationalize it.”

“However, a college or university choral director who photocopies choral parts that are not public domain—and whose choristers know that he does it—he or she is not only breaking the law, but is setting a bad moral and musical example for the singers who respect him or her. Those choral directors ARE evil people!”

First, allow me to say this: piracy, whatever you think of it, is not stealing. Intellectual property law professor Lawrence Lessig ¹ points out an important distinction in his book Free Culture. If I steal a score from the music store, that’s a score the store paid for and that they no longer have to sell. However, if I check a score out of the library and make a photocopy, that isn’t depriving anyone of a sale. If I could afford to buy the score, I probably would have. My copying of the score does not represent a lost sale to a music store, a publisher, a distributor, or (most importantly) a composer.

In the SCI discussion, church and school choir conductors  are the chief villains. Churches and schools (particularly public schools) are not exactly known the world over for their bulging arts budgets. The composers taking issue with these performers seem to think that they could put their kids through college if only these horrible, cheapskate conductors would put their money where their batons are and do the “right” thing. WRONG! The options are not photocopying your music on the one hand and purchasing it on the other; the options are photocopying your music and NOT PERFORMING IT AT ALL!

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather hear an “illicit” performance of a contemporary work than a legal performance of a public domain work by Mozart or Scarlatti. I’ve sold my music, and I will hopefully continue to do so. But don’t think for a second that I would tell somebody not to copy my work. Steal my music!

Got any thoughts on intellectual property? I knew you would. Feel free to have your voice heard in the comments.

He separated the audience into two groups for each piece: a group who had heard the work before and a group who hadn’t. The latter group he liked to call “the innocents,” and the masterclass mostly took the form of a focus group discussion. After each piece, Corigliano asked, “What did you hear?” He wasn’t interested in what anybody liked or didn’t like. He wanted their empirical observations about the materials, their development, and the form. It was a nice little experiment that proved one of the things that Dr. Lorenz has told me before: anytime you feel like you’re really beating the audience over the head with an idea, you’re only beginning to make it clear.”

Toward the end of the observation discussion for each piece, he allowed himself to slip into a few opinions. He told me the disintegrating ending of my quartet was “really quite lovely” and that it was a “great piece.” Not much to snip out and put on a website or anything, but I’ll take it.

If you don’t know what a masterclass is, or if you’ve only been to performance masterclasses, composer John Adams just wrote a humorous and thoughtful essay on composition masterclasses that you should read. As a summary, I will tell you that he calls the student composer “the victim” and the process “ritual disembowelment.”

I find masterclasses to be a bit nerve-wracking in the best of situations, but this will be something else altogether. This will be a masterclass given by one of the most prominent American composers of his generation, and I imagine it will be attended by several members of the faculty from outside the composition area. Thankfully, I will be presenting a rather short (6½ min.) piece, Falling up the down escalator. Also, I happen to have a stellar, recently-released recording by the H2 Quartet.

I’m hoping to come out of the experience smarter but not in too much pain.

It’s a tough question, and it’s one that I know a lot of composers deal with, though not one we often talk about. I’m a one-thing-at-a-time kind of person. That’s bad, because it means if I get side-tracked by one of these “next projects,” I put off my main project and it loses momentum. There are some people that can successfully work on two pieces at once, but I’m not among them, and I think most of the composers I know would say the same thing. This can cause some problems. One of the most frustrating is that working on large-scale projects means that you can’t take on any new projects for a long time. Right now, I’m working on my dissertation. By the time I finish it, I’ll have been working on it for at least a year and a half. The worst part is when somebody says, “Hey, we should work on a piece. I want you to write something for me.” This doesn’t happen very often, and when it does and I can’t act, it’s pretty maddening. I have to tell them to come back in a year and ask me again.

The good thing about the one-piece-at-a-time policy is the moment I get the new idea. Nothing gets me more excited about finishing the piece I’m working on than the allure of diving into a new one. (Admittedly, the diving in can be painful, but in a hurts-so-good kind of way.) I know some composers that keep a written queue of pieces they want to write. I keep a mental list. Sometimes I bump things up and down the queue. I’ve been meaning to work on a one-act chamber opera for the better part of 5 years. But when things start to stagnate, it always helps me to start thinking of that next big thing.