Music Publishing: an ominous sign

It is no secret that the business of publishing music is in trouble, especially choral music. Much of it comes from the ubiquity of the Xerox machine – for decades now, choral directors have too often obtained one copy of an anthem and Xeroxed it for their choir, instead of buying printed copies. This is illegal, but the inconvenience and expense of purchasing legal copies has been too much for many of my colleagues.

More recently, the appearance of the Choral Public Domain Library has added to the problems. CPDL is sort of a “Project Gutenberg” for choral music; there are equivalents for instrumental music as well. It has made it difficult for any publisher to contemplate the production of printed editions of the “classics” – anything that is in public domain – because (again) the choral director will face the choice of paying money for printed editions, or getting it for free. It is not in fact “free,” because Xeroxing costs money, but many situations are like it is in our parish: the purchase of music comes from our small music budget, but Xeroxing comes from the much larger “office supplies” budget.

The ominous sign, which provoked this essay? I received this afternoon what in the sales business is referred to as a “cold call” – an unsolicited telephone call from a gentleman at Paraclete Press, which is a fine and reputable publisher of choral music for the church. He wanted to sell me some of their new choral music, in particular a new Anglican Chant Psalter edited by George Guest at $49.95 per copy. It sounds splendid, though (as I told him) we could not use it because the text translation is not what is used in our parish. Here is a link to their description of the Psalter; if any readers out there can use such a book, I encourage you to consider it.

“Cold calls” are no fun for anyone. The rewards from them are meager. I sense that it may represent some desperation at Paraclete Press.

Perhaps more ominous still is my recent experience in ordering some music from Oxford University Press. In the world of Anglican music, they are the king of the hill (though Novello would have a place in there somewhere). Their catalogue of the Anglican standards is large. Or “was” large. It seems that they have gutted their choral catalogue, and turned the distribution of the leftovers over to Edition Peters. I am told by a friend in the business that they appear to have decided that it simply is not worth their while to publish composers such as Tallis or Gibbons or Purcell (thank you, CPDL, for this state of affairs), or even much of their twentieth-century (and copyrighted) material by composers such as William Mathias and John Rutter. If you already have a single copy of something you want to sing, they will grant permission to reprint it for a reasonable fee, but if you don't have a copy, you are out of luck. I have been a choral director for a long time, and started a file of reference copies of choral music in graduate school. Even after significant pruning a few years ago, it still runs to about 1500 titles that I think I might find useful someday, out of perhaps ten times that number that I have examined and discarded over the years. But what is a young person just beginning in this work to do?

If Oxford University Press can't make a go of it, it is hard to imagine who can.

[Edited to add: As it happens, the next item on my to-do list was to request permission to make additional copies of an O.U.P. title for our youth choir: "Choristers' Prayer" by Richard Proulx, published in 2002 and now out of print. We sang it in 2007, and need a few more copies for our larger youth choir to repeat it this fall. A visit to the O.U.P. website shows that they have not entirely abandoned choral music -- they have simply gotten out of the "old" stuff aside from publishing anthologies, and drastically cut back on their newer stuff. They still claim to have a catalogue of about 2,000 titles, which appear to be aimed more at the secular educational market than the church.]