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ePublishing Reading Session set for NWACDA Conference by Reginald Unterseher, R & S Chair for Male Choirs, NWACDA I The way that music gets from the composer into conductors’ and singers’ hands is in a significant transitional phase. I first wrote about some of the potential of ePublishing on this site two years ago, just before the first iPad was released. While most choirs still work from paper scores and will still do so for some time to come, more and more composers are making their works available directly from their web sites or from composer co-ops. Generally, they are distributed electronically as PDF files that The music presented at this ePublishing reading session will focus on:
The session will be presented without paper, which is the only way it is financially possible for us. The session will be held in a room with WiFi internet. Scores will be made available to read on participants’ laptops, iPads, or tablet devices that can read PDF files and download them from a web site. The materials will also be available on the NWACDA web site following the conference. This session will be the first of it’s kind, as far as we know, and we expect it to be an evolving format. I welcome all suggested improvements before and after the session on any aspect of the reading session, technical or artistic. For titles in traditional reading sessions, R&S leaders present their lists in late summer to the folks at the retailers who prepare the booklets to give them time to put them together. One advantage of the paper-free aspect of the session is our ability to continue to gather our materials closer to the time of the conference. Some of that repertoire has been chosen, but I can still review more pieces and web sites for the next few weeks. I need to have all the pieces chosen by the end of February in order to have things prepared for the session. If any of you, conductors and composers alike, know of pieces that should be considered, please send the information to reg@reginaldunterseher.com right away. Reginald Unterseher is Music Director and Composer-in-Residence at Shalom United Church of Christ, Richland, Washington. His works are published by Oxford University Press and Walton Music. He co-founded Washington East Opera and served as Chorus Master for nine years. From 1996 until 2004, he was Artistic Director of Consort Columbia Vocal Ensemble where he conducted ensembles of children and adults. He currently serves as Repertoire & Standards Chair for Men's Choirs for the Northwest Division of the American Choral Director's Association. |
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January 21, 2011 Your piece “Peace on earth…(and a lot of little crickets)” (published by Walton) is a big hit with choirs and audiences all over. You have some great advice for people preparing and performing it on your web site, www.paulcarey.net. How did this piece come into existence? I never expected anyone to publish this piece, thinking that all the little percussion parts in the score would scare directors away, yet Walton accepted it right away, sensing that the text not only fit the winter holiday season but also has a great general message about sharing and caring for any time of the year. What happened was that the JW Pepper review board and the distribution folks at Hal Leonard told Walton that the piece would never sell and that it was a mistake to publish it! When Gunilla Luboff told me this and as Walton neared release (as they did not go back on their decision to publish), all I could say was that maybe the so-called experts could be wrong! And wrong they were. We have been through a number of reprints and I believe the piece is Walton's #1 selling octavo for the last three years. Of course I would also like people to know that I write serious music for advanced mixed choirs, not just silly kid's choir pieces! And by the way, JW Pepper has, off and on, placed it on their website as a Pepper recommended piece- go figure. This usually means I might read/skim one hundred poems just to find one strong candidate. At times it can be very frustrating and actually 2008 and 2009 were not highly productive years in terms of the quantity of pieces completed- I was having a rough time finding poems then that really spoke to me. I think lately I have been having better luck in this regard. I think the best modern poetry I find to set speaks very naturally, very directly about the human experience and contains high amounts of visual imagery. For some reason well written visual imagery really gets my imagination going. I would also say that as composers, all we can do when we do our best work, is enhance or heighten an already great poem. We can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as the saying goes!
I did just that a few weeks later and although it wasn't cheap to mail a bunch of my best scores to South Korea, it turned out to be worth it. Hak-won e-mailed me with compliments on my music and asked me to write a Missa Brevis for the chorale's Fall concert. I, of course, jumped at the opportunity and wrote most of the piece in June and July 2009 while I was teaching at the N. Carolina Governor's School. Hak-won's biggest directive to me was to write something truly challenging for the choir- they were growing tired of new works that were too easy for them. So I wrote them a piece which is often quite bravura as far as the need for vocal agility, extended tessitura, dynamic range, etc. I also, however, wanted to make sure that there was plenty of lyricism in the piece as well, and you certainly hear that in the Agnus Dei and most of the Kyrie. The Chorale flew me over in October 2009 for the premiere in Seoul and they and the South Korean people were wonderful hosts. They sang the heck out of my “Missa Brevis Incheon”, plus two more pieces of mine on that program- “My Friend Elijah” and an arrangement of “Go Down, Moses”. Most of the major publishers have allowed themselves to be infected by the throw-away consumer mentality that is part of our society. You see some of them putting pieces permanently out of print quickly if they do not sell well in their first year of release, and really almost no major company wants to even be bothered with composer submissions that are over five minutes, are challenging, contain divisi, etc. I have also seen the company that first published my music, Oxford, just give up on printing octavos to any degree and give up on even having any active choral department based in the United States. I think that Oxford was a leader for good music here in the US but a few years ago they just pulled the plug on the US operation- a terrible shame. And now what we have is a terrible divide- virtually none of the best choral work being written today is being published at all by the leading conventional publishers. The drawback some directors see is that this fragments the market and makes it more difficult to find music since it is not all explorable at a brick and mortar store or in a browser bin at a convention. But I think composers now have no choice but to do this. I currently publish conventionally with Roger Dean and they have always been great to me, but my more adventurous music and the extended length pieces will still mostly be found as self-published on my website. The next hurdle for self-published composers involves reading sessions and honors choirs- it is often difficult to get a “self-published” piece included or even considered due to old habits of those organizing these events and the self interests of sheet music retailers. I am hoping that ACDA and other large organizations can start addressing that issue. |
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Enhanced Music Scores: more than notes on paper could ever be by Reginald Unterseher, R&S Chair for Male Choruses (Editor's note: Sci-Fi? We don't think so.) I My singers use digital displays rather than paper. The displays are very light, lighter than some of the paper scores they used to hold when we did large works with orchestra, surprisingly thin, and easy to hold for a whole concert. Displays replace more than sheet music Easy planning Making it work in rehearsal The software we use is closely related to the notation software I have used for years. Singers can choose to see the notes scroll by or to turn pages with a touch. The notes can easily be bigger or smaller. As saving paper and page turns is no longer a concern, each voice part gets its own staff, all the way through the score. Using my finger, I can make markings on my score, in color, that show up on everyone’s scores or just mine. It looks like I wrote them with a pencil or pen. Singers can make marks on their scores that are just for themselves and are saved with their score. When another singer uses this licensed copy in another year, they will be able to erase the markings or modify them and keep them in various versions, using procedures that are familiar from word processing. Typos and mistakes in the scores are almost unheard of anymore, and when they do happen, even scores that have already been distributed are all corrected with a downloaded update. I tell the singers “let’s start here,” touch the spot where I want us to begin, and all their scores go to that place. It flashes a couple of times so they can see exactly where it is. I touched the 2nd soprano and baritone lines and the starting and end points, so they all know exactly which section we are doing. We work through that passage a few times, and it is still shaky, so I assign that spot to their personal rehearsal list. It will stay on that list until they check it off . I have an automatic record of what I assigned, and when they check it off, it appears that way on my list. What about the still-existing paper library? The publisher has not created an Enhanced Score of this piece yet, as they have with their perennial best-sellers, or I might have just purchased all new copies in the new format. For this piece, I scanned the score and used some filters to sharpen and clarify the image. It is now just an image of my existing paper score, but I can still write on it on the display, as can my singers, and I can manually add some of the resource links I have. I have not digitized my entire library, and I am sure I won’t, but I expect to see the paper storage shrink year by year. One publisher has invested in scanning nearly all the pieces in their catalog, and sell the Basic Score version for a very reasonable cost. It is often worth it to me to just buy that rather than go through the time and expense to digitize my own. I now tend to purchase new Enhanced Score editions of classic pieces even if I had them in my paper library. The research and rehearsal resources and great editorial practices make it worth the money. A little help for singers who had to miss the rehearsal Practice and review between rehearsals With one of my academic choirs, part of their grade is linked to practice reports that are automatically generated when they log in to their scores. More personal rehearsal help With these resources right at their fingertips, we spend more of our group rehearsal time on artistic detail, rather than just learning notes and rhythms. In fact, my community chorus, which has always been reluctant to sing from memory, has found that these rehearsal resources make the memorization process much easier, and now we do at least one set per concert from memory. Advantages during performance The devices don’t have to be as big as their old black folders were, given the way the music scrolls or turns pages with a touch, so there is more room on the risers. The music appears in the right order automatically, and they don’t have to turn it in at the end of the concert—it is checked in and out electronically. The devices don’t depend on the light in the room for the singers to read them, so they can always see their scores. It took some experimenting for the device manufacturers to figure out how to make the screens have the right amount of light without casting a weird colored glow on my singer’s faces, but they did it. The audience does not miss noisy page turns at all. I have a larger, stand-mounted display to conduct from. Especially with orchestral scores, this allows me to see much more at a time. The bigger display works well with my color-coded highlighting and marking system, too. Yes, it was a challenge for publishers...and music retailers They had to come together on formatting standards, a process that required work with the various display manufacturers and the notation software companies. They had to come up with a way to deal with copyright security. During the time when they were launching the new formats, they had to still deal with existing paper inventory and customers that had not yet made the transition. The size, weight, and cost of the displays had to get to a certain point to be practical and affordable for enough singers to have them to so that there was a customer base. That would never happen with dedicated music displays alone. Now, though, they have a more reliable income stream than they did with paper. It is much harder to pirate a digital copy of an Enhanced Score than it was to illegally photocopy paper music, and the instant availability of scores for reasonable cost has meant that fewer people have the impulse to make illegal copies. I don’t even have a photocopier or printer any more, or any of their associated costs. I spend that money on new Enhanced Editions instead. Some serendipities Some smaller publishers were able to take a much bigger role without the capital outlay that it would have previously taken. They built their business on the quality of the music that they put out rather than the pressure they were able to put on distribution networks because of their size. They don’t feel as much driven by the lowest common musical denominator, so they could be more adventurous. As it turns out, the new learning aids that the Enhanced Scores include have made it possible for singers to perform works they previously thought not possible or practical. Music does not go out of print anymore. New, enhanced editions of classic music has proved to be an important part of publisher’s revenue, because it has given choruses a good reason to buy new versions of pieces they already had. Composers and editors get paid more, as the Composer and Editor Union negotiated a new formula when the distribution model changed [note: don’t forget, this article is a type of science fiction…]. Customers more than ever rely on the editorial function of publishers and choral organizations like ACDA to choose and distribute the best music, because few teachers and conductors have the time and inclination to dig through all that is out there. Retailers organize, present, and promote materials in ways that still make them the first stop for purchasing. This transition has not been without a few hiccups. It seemed like a huge change going in, and change can be daunting. Not all publishers and retailers survived, but that was happening anyway, before the transition. Some singers were afraid they would miss the feel of paper and would have to change so many of their long-standing habits. For most of them, though, the clarity and note size flexibility of the new format was a foot in the door, and the additional features that the Enhanced Scores offer won them over. We don’t want to go back. 13 January 2010 Reginald Unterseher is Music Director and Composer-in-Residence at Shalom United Church of Christ, Richland, Washington. His works are published by Oxford University Press and Walton Music. He co-founded Washington East Opera and served as Chorus Master for nine years. From 1996 until 2004, he was Artistic Director of Consort Columbia Vocal Ensemble where he conducted ensembles of children and adults. He currently serves as Repertoire & Standards Chair for Men's Choirs for the Northwest Division of the American Choral Director's Association. |
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1-16-2009 I Conductors need the support of other conductors, and it is not enough for me to just say that. Being part of the choir was an opportunity pass on the support I had been given in some situations, and to give the support I wish I had been given in other situations.
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