Music publishing

Music publishing

Within the broad spectrum of musical professions, music publishing is one very few people consciously set out to enter.

It's understandable. Editing, selling, promoting, or distributing sheet music just isn't as sexy as playing in a string quartet, conducting an orchestra, or commanding center stage in an opera.

Someone has to do it, though. Without publishers, musicians would have little or no access to the scores they need and living composers would have no way of reaching a broader public. What's more, practitioners say music publishing can be a surprisingly rewarding niche for the right kind of person.

'Nobody sets out in life to be a music publisher,' admits Steven Swartz, publicity manager for publishers Boosey & Hawkes (B&H). 'People get involved because of their passion and commitment to the music of today. They're drawn to the field because it's the point at which the repertoire is renewing itself. The most successful are the slightly geeky people who get really turned on when there's a new piece by John Adams coming out. If that gets your juices flowing, you might be a publisher.'

The problem is finding a job. As with so many areas of the musical world, full-time jobs in the music publishing industry are scarce - particularly those that demand actual musical expertise, such as editing and proofreading.

'You have to be realistic. You can't plan to be a publisher per se, the way you might plan to be a violinist.'

Daniel Dorff, vice president of publishing for Theodore Presser, says most of the jobs in his Philadelphia-area company are in non-musical fields like warehousing, bookkeeping, marketing and promotions. 'Very few companies are taking proofreading seriously, and there just aren't that many companies around, period,' he says. 'You have to be realistic. You can't plan to be a publisher per se, the way you might plan to be a violinist.'

Even so, there's always a need for musicians in a publishing house's rental department, where employees tailor score rentals to the specific needs of orchestras, chamber groups and opera companies. And no matter where you fit in the publishing hierarchy, Dorff says, 'The more of a musician you are, the better, and the more versatile you are skills-wise, the better.'

True to their word that no-one sets out to be a publisher, both Dorff and Swartz earned advanced degrees as composers, Dorff (who remains active as a composer) at the University of Pennsylvania and Swartz at the University at Buffalo. Both imagined they'd end up in an academic setting and discovered a harsher reality when they left school.

'I wasn't even sure what a publisher did,' Swartz recalls. 'All I knew was that we all wanted to get published. But very few of us coming out of the program could actually get teaching jobs, and so we ended up finding other ways to make a living in music.'

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