Orchestra Summit 2006

Orchestra Summit 2006

Orchestra Summit 2006

No one denies that we all want performances of new orchestral work that composers, musicians, and their audiences will look to with pride and satisfaction. Six key industry players discuss ways of reaching that goal and the hurdles that remain in our path.

Written By

NewMusicBox Staff

McManus: Okay, one issue that we really haven’t discussed yet but is, of course, paramount to new music and getting it out to the public, is recording. It’s an issue that has plagued this business quite a bit in the last couple of years. Robert, you had some ideas about that.

Levine: Well, I’ve been at a number of negotiations where recording new music came up, and the issue was always presented as, “It’s too expensive. We can’t get the stuff out there. Composers can’t get their works heard by other orchestras.” I think there was always a little bit of truth to that, although more because of what David said, because a lot of these agreements, they weren’t done to help or hurt composers; it’s just the way they were structured happened to impact new music negatively. I think it’s increasingly a non-issue. I think with the Internet agreement that we negotiated five or six years ago—

McManus: Could you explain what that is?

Levine: It’s an AFM agreement with orchestras that basically allows orchestras to distribute content over the Internet directly. So, it’s not CDs, it’s not DVDs, it’s just downloads or streaming. And orchestras now are beginning to use it. Mine was actually one of the first, the first to sell downloaded content. One of the pieces that was up on our first wave was a piece by Roberto Sierra that we had premiered three weeks before. Now, not only was that a premiere recording, which is unusual enough, but it was for sale within three weeks of the premiere, which has got to be a record. I mean, not having to go through CDs, not having to distribute CDs, not having to pay to manufacture CDs or store them. The fact is, there are opportunities here that I think are going to radically change the way that new music is available in the recording environment within a matter of a year or two.

Lennon: I think I should also add that there have been great strides just even in the past year. Right now as we sit here and speak, there are ongoing negotiations with, I believe, up to 59 orchestra and opera and ballet managers around the country with the union about CDs, but I think there’s more significance there. I think we all can agree that the technologies that are there and available to promote the orchestra product and the composer’s works are light years away from what was around 20 years ago. And I think we’ve all been a little slow and are just playing catch-up. Certainly what’s happening now, rather than negotiating on the union’s part directly with the recording companies, by dealing directly with the orchestra managers I think that although maybe we’re taking baby steps in that direction, we’re understanding that recording perhaps needs to be viewed far more in a promotional way because that will also impact the problems that are happening at the box office.

Levine: And negotiating with recording companies is completely pointless because they are so bottom-line driven they have no interest in putting out new music unless it’s something they know will sell, which basically means they have no interest in it.

Bilfield: Can I ask a question, a point of clarification? Are the recordings that are being distributed made from the live performance, or are they being edited?

Levine: Well, in our case it was edited from three live performances. There was no patch session or anything, and I think for the most part orchestras, if they prepare the stuff properly, they’re better than acceptable.

Bilfield: And do the orchestras vote on the final product before it goes out?

Levine: It really depends. The Internet agreement is quite flexible. In our case we have a local committee, we involve the artistic committee. They had to approve the final version before it went available for sale, as did the composer, as did the music director.

Fogel: Each orchestra can negotiate its own method.

McManus: Correct, so now they can come up with a customized solution to whatever problem they have.

Fogel: When I first came to the Chicago Symphony in 1985, we had a million-dollar-a-year income stream from royalties from George Solti’s recordings. Now I don’t think it has a $33,000-a-year revenue stream. The big change that I think finally is recognized by everybody is that recordings, in whatever form you look at them, will probably never again be a meaningful source of revenue to anybody. But as a promotional vehicle, as a musical calling card, and, of course, as an historical document, it will have enormous value. And so I actually think the issue of the recording, five years from now when we talk about problems of new music, that won’t be one of them.

Bilfield: Publishers are experiencing the same thing, a decline in mechanical income, and certainly Boosey & Hawkes is not alone in having taken a very proactive role in not only licensing our composer’s work for film, but creating our own masters so that we, working with certain record companies and orchestras, can create paths of income for existing recordings. So to the extent that orchestras can enter the sort of partnership to have a revenue stream and passive income from synchronization licensing, there’s a lot of money to be made in it.

Levine: Well, in a sense, that’s what we did. We took recordings that, except really for the Sierra, had already been done on the radio, had been edited and we’d been paid for, and made them available for sale. There’s not a lot of additional income, but it’s some. More to the point, the stuff is out there—it’s helping the orchestra; it’s helping Roberto, I suspect. You know, it’s furthering everybody’s interest. It’s on iTunes. You can go buy it on iTunes.

Theofanidis: I’m thinking about this all from the standpoint of, you know, the very small cut of the pie that the composer would get eventually from something like that. Is there a standardized thing from the union that is broken down by percentage, or is that just really done in house?

Lennon: In a nut shell, what’s going on at the negotiation table right now is recognizing what Henry was talking about, that the days of recording a product purely with the idea of making commercial profit off that physical product are certainly long behind us.

Levine: At least in the symphonic world.

Lennon: Right. So that’s the first thing. The second is looking more at a model of revenue sharing. On the management side, they’ll refer to it as equal risk/equal reward. On our side, we’ll look at it as a creative and innovative way to create a new model that will hopefully solve a myriad of problems, not the least of which is jumpstarting an interest in this whole industry and getting people back into the theaters and into the halls. But finding a way to do it that is not financially prohibitive for all concerned.

Fogel: Am I correct, Robert, in assuming that once you’ve made that agreement and that piece is now out there, can Mr. Sierra himself or his publisher download it and then make a copy to send it out as a demonstration of his work? Is that a legitimate use?

Levine: I don’t see how we’re going to stop them, quite frankly, but if it’s commercially out there, all they have to do is tell people to go buy it for $4 off iTunes. Why is that such a big deal?

Fogel: Now, excuse me, the cost is so little for anybody to go buy Roberto Sierra’s piece, but if every composer who wants the artistic administration department of the Omaha or Chicago Symphony to hear their piece—the orchestra’s not going to go out and buy $400, or $4,000 worth of new music every day to listen to. They’re not going to do it. Commercial CDs you get in the mail.

Levine: I would suggest that if an orchestra is not willing to invest $4 in listening to a new piece, they’re probably not that serious about considering it anyway.

Bilfield: We have to make this as easy as possible.

Schwarz: But don’t most orchestras allow the composer to—I mean, if a composer does a piece, we’ll make a CD for them, not to be played on the radio, not to be released commercially, but to promote their own [music].

Fogel: Your orchestra, Gerry, is not represented by the AFM so you can give them discs. I convened a meeting within the last two months with Laura Brownell, who is the union’s head of symphonic services, and the heads of the three major composer representative organizations in this country—the American Music Center, Meet The Composer, and the American Composers Forum—and me, because there is currently a union protocol which says that, honestly, every 10 seconds of a tape given to a composer of his piece has to have white noise in it so that it can’t be pirated. And it’s unlistenable. Now, the thing I want to say to the composers here is we had a very good meeting with Laura Brownell. The ball is in her court to get back to us on how we can deal with this, to give composers recordings that actually represent their piece rather than that make a listener run screaming after the third interruption of the white noise. So that’s an issue that the union has shown some great flexibility on.

Theofanidis: Most of the recordings that I’ve gotten for in-house use, they don’t bother doing that. They just give you the usual rules about the way it can be used and so forth. This is something that I think is more a problem in New York than it is in other places. Coming to this, actually, I tried to find an old recording in which the New York City Opera did that to my piece. I had obviously thrown it away. So I made some other phone calls. I called Derek Bermel, Michael Hersch, Shafer Mahoney, and some other good friends of mine, and they had all done the same thing. They all had these Carnegie Hall recordings where you had whhhhhhhhh every 10, 15 seconds, whatever it is, and they just couldn’t use these recordings.

Fogel: I wish I could say it’s only a problem in one city; it’s a problem in many.

Levine: This goes back again to the issue of composers not being represented. I’ll bet that that was on some level not technically negotiated but informally negotiated between somebody at the AFM and some orchestra manager. You know, they’d been bugged by some composers to do something. The orchestra manger basically didn’t really think through if this idea of having white noise every ten seconds was actually going to be workable or not. The fact is the composer was not ever a part of that discussion. And if the composer had been, it would have been a different result.

Schwarz: Let’s say that Chris is being done, and he says, “I’d like to be able to send this out, and it’ll be just for personal use to promote my piece.” Will you allow him to take your radio broadcast and send it around?

Bilfield: If it’s a radio broadcast, it’s hard to put it back in the can.

Levine: If it’s out there in the public, you know, why do we care?

Fogel: Would you like to meet with my Chicago Symphony committee? I’m sorry! But Robert, you’re talking in an ideal world. You have not met with an orchestra committee that comes into your room as an administrator and says, “If we see that anywhere out in the world, we’re bringing you to court.” I’ve had that. Now, it’s loony, but please don’t say it doesn’t happen.

Levine: I’m not saying it didn’t happen, I’m just saying.

Lennon: I think the key here, though, is not to assume everyone has the same definition of the word promote. I can think of some horror stories. For example, I can think of one composer in particular—actually two, in my tenure at 802—that recorded a piece under those kinds of circumstances for promotional use. And, lo and behold, we discovered things were being sold on the Internet, and they were a hit. There was revenue, and the musicians and artists who were on there weren’t getting anything at all.

Fogel: That’s a very fair point.

Levine: But that’s what I like about the whole thing of distributing it on the Internet. It’s available for sale at nominal prices to anyone, not just other orchestras, and the issue is essentially solved.

Schwarz: The artistic administrators are not going to spend $4 on the 200 pieces they want to hear to get a download and go through all the work.

Levine: Well, they’ll probably figure out which of the 200 pieces they really want to hear, and then they’ll download.

Theofanidis: The fundamental issue, though, is if the composer then has the right to actually distribute those things, which the composers surely won’t mind doing at their own expense because they’ve been doing it all along.

Fogel: We’re still in a transition period. You, Robert, are one of the more technology-savvy people I know in the music world. But for the general public, it’s a few years off before downloading becomes as common to Mr. and Mrs. Subscriber as the CDs are. But there’s no question that over the next three to five years, I think we’re moving to the point where a lot of these problems will go away. And I’m sure when an orchestra agrees to this provision to allow an Internet download—which not all orchestras will, but when they do—I’m sure the composer can either buy enough to send them out or download one and somehow make copies of it and send them out to orchestras at their own expenses because, as you say, that’s what they always did.

I’ll give you the history of that composer agreement. It actually didn’t come from an orchestra manager. It actually came from composer organizations pleading to be able to make any recording available. And the answer was, well, okay, but there will be white noise every ten seconds.

Bilfield: We publish a number of composers whose works are performed and commissioned by one orchestra, and one way that we’ve found of getting around this very complicated issue is if there is an orchestra that absolutely has an unyielding agreement with its musicians, we find co-commissioners. And we insist upon having co-commissioners or having a very limited exclusivity period so that the work can be taken up by another orchestra, and the piece isn’t embargoed. If a performance happens and there’s a two-year exclusivity and we can’t send a recording out, then this piece is basically dead in terms of a sound recording for three to four years just because of the way the programming cycle happens.

Fogel: Sure.

Bilfiled: So, the more exclusivity requested, the more understanding we expect from an orchestra. Or we find a co-commissioner. What I’ve wanted to test out but haven’t been able to do successfully is the possibility of including within the materials provision that orchestras pay for a new commission—let’s say it’s $10,000 to copy the parts—is that if they can’t provide the composer with an archival tape to use for promotion, that they contribute a certain amount of money additionally that could be given to a university orchestra or another non-union orchestra to create a sound recording. So that if they can’t provide it [themselves] because of their limitations, that they at least, through relaxing the exclusivities and by helping fund the creation of a recording as part of the overall concept of the commission, participate in reducing a barrier. Obviously it’s working around the problem, but what we find is it is essential to have a recording. We will purchase the recordings ourselves before we’ll ask a presenter to do that because it is one more step that pushes away the decision making, but it is a live-or-die issue.

Schwarz: Let me ask you a question. In your experience at 802, quite a few years, I think, you’ve had two bad experiences. Maybe more?

Lennon: A couple here and there.

Schwarz: People break the law. People break the law, and they get punished for breaking the law. You shouldn’t speed. You break the law, you get a ticket for speeding, and if you break the law in a more significant way, you get punished in a more significant way. I mean, isn’t there a way for the composer to say, okay, I’m not going to do this and this and this, and then you say if I do this, I will be fined $50,000 or some number. In other words, rather than saying you shouldn’t [release promotional recordings] because we’ve had a few people break the rules.

Lennon: Well, the truth of the matter is that in that particular case, finding it was a miracle, like a needle in a haystack, and then when we finally found it, it was not financially feasible to go after the person. There wasn’t money to be found at that point.

Fogel: Well, maybe, David, if that’s true, and we shouldn’t turn this into a negotiation, but if what you just said is true, then they didn’t get rich off of the recording. You can’t have it both ways. They can’t have gotten rich off the recording but have no financial resources to pay the fine.

Lennon: I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that because what did they buy with the money? But the point is, I think we’ve got to find a balance because obviously the union has always been concerned about, for all very good reasons, product being given away that’s actually featuring the artistry of the playing musicians, and there’s revenue out there, sometimes, and that’s all we’re saying. We understand that new models need to be looked at because you’d be foolish to think that the landscape is still the same, but revenue needs to be shared, and I think that we’re all looking at that kind of model.

I think we have to hit on one other thing if we’re talking about the technology, though, because we’re hearing Internet, iTunes, iPods, all of this—it gets to the beginning of what we were talking about, which is targeting a segment of the audience. You know, I was told recently at the Met negotiations that I’m considered a young audience member. I’m 46. Let’s face it, the forum that children and the 20s and 30s generation listen to music is through all of these technologies, and I think that none of these things are separate; they’re all intertwined—using technology to reach to a broader audience, using technology to promote a composer’s work, using technology to hopefully generate interest in coming to the live production itself. The thing that has struck me most about this conversation is this is a very diverse panel and everybody has their piece of it, but these conversations have to happen much more often and, as you had said, earlier in the process because they’re all linked.

Fogel: And with composers involved more broadly than they have been historically. And that’s one of the things that I take away from this conversation is that that’s something we’ve all failed at. I mean, I, who think I care about composers, never really thought about the issue of having the composers represented in conversations that impact them.

Theofanidis: Can I speak, please.

Lennon: What we’re all talking about is how important it is for the composer to be heard, and we’re not letting him talk.

[All laugh]