Making money, or having your music played? It’s a very serious questions, and of course the answer is not black or white, but somewhere in between.
In days gone by, if you wanted a piece of music, you went out to find it and then buy it. The retailer, publisher and composer all got their cut, as it were, and in many cases made quite a deal of money in doing so.
But technology changes everything sooner or later and for the sheet music industry changes have created both opportunity and problems. Firstly, the ability to photocopy music and secondly the ability to download sheet music off the internet.
After two of my students took performance exams last year I received a note from the AMEB advising me of copyright and that my students were using photocopies of sheet music. They obviously had no clue that the music I gave them was freely available on the Internet, and that the copyright for those editions expired many moons ago. I’m not that stupid, I don’t think.
Not many people realise that much classical music printed before around 1930 is now out of copyright and therefore can be copied legally without restriction. Additionally, there are sites on the internet which allow downloads of first editions of the music of Beethoven and Chopin, and the complete works of Mozart (and I do mean complete) can be downloaded free of charge for personal use. In addition, copyright laws in many countries are either vague or non-existent and much music has been printed with little or no restrictions in that regard. There are multitudinous sites which offer vast collections of sheet music, either free or for a small charge, and of course there the ubiquitous file sharing networks to consider as well.
What this has enabled me, in particular, to do is to become familiar with a large number of composers’ music which, until the advent of the internet, I’d never even heard of, let alone had a chance to play and explore. What the internet has done has made classical sheet music available to many more people and this has had a dual effect.
Firstly, much music has been preserved which has little or no intrinsic commercial value either do to the obscurity of the composer concerned or else the edition is out of copyright. Secondly, it means that much of this music is now much better known and appreciated by a growing number of people simply because there was no other way of acquiring it up to this point in time.
One would like to think that composers would like to make a lot of money from their sheet music, and that is not in dispute. But if that means that less people see that music – particularly over a period of the composer’s lifetime, is that really what the composer would want long term?
At my recital much of the music I played came quite legitimately from out of copyright editions obtained, once again, quite legitimately. I was able to play much unusual music and this definitely added to the quality of the recital.
There should always be a balance between cost and availability. The internet supplies the availability – we simply have to get the cost right.