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Dear Fran Richard:
Thank you for your kind birthday wishes and celebratory aspirations. They
are most appreciated and welcome. Classical music and its practitioners are
indeed in need of the latter as well as some practical equanimical
consideration at home in terms of economic recompense.
The fact of the matter is that American classical composers and their music
are all but completely out of the loop as far as are the barest consideration
for broadcast or live performance money. Our stature in the performance
royalty feeding chain of the various genres of music who are garnering income
from broadcast or live performance consists of the humiliating condition of
begging for alms like a street mendicant. An occasional donation to the blind
man's cup of a fastly diminishing human charity. That's no way to treat a
proverbial enemy--- much less a friend.
This analysis is not in any way directed at you but constitutes a melancholy
assessment of the pitiful economic and cultural standing that our beloved
music has descended to in our republic. Indeed, every informed classical
composer is very much aware of your long standing valiant attempts to maintain
the present flow of donations to the lowly classical composer's cup, as well
as add to same whenever possible. Of course from the economic standpoint this
has been more and more an historically thankless task.
I do believe that it is now time for our domestic societies, with ASCAP in
the lead to focus on implementing to what amounts to a minimum gesture of
economic reform and thus meaningful financial support for the classical
writer. This would be in the form of a guaranteed minimum percentage of the
gross income from live performance.
For example, let me demonstrate a couple of the most interesting and
important precedents for this proposal. SACEM currently collects and
distributes 8.9% of the gross income from a live performance to the music
being performed on that venue. They do this for all genres of music across the
board. PRS likewise collects and distributes 3% of the gross revenue. I hearby
propose that ASCAP at the very least adopt this 3% minimum as a standard for
live performance for its classical community. The consequences would be that a
classical composer would then receive somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500
for a featured work by the New York Philharmonic, (according to the piece's
length), for one evening's performance. The usual three or four performances
would thusly earn him $6,000 for the week. Compare this to the current
domestic absurdity of $100 to $400 for four performances over the same time
period.
This latter payment standard only encourages an ivory-tower, academic,
dilettante, culture which has no professional viability to be by default, the
last bastion of the classical heritage. This music of the elite dilettante is
the very reason that the audience for contemporary music has almost zero
tolerance for its music. For they are unable to produce a vital, living and
breathing classical music that resonates within the hearts of a vital, living
and breathing classical audience who are culturally conservative by nature. If
there is not even the most meager of performance funds for the classical
composer to survive on, in other words in which to pursue writing as a
profession----------than quite frankly, there is no profession. That is why
almost all the potential classical talent have abandoned same and had to
pursue by default the only realistic alternatives for having a viable
professional career in music composition. And those areas are of course
songwriting, underscoring and musical theater. And to a lesser degree "jingle"
music which however suffers many of the same problems of classical music, only
less so.
It doesn't take a visionary to comprehend that if there is a potential for
earning a performance royalty of $6000 in one week, there is also a chance for
a viable professional career in its own right and the chance to produce a
dynamic between creator and audience that has not existed for over fifty years
in this country-------- not since the era of Koussevitsky, Bernstein, Harris,
Copland, Barber and Gershwin.
Let me point out a relevant fact. In the top one hundred earners at SACEM,
14 of them are classical composers, the second highest contingent behind the
songwriters. Ironically the film composers placed last with 12 practitioners.
I daresay that in America today we wouldn't have one living classical composer
in the top 2,000 highest earners.
In the down and dirty "bottom line" culture of Darwinian economics that is
the prevalent model for contemporary America today, it is mandatory that we
seed and nourish this rich legacy of classical musical culture with deserved
performance money for composers. And not by the meager handouts to the cups of
classical composers and their organizations which only contribute to the
ubiquitous moribundity and disgrace of a "kept" music in all its odoriferous
state of decay.
Let us seriously endeavor to reestablish this once noble profession not by
the maintenance of same on life support systems by alms donations, but by the
instituting of a minimum live performance royalty that offers a decent
honorable compensation and a viable prospect for the profession of creating
this highly expressive and nourishing music with dignity
Most sincerely,
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