Watch a video report on the cost of music royalties to schools
The Missoula Youth Symphony's performance of Tchaikovsky last week was free to all takers - as long as you were in the audience.Looking over the musical score, conductor Bill Hollin likely saw at least some of those sharps and flats as dollars and cents.
The Missoula County Public Schools orchestra teacher knows keeping his young musical charges motivated depends on offering new and interesting selections of music. What few others know, though, is how much those musical scores cost, or the rules governing their use.
“The cost of providing the music is a challenge,” Hollin said. “The more advanced the group, the more expensive the music. A school orchestra arrangement averages $50. If you perform 10 pieces, that's $500 worth of music. Multiply that by five or six concerts a year, and you can see the cost.”
In educational terms, an arrangement is a big folder of sheet music that includes a complete score for the conductor and individual parts for each instrument. Choral pieces are relatively simple, with all voices printed in a single booklet. But a major symphonic band piece may involve dozens of parts for 120 or more performers.
MCPS' music library dates back decades, which softens some of that bill. On the other hand, Hollin's orchestral music costs about half that of a symphonic band arrangement - simply by virtue of the larger number of band instruments.
Public schools stand in a narrow gap between fair use and commercial licensing requirements. So Hollin doesn't have to pay performance royalties for concerts, as does the Missoula Symphony Orchestra.
But schools must abide by strict rules requiring original copies of sheet music for each performer. If you ever wondered why a conductor's hair goes white so early, it's because of the number of players who mark their music notes in ink.
“If I find a pen in the room, it's not going to be a pretty sight,” MCPS fine arts director Paul Ritter said while paging through stacks of sheet music in his Jefferson School office. “We have a big problem with music that's gone out of print. It can be really hard to find out who has the rights to things because the publishing houses change hands so often. We've got some copies of the Lutheran hymn ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God' from the 1950s - they're like gold.”
And as more material moves into digital formats, the rules get muddier. Some Web sites allow downloading of sheet music for a fee. Others make it available for free. Still others insist on selling license agreements for public use. Can a school make enough copies for all 70 members of the choir? Maybe. Maybe not.
“Once or twice a month, we get a call wondering about copying and fair use,” said Robert Hershman, rights and permissions specialist for the American Library Association in Chicago. “Fair use is wonderful, but it's gray. Keeping it in the school keeps everybody pretty safe. Once it gets outside and into other media, then it's a problem.”
Hershman said occasionally, music publishers get aggressive with schools over the use of popular songs. But as long as the school can show the sheet music is properly purchased and used in an educational setting, there's little to fight about. A more common violation, he said, occurs in church choirs - which photocopy published music on a large scale.
The basic rule for copying music is “don't.” There are exceptions for emergencies, like the second oboe player who forgot his folder on concert night. Marching band members sometimes make practice copies so the originals aren't ruined in bad-weather rehearsals. Teachers can copy bits of music as classroom examples, as to show how one composer borrows a theme from another.
Anything beyond that can be trouble. At school music competitions or auditions, a student can't perform with photocopied music on the stand. If someone loses a piece from a band or orchestra arrangement, the school must request a replacement from the publishing company. Ironically, the publishing company will typically send back an “official” photocopy.
“This district makes a real good-faith effort to use proper materials,” Ritter said. “We've got enough guys on staff who are composers that we're sensitive to that.”
Incidentally, copying includes copies of the performance. It's illegal to make audio or videotaped copies of copyrighted material without the owner's permission. That rule tends to go out the window at school performances, where dozens of parents record the show.
“We call it ‘the forest,' ” Ritter said of the ranks of adults with video gear at every holiday concert. So far, no music agency has had the gumption to crack down on such family treasures.
For teachers, the challenge is keeping the material current, complete and affordable. Pete Seeger's “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” in choral arrangement by Robert De Cormier costs $1.50 a copy. A vocal arrangement of Scott Joplin's “Pineapple Rag” by the same arranger is $2.40 apiece. That's for a piece of published music that's been in the public domain for decades.
And schools have it easy, compared to the Missoula Symphony Orchestra.
“We're paying in the neighborhood of $100 a minute for the Christmas pops concert, just to rent the scores,” said MSO director John Driscoll. “We have this fantastic arrangement of ‘Deck the Halls' that's costing us $340. If you look at the program page for the pops concert, there are 12 or 15 tunes for that program. We have to be really careful how we program.”
The more commercially active MSO productions must have up-to-date licenses with major music publishers and royalty organizations. Because they deal in more contemporary arrangements, they typically have to rent music they don't have in their libraries. Driscoll said MSO's budget flexes between $5,000 and $10,000 a year for rentals and licensing.
Orchestras around Montana share music back and forth to reduce costs. Butte's symphony is renowned for owning an old arrangement of Irving Berlin's “White Christmas” that is now only available for rent. Missoula has a set of scores for Prokofiev's “Peter and the Wolf” that's out of print and equally treasured.
MCPS spends about $20,000 a year on music program expenses. That money touches every elementary and middle-school student, plus about 900 performers in the city high schools. But the bulk of that goes to what Ritter calls “soft expenses” - instrument maintenance, training, subscriptions and the like. Little is left for new music, although the instructors constantly prowl for more.
“I spent the month of August listening to publishers' CDs, trying to find things that fit the level of my students,” Hollin said. The mix has to change constantly, as last year's veteran trumpet section graduates and this year's cello contingent needs lots of mentoring.
Hollin said his colleagues' shop talk centers on who's discovered what piece lately that excites students, doesn't rely on unpopular instruments, and most of all, is available.
“The highest quality material is the older stuff,” Hollin said. “You're not going to go wrong with the classics. And my predecessors did an excellent job of stocking the library with the classics.”
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com
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