Musings of a Composer

 Back in January of 2009, Crucial Music started accepting my Water Bear trio and quartet recordings for pitching to TV & film placements. It took 4 years before my pieces were placed anywhere, but in the years since, these wonderful performances have appeared in TV shows like Touch (Fox), Agents Of Shield (ABC), streaming shows like Mozart in the Jungle (Amazon), cable TV (The Magicians on SyFy), and an indie film (In Search of Fellini).  It's sporadic, but not only do I receive the initial placement fee (I’ve received anywhere from $75 to $2000), but also royalties ongoing from ASCAP domestically and internationally. These royalties often surpass the initial placement fee amount but take far longer to trickle down to me after the shows air. Recently I’ve been on a kick to supply Crucial Music with fresh material — they haven’t placed any of my pieces since 2019, and I suspect there’s been lots of changes in their business model. There seems to be so much music created by ...

Rejection is hard. Or perceived rejection. Much more fun to feel I am reaching people with my music, to feel their positive reaction to it. I’m lucky that I’ve experienced both, frankly. Because the positive reactions make it all seem worthwhile, and the negative ones keep me grounded in the reality of how personal music really is to people, and how what is needed in each moment for a person can and does change. What I need changes. What the world needs changes, too — and so it is important not to take it all too personally, but to trust the process and proceed as we go. One of the most striking “rejections” I experienced was when we played for the Dalai Lama’s visit to the State Theatre in Ithaca many years ago. We didn’t open, we closed — playing at the end of the program, while everyone needed to wait to exit until the Dalai Lama had made it a few blocks away, for security reasons.  The “all clear” announcement came over the sound system partway through our first piece, and 99% ...

 Yes, I now have 61 pieces registered at MLC, it took several tries to do the bulk upload correctly, but all due to errors on my part in preparing the spreadsheet, and I was very impressed that their interface caught the errors and let me cancel and start over. Nice! We’ll see if this leads to any remuneration — there is always a delay in payments, but supposedly coming up in June 2021 will be the beginning of the MLC making the back payments for uses that were never paid out over many years at Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Pandora, etc. The MLC received millions of dollars from those Digital Service Providers, and once they receive all the data on the uses from them, will attempt to straighten out who is supposed to get what. This sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it? Well-intentioned. The MLC starts with the data from the Harry Fox Agency, so anyone who didn’t register their pieces with HFA needs to do it directly with MLC. I hope The MLC is successful.

 One benefit of the pandemic universe we have been living in is how it has brought our lives into focus by the reality of death — and for me, this has led to what I think of as My Legacy Project. What do I need to do to give my music (recordings, compositions) the support & structure they need so that when I’m gone they can continue to have life and provide joy to listeners and players? Kind of like launching children into their lives as adult, how best to do this for my music, but also encompassing how to make it easy for the executor of my estate to manage it all when I’m gone, and also including how can I have the most fun with it all while I’m still here? Tim Reppert has a huge role in this revival of my musical “ambition” — he is such a fan of the music we created together in Water Bear! And his interest in coming to Ithaca (from Boston) to have playing reunions really re-ignited my sense of what might be possible, even though I’ve got finger issues and neck issues that ha...