On 4 Feb 2006 at 13:24, Kim Patrick Clow wrote: > When I was recently at the > University of North Carolina's music library, I didn't notice any > scores in the stacks from what I would call "desktop" publishers. I'm > not sure if that's because the staff is unware these sources exist, or > it's the lack of distribution for such small operations. Just an > observation I had at *that* library.
Did they have an Artaria Editions? I mean the modern Artaria, not the Viennese one. That's basically a desktop publishing organization, and they actually do quite nice work. My bet is that there are quite a few others. Also, a lot of the big publishers are getting much cheaper engraving because of Score, Finale and Sibelius. I know for a fact that most of the major publishers subcontract out their engraving and it's done with the well-known software on mostly consumer-level PCs, not on mainframes. So, in a sense, an awful lot of music is getting engraved using the the new technology, and being engraved as piece-work, rather like the 18th century, when engravers could be independent operators (as in Paris) valued for their skills at producing beautiful engravings. The costs of starting your own publishing house are pretty minimal. If you've already got the music engraved, all you have from there on is the production costs. Then you decide whether you're going to publish on demand or pre-print inventory. I really think it isn't that much different from the composers who are selling their own compositions on CDBaby.com or other such sights, direct to consumers. It's not like producing a good MP3 doesn't take a whole lot of work, just as producing an engraved score takes a lot of work. The reproduction of the MP3 once engineered and created is really easy, but so is the reproduction of a computer- engraved edition once the engraving is done. The only difference is that the latter can't be distributed easily over the wire. But that's just a difference between a digital and a non-digital medium. When we someday have electronic music stands, music distribution, too, will be fully electronic. But as long as we use paper scores to play from, music distribution will always have more steps and be less easy than MP3 distribution. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
