Martin Banner wrote, in part:
Publishers either got rid of those inventories, dropped things from
their catalogues, and subsequently have been less and less willing to
take a chance on publishing things that do not indicate they will be a
financial success.
Another factor involved here has been the consolidation of music
publishers over the past thirty or so years. In that time, the imprint
J. Fisher & Bro, and any unsold inventory, has been owned by H. W. Gray,
Belwin, Columbia Pictures Publications, Warner Brothers, and Alfred. I
know from personal experience that there are works under copyright by
Alfred, that Alfred does not know they control the copyrights to. Hall
and McCreary of Boston, was subsequently owned by Schmitt Hall and
McCreary, then Warner Brothers, then Alfred. When Gray bought Fisher,
the move was in town, when Columbia bought Belwin, the move was from New
York to Florida.
It would make sense to me for publishers to hold on to at least one
archival copy of everything they ever published, so that they could do
a "print on demand" for someone who wanted to perform something out of
print.
I don't know enough about the instrumental end of the music publishing
business to do much more than guess, but in the case of choral music,
there is an increasing tendency, in these days of desktop publishing, to
offer print-on-demand archival copies of material still under copyright,
but no longer "in print". I can come up with several reasons archival
editions of choral music may be more common than instrumental music:
for one thing, everyone involved with performance of the choir,
including conductor and accompanist, usually play from the score, unlike
the situation in an ensemble work, where there is one score, and a few
each of a number of different parts.
ns
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