Surveying Composers: Methods of Distribution, Discoverability, and Accessibility of Their Works and the Corresponding Impact on Library Collections

English Abstract

This article provides the results of a survey we conducted with contemporary composers in the Spring of 2019. Our intent was to seek new opportunities for collection development as well as to increase discoverability of contemporary composers' creations within a library context for both librarians and patrons. The aim was to learn more about accessibility of contemporary works, to identify changes in the field and learn how librarians can support the larger community. We collected information regarding distribution, format, awareness of library collection practices, as well as interest in representation in a library. An additional goal was to provide insight into how libraries can assist in the discovery, collection, and access of contemporary music scores.

As librarians, we want to make contemporary musical works discoverable and accessible to our patrons regardless of medium. Our overarching goal is to create a dialog between composers and librarians as we become more informed about current composition practice. The results of this survey illustrate avenues of opportunity for librarians to initiate discussion and provide information to composers.

French Abstract

Cet article présente les résultats d'une enquête que nous avons menée auprès de compositeurs contemporains au printemps 2019. Notre intention était de rechercher de nouvelles opportunités pour le développement des collections et d'accroître la possibilité de découvrir les créations des compositeurs contemporains dans un contexte bibliothéconomique, tant pour les bibliothécaires que pour les usagers. L'objectif était d'en savoir plus sur l'accessibilité des œuvres contemporaines, d'identifier les changements dans ce domaine et d'apprendre comment les bibliothécaires peuvent soutenir cette communauté au sens large. Nous avons recueilli des informations concernant la distribution, le format, la prise de conscience dans les pratiques de développement des collections en bibliothèque, ainsi que l'intérêt de représenter ce répertoire au sein d'une bibliothèque. Un autre objectif était de donner un aperçu de la manière dont les bibliothèques peuvent aider à la découverte, à la collecte des partitions de musique contemporaine et à leur accès.

En tant que bibliothécaires, nous voulons rendre les œuvres musicales contemporaines visibles et accessibles à nos usagers, quel que soit leur support. Notre objectif principal, en devenant de mieux en mieux informés sur les pratiques actuelles en matière de composition, est de créer un dialogue entre les compositeurs et les bibliothécaires. Les résultats de cette enquête illustrent les pistes possibles qui s'offrent aux bibliothécaires pour instaurer des discussions et fournir des informations aux compositeurs.

German Abstract

Dieser Aufsatz stellt die Ergebnisse einer Umfrage unter zeitgenössischen Komponisten aus dem Frühjahr 2019 vor. Wir verfolgten damit die Absicht, neue Möglichkeiten für den Bestandsaufbau sowie für die Auffindbarkeit von Kompositionen zeitgenössischer Komponisten für Bibliothekskunden wie auch-mitarbeiter zu finden. Ziel war es, mehr über die Zugänglichkeit zeitgenössischer Werke zu erfahren, Veränderungen in diesem Bereich zu erkennen und zu erfahren, wie Bibliothekare die Szene unterstützen können. Gesammelt wurden Informationen zur Verbreitung, zu den Formaten und dem Wissen um Arbeitsweisen von Bibliotheken sowie zum Interesse daran, in Bibliotheken vertreten zu sein. Ein zusätzliches Ziel war, Erkenntnisse zu erhalten, wie Bibliotheken Erschließung und Sammlung von sowie Zugang zu Notenausgaben zeitgenössischer Werke verbessern können.

Wir Bibliothekare möchten, dass Werke zeitgenössischer Musik von unseren Kunden gefunden und genutzt werden, ganz unabhängig von der Medienart. Zuoberst steht dabei das Ziel, in einen Dialog mit den Komponisten zu treten, indem wir uns die aktuelle Arbeitsweise zeitgenössischer Komponisten bewusster machen. Die Ergebnisse dieser Umfrage zeigen Möglichkeiten für Bibliothekare auf, in den Dialog zu treten und Informationen für Komponisten zur Verfügung zu stellen.

Introduction

The relationship between librarians and composers has been a frequent topic of discussion in music librarian circles. Discovering new works is a common challenge. Selfpublishing has become main-stream and traditional vendors have difficulty gathering information, storing, and providing access to works in digital formats. As librarians in two different areas of music librarianship, collection development and research services, we realised there were intersections in our work. We saw a need to further develop the composer/librarian relationship in order to better understand the challenges and limitations in access and discovery. In order to do this, we gathered information from composers by surveying international composer organisations, social media, and individual contacts. We collected information regarding the composers' distribution and use of formats, and awareness of library collection practice, as well as perceived value and interest in representation in a library. Some of our additional goals in creating our survey were to provide insight into how libraries can assist in the discovery, collection, and access of contemporary music scores and to explore compositional diversity.

Literature Review

Previous research articulates the need for further investigation in this area. Several authors discuss the issues of collecting and storing materials and the need to build partnerships with vendors, but without providing concrete solutions. They look at purchasing from the perspectives of librarians as consumers, rather than from the perspective of the creator of the work, composers.

Another concern is the difficulty of purchasing scores when they are available through independent Web sites only, as evidenced by Kent Underwood's 2016 study "which concluded, as evidenced by library holdings in WorldCat, that commercial publication and distribution is still the principal conduit for new scores going into libraries, and that selfpublished music has a relatively slim chance of making it into our collections"¹. In his 2019 article, Chuck Peters discusses the difficulties in collecting digital scores, including incorporating these purchases into current workflows². Peters provides a scope of the issues, including the fact that many digital scores are being left out of approval plans and automated ordering.

Many librarians collect scores collaboratively in order to broaden collections and to address the complexity of collecting new works. One example is the Ivy Plus Confedertion's Music Librarians collaborative collection development plan which is currently used for music scores. An extension of this group is the Contemporary Composers Web Archive (CCWA), an archive of contemporary composers' Web sites whose stated purpose is a "collaborative collection development agreement identifying approximately 1,500 globally-based contemporary composers of sufficient importance to have their published printed works collected at a comprehensive level by at least on participating institution"³.

Another concern is data management and the danger of losing digitally created works. Lisa Hooper discusses in her 2013 article the need for a well-developed user interface that meets the needs of storing and searching for electronic scores⁴. Marc Battier's 2004 article provides examples of loss and the need to understand electronic music to help it survive⁵. A similar report was provided in 2003 during the Third International Conference on WEB Delivering of Music. A working group of MUSTICA, led by Bruno Bachimont, included an international team of archivists, information scientists, and musicologists. They presented the archival issues they hoped to answer and the necessity of completing this work by stating "As interactive digital compositions form a significant portion of the music that is currently being composed in many parts of the world, the failure of society to capture and preserve authentic versions of this music will result in the loss of a vital component of contemporary global musical heritage"⁶.

While much is written about the preservation of digitally created works, we concentrated our efforts on gathering information about how composers market and distribute, in addition to the platforms composers use as relevant to our work as music librarians. Can we help make their creations more widely available in libraries? Kimmy Szeto acknowledges that while there are platforms for e-books, e-scores do not have the same support⁷. Some digital scores collections are provided by large database companies, such as Alexander Street Press' Classical Score Library and BabelScores. Amanda Maple points out that these collections are now making decisions about what comprises a "complete collection" while deemphasising the diverse needs of a local community⁸. These decisions are best made in collaboration with the composers themselves.

Methodology

Our project took one year from the start of drafting through analysing and writing up our results. The initial information gathering phase began with several conversations in the summer of 2018 amongst ourselves, composition faculty, and Ph.D. candidates at Harvard University. The proposal and survey questions were drafted and submitted to Harvard's Institutional Review Board (IRB) with composer Chaya Czernowin as the faculty sponsor. The IRB is an administrative body used in the U.S. to protect the welfare and rights of human research subjects and which requires researchers to undergo ethics training. The survey consisted of ten to fourteen questions, depending on the selection chosen, some responses prompted a follow up question to clarify and add detail. Appendix 1 includes all questions in our survey, including the flow from selected answers to the prompted follow-up question.

We sent our survey to the first potential participants in February 2019 and continued to send requests until we closed the survey in May 2019. Our distribution was far-reaching: we made contact with music societies, associations representing new music, and individuals through social media and direct e-mail. We sent our survey to 121 associations and approximately 1,000 individual composers. Not all individuals and associations responded. We received responses from some very large organisations, including the Society of Composers, Inc. (SCI) and the Contemporary Music Centre of Ireland, who sent it on their list-serv to their membership. New Music USA, the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors (BASCA), and I Care if You Listen all retweeted our request, and the American Composers Forum retweeted and posted on Facebook. Several chapters of the International Society of Contemporary Composers, or ISCM, of various countries sent the survey to their members. These include: the Australian Music Centre, Musikagileak (ISCM) (Basque-Navarrese), New Music South Africa, Nieuw Geneco (Netherlands), nyMussikk (Norway), Society of Contemporary Music Italy, and Ty Cerdd (Wales). As we realised we were lacking in responses in some areas of the world, we concentrated our second round of efforts on organisations and individuals in those areas. We received positive responses from the Composers Association of New Zealand, Danish Composers' Association, EMS Elektronmusik Studion (Sweden), and the Iranian Female Composers Association, who participated through list-serv distribution. We are aware that there were other organisations and Facebook groups that contacted their members, and we have reason to believe a few more sent the survey to their members based on the responses from particular regions.

Respondents

There were 724 responses to the survey. Of that number, 681 people fully completed the survey by answering the final demographic question asking where they currently reside and work. The largest response to the survey was from the U.S. with 234 respondents, U.K. and Northern Ireland with 54, and Canada with 39, followed by Denmark and Finland. Appendix 2 shows a complete list of the countries with the number of respondents.

Appendix 3 is a complete list of every iteration of respondents self-identifying their status as composers. 301 respondents, the largest group, identified themselves as Freelance Composer without any other affiliation. The second largest group of 110 responses were composers who are affiliated with Higher Education, and the third largest group, with 54, was those who self-identified as both a Freelance Composer and affiliated with Higher Education.

Results and Analysis

Many composers provide access in both print and digital formats

Table 1 tabulates responses to the questions: "Do you provide access to your works in a physical format?" and "Do you provide access to your works in a digital format?" The largest number of respondents provide access to their works in both digital and physical formats, as represented by the number 480. This could indicate that a composer provides access via print and digital for some works but could also indicate that they provide access in only one format for others. Thirty-six composers indicated that they do not provide accessibility in either format, which begs the question: what format are they producing in, if any at all? Do they not provide access to their works? Is it possible that these respondents use a format that they do not consider physical or digital, or that we have inconsistent definitions of these terms?

Table 1.

Physical/Digital Formats.

Table 2 identifies the results when these numbers are added together vertically and horizontally. It represents the total responses to this question for print access, regardless of what they chose for digital access, and vice versa. When we look at the totals in this way, we have a better representation of potential available formats. The composers were not asked if they produce some works exclusively in one form or another, but rather if they produce ANY works in these formats. It is worth noting that 69 respondents do not provide access to any of their works in a physical format.

Table 2.

Access.

Figure 1 shows the physical and digital formats in which composers provide access to their works. This was a "select all that apply" question, so 841 selected responses for print and 1,643 responses for digital. It is important to note that only respondents who answered "Yes" to having accessibility in either physical or digital formats were shown the corresponding question. For example, if a person selected "yes, I provide access in a physical format", the next question they were provided was "in which physical formats"? Fifty percent of the respondents indicated that they provide bound copies of their materials. This may include many types of binding as the survey did not request specific examples. Twenty-two percent of the respondents indicated they have a hard copy of an audio representation, though, again, we did not ask for specific audio formats. Having this information adds to the conversation in libraries regarding the issue of long-term storage and archiving.

Fig 1.

Format in Which Composers Provide Access to Their Works.

Figure 2 shows the percentages of respondents who provide digital formats to a "select all that apply" question. This provides overlap in the data we collected and does not clearly articulate a definitive outcome of those who work in one format. We did not ask for specifics on what file format is used by the twenty-seven percent of composers who provide audio and/or video as a downloadable digital file. The question of providing access to and archiving streaming only audio and video becomes relevant again when we think about the longevity of a file. Sometimes these streaming files are accessible only through a commercial site, like YouTube or SoundCloud, with no guarantee of longevity. We decided this level of detail would be cumbersome to ask in the survey and wanted to concentrate on the bigger picture. Now that we are more aware of the large portion of composers using these formats, we feel more confident that we can continue our research more comprehensively and in our follow-up work. We recognise these are challenges in our libraries and this is another opportunity for follow-up.

Fig. 2.

Percentages of Respondents That Provide Digital Formats to a "Select all that apply" Question.

Most composers responding to the survey distribute through their personal Web site

Figure 3 shows the distribution method used by each self-identified composer group. Respondents could select more than one composer type and therefore be represented in more than one group. Personal Web sites are the most frequently used distribution method by all composer groups, followed by publisher Web sites. We felt it was important to present this information as it gives us insight on how to discover their work.

Fig. 3.

Distribution Method Used by Each Self-Identified Composer Group.

Composers market/promote through their own Web sites and social media

We also asked how the respondents market and promote their works, as shown in Table 3, Personal Web site was again the most frequent answer. This question included an open text box along with the option 'Other,' where we noticed commonalities and listed the top three.

Table 3.

Market and Promotion Methods.

Composers stay up-to-date via expected channels: through personal connections, festivals, associations, and organisations

This was another "select all that apply" question related to staying informed, therefore the numbers are much larger than the total number of respondents. Table 4 shows that Word of Mouth and Competitions and Festivals were the most popular methods. Similar to the previous question, this question included an open text box along with the "Other" option where we noticed commonalities and listed the top three in the corresponding table.

Table 4.

Methods of Staying Informed.

Accessibility is important to composers, not just librarians

Responses to the question asking whether a composer was aware that libraries may have special requirements for accessioning scores into their collection showed that 343 (49 percent) people were aware, or about one half of the total respondents. 354 (51 percent) of the respondents were not aware that libraries had requirements. 634 (91 percent) of the respondents were interested in libraries purchasing their works. 54 (8 percent) were indifferent and 9 people (1 percent) were not interested in libraries purchasing their works. The survey showed that of the 634 respondents who were interested in libraries collecting their works, 322 (51 percent) were unaware that libraries may have special requirements. This indicates that there is a large percentage of composers that we could potentially inform about libraries' considerations. These considerations may include specific binding requirements, file formats, and archiving. When comparing the intersection of composers interested in libraries collecting their works and the method of distribution, we found 359 composers (57 percent) release their works in audio or video streaming only, and 46 (7 percent) release their works as an instruction or design plan. This raises the issue of maintaining collections that are in formats that are difficult to collect, to provide access to, and to archive. It was our intention to allow a broad interpretation of these terms and therefore we did not define a specific definition of the terminology in the survey. A few of the respondents indicated economic considerations as their primary concern for whether they would consider thinking about this as an opportunity.

Composers see value in having their works held in a library for long-term representation

Our question whether composers currently do anything to ensure their compositions are widely discoverable elicited a wide array of responses. Figure 4 compares what composers currently do and what they are willing to do. The largest responses seem to be reactive rather than proactive, meaning that they respond to requests by libraries but do not reach out on their own. The number of composers willing to consider making changes in order for libraries to collect their work increases. The number of composers not willing to do anything in order for libraries to collect their works is very small, only 1 percent of total respondents to this question. 32 percent of respondents are willing to send a copy of the music when requested, and 27 percent would consider doing so when requested.

An issue that continually comes up in libraries is the difficulty of discovering works that are not distributed through a vendor. A significant number of composers were willing to use a library vendor, and an even larger percentage were willing to provide access using an online library platform (Figure 4). The next question might be how to communicate with both vendors and composers to make this a reality and what that could look like from a library perspective.

Recommendations

In addition to the follow-up opportunities mentioned throughout this article we have a few big picture ideas. It is important to engage members of Music Library Association (MLA) and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres (IAML) to get more traction for our outreach. Answering a question such as, "could a tool be created to aid in the discovery of new music for all libraries" requires the collaboration of many. There is a need for clear communication with composers about long-term storage and what that could mean for both parties. Formal collaboration through MLA via a liaison program could be an avenue to fill this need. These liaisons are already in place through MLA with other professional organisations.

Fig. 4.

What Composers Currently Do and What They are Willing to Do.

Our further research will include structured focus groups consisting of composers, music librarians and other interested parties, which may include vendors and systems librarians. The questions for our focus groups will be determined by the results of our survey while digging into more details. This dialogue will help us understand more fully the details about the composers' output as it relates to the formats chosen in the survey. We hope to expand our relationships with composers who are interested in having their works represented in a library who are unfamiliar to standard practices.

Conclusion

This survey took a new approach towards conversation and engagement between librarians and composers, by gathering information from the creators of new music. It is an ongoing study through which librarians can learn from living composers not only about their works, but also about how we might develop tools to support the discoverability, accessibility, and preservation of their compositions. We gained new insight into the way composers engage with publishers, and the concerns they have about the economic impact of engaging in a relationship with publishers.

It also raised additional questions about collecting contemporary works and possible future directions for research. Composers will continue to create in new formats and push the boundaries of composition. We need to know how and where to meet them if we want to continue to be relevant and good stewards. We have only scratched the surface of what seems to be an inevitable challenge for the future of libraries.