Comments on: Composer Commission Pay in the United States

By: Loretta Notareschi

Loretta Notareschi — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 19:59:07 +0000

Hi Keane, thanks for your interest in the article. We contemplated different definitions of commission, and here is the one we ended up using: “writing music for a specific musician, other than yourself, or musical ensemble, at their request or upon their agreement, for a scheduled live performance within one or two concert seasons of completion of the piece. A commission may be paid or unpaid. For the purposes of this study, music written “on spec,” meaning the composer has written it without a specific request from or agreement with a specific musician or ensemble, is not included, even if it ends up being performed later.” Since we were also interested in music that people were writing by request, but for no money, we did open up the definition to include unpaid works. The question of prestige is an interesting one. To me, the order of prestige for a work goes: paid commission, unpaid commission, work I wrote without anyone asking for it. Personally, I do all three of these in my career.

By: Chris Sahar

Chris Sahar — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 17:46:59 +0000

On a cursory glance your study shows what many composers over 35 know too well: Majority of commissions go to the recent doctoral grads and often for groups of 1 – 3 performers. Doctorates act as an insurance that you will get a composer with solid skills and an interesting sound. There is nothing else that offers this as with all the developments in music compositions, the accepted approaches and parameters that determines a music composition have exploded in the past 75 years.

The study reveals how narrow the focus of the commissions are although I suspect there is far more than what the study suggests in the areas seemingly underserved. As the authors wrote, more research is needed (just investigating the paid commission in liturgical music would be fascinating).

Look forward to more studies. I just hope they contradict the apparent ageism and educational bias revealed to date in this article.

By: Keane Southard

Keane Southard — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 15:52:30 +0000

Thanks for this important data and I hope this leads to more open conversation on this topic.

I’ve always considered that by definition a commission means that it is paid, so I am wondering what the definition of a commission is if it can be either paid or unpaid? Is it simply someone asking a composer to create a new work and them accepting? Is there some perceived benefit for both parties to call something a commission even if it is unpaid, that the composer gets to say they were commissioned to write the piece and the other party get to say they commissioned it? But does the benefit or prestige of this word rely on the fact that most people assume if you commissioned or were commissioned to create a work that that means it was paid for?