Ep. 57: Painfully Unpublished! Alfred Music's Jack Zaino (LIVE at ACDA!!)

Hey, everyone, welcome back to Selling Sheet Music.

We’ve got another episode from ACDA for you.

I’m sitting down with Jack Zaino.

He’s one of the choral editors at Alfred.

Caught him on his way out the door, grabbed him, pulled him over to this couch.

We’re gonna talk a little bit about what he does and what Alfred does.

So thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah, you’re welcome.

We’re here in Dallas, and I’m being sort of attacked by surprise seasonal allergies.

You know, up north, we have time to get used to spring slowly coming, but here I was like dumped into spring’s embrace of pollen and getting used to it a little bit, but I’m right in it, so.

Yeah, well, this is the first time I’ve got to wear shorts in a while, so that’s exciting for me.

Hey, yeah, you know, I should have brought some shorts.

I didn’t even think about it.

Well, tell us about yourself.

Well, I’m Jack.

I’m first and foremost a music educator with an interest and background in middle school.

I taught in the middle school classroom for five years, so I love working with that age group of choir.

I’m a writer arranger.

You’ve probably seen my name on published pop charts with some of your favorite publishers, and I’m a choral editor at Alfred Music.

Awesome.

And what do you do for Alfred?

I do a lot of things for Alfred.

What don’t I do for Alfred?

That’s the right answer.

Yeah.

I arrange pop songs.

I work to curate and edit our choral release every year.

So I’m always looking for folk to submit music to us.

I work with our writers to really go back and forth to get a piece into print every step along the way.

I’m one of the people who’s really holding a writer’s hand as we get a piece from the idea, the conception of it, all the way into print.

So I’m there for the whole journey.

And how would you describe Alfred’s place in the larger just choral industry?

You know, you’ve got all these different publishers.

Is there a particular thing that you focus on?

Is it, how would you explain to, like, let’s say a band person that took a choral job.

They don’t know anything about the choral industry.

How would you explain to them, this is what you come to Alfred for?

Well, I mean, Alfred does a wide range of things.

And we have a long history that includes, you know, pieces that are very, very simple to pieces that are what we would call fancy music.

And I guess that’s a bad example because a band person would know Alfred too.

That’s true.

In the choral space at least, our primary focus is on public schools, choral music, students, teachers, community choir, folks who are learning to teach and play music.

That’s really who we try to serve, is the everyday teacher in the classroom, the everyday student who’s looking to be get better at the thing that they love to do.

Recap your week for us.

I mean, you’ve been hanging out mostly in that exhibit hall, right?

Talking to people, getting to know, I mean, what’s it like from your end and everybody that cycles through and talks to you?

What are you seeing?

Just kind of give us the overview.

Well, I’m seeing a lot of excited teachers and directors and students, which I love seeing students, whether they’re singers or college students at this kind of thing.

I didn’t come to a lot of ACDAs when I was a student, and I think it’s wonderful to have folks getting excited about music.

And I’m also seeing the change in ACDA attitude over the past 10 years, where it doesn’t feel like snooty and uppity uppity anymore, like I was brought up to think it was.

People are wearing sneakers, people are having fun, people are laughing.

There’s not this attitude of, I need to be better than you anymore.

I need to do fancy music or I need to show off.

It’s really this attitude of like, let’s see great music, let’s learn from each other, and let’s get to know each other.

I even met some people that are not even musicians or directors or singers.

They’re just here in town to see some of the best choirs you’ll ever have in one place at the same time.

So it’s super cool.

And there’s also the feeling of walking by people that I admire and adore and say, oh my gosh, they’re so and so.

To be surrounded by such great talent and such great people is second to none.

So what would your advice be to a composer trying to break into the publishing game?

Well, I think first and foremost, I really believe that publishing is about people.

And being a published composer is not the be all end all crown jewel of your career.

When I first started doing this, I was going to conventions talking to people, trying to learn from the folks that inspired me.

It’s kind of like, I hear a lot of people say like, so I’m a big like reality TV fan, and whenever they introduce whoever’s on the show, like Big Brother, for example, someone will always say, oh, I’m so and so, I’m this many years old, I’m painfully single and looking for love.

You know, and I sort of always roll my eyes at that because, you know, they always say like, you know, you have to be happy yourself before you’re ready to move on in life.

And it’s sort of that way in publishing too.

The title of this podcast should be Painfully Unpublished.

There you go.

That’s a good one.

Because if you are, I think if you are trying too hard to have publication imprint be the be all end all of your life, you’re not gonna be happy.

So if we were making a choral version of Big Brother, who would you put in the house?

Oh, who would I put in the house?

You know, it’s easy to say I’d put Roger Mack and Mark in there.

I feel like Roger would be a ham.

100%.

But in the choral world, it’s a privilege to be part of such a special family.

Of course, when you’re submitting music, you do want to promote yourself.

You want to make sure you have a great looking score.

Study the music of the publishers that you aspire to be with and see what their conventions are.

You know, so many people send in music just because it’s a publisher.

You know, they’re not really looking around, but it’s sort of like going to college, right?

You don’t just like throw the dart at the board and see what college you want to go to.

You visit, you see how the staff make you feel.

Is there a particular professor you want to work with?

It’s the same thing in publishing.

Do you feel this music is something that you fit in with?

Does it feel like home to you?

Is there a particular editor that you like, that you want to work with?

I think the most successful folks in publishing understand the importance of being around other people that will make a difference and impact in their life.

And the print success kind of comes with that.

I was talking to Mary Ann, a wonderful a cappella arranger, and we sort of joked that she’s the queen of Arrange Me.

She’s figured it out.

And Sheet Music Plus ran a wonderful article on her, where they kind of asked her the same question.

What’s your secret to being successful?

And she sort of alluded to, it’s about connecting with people.

It’s about learning about the music that other people do and not just talking about my own.

It’s about taking a genuine interest in who else is in this industry and where can I fit into the puzzle piece and contribute to more than just my own music, right?

You’re taking an interest in where you fit in the landscape.

So in short, I think it’s about wanting to be part of a really valued family.

I have a video online on Alfred’s YouTube channel called Mission Submission, which goes over some of the specifics of how to edit and get ready for your score to be submitted.

You have to be prepared for rejection.

That’s what publishing is.

If that happens, it doesn’t mean your music is bad or that you should stop, you know, don’t give up.

It’s important to understand that publishers are looking for certain things at certain times and just because your piece didn’t fit at that exact same time doesn’t mean it won’t be great elsewhere.

I’ve gotten submissions that are so beautiful and amazing, but I know I can’t sell it to my market, but I’ll say go to this publisher.

They’ll be able to do something for you.

And we can link to that video along with this episode too, so people can go watch that after they’re done listening.

Yeah.

What do you wish choral directors knew about publishing?

How many different people are involved in getting a piece from start to finish?

You know, it takes a village to get something published.

Publishing is a collaborative experience.

It is not a single person writes their piece and that’s it.

You know, there are so many eyes and ears and rounds of edits and suggestions and different opinions that are tossed around to get a piece from beginning to end.

And it takes sometimes around a year, maybe more, maybe less, but usually around a year, to get something completely from start to finish.

So every single piece is an absolute labor of love.

And it’s always so exciting when I have a brand new writer and to give them that piece for the first time, seeing that look on their face.

So I hope educators know that that piece means something to somebody.

And I also hope that they know that they can make decisions about that music.

You know, almost all the composers I work with say, if something different works for your group, fine, make that change.

If you want to go back to the middle section for, you know, a redo after the applause, do it.

If you need to change a few notes or a few words here and there, most composers are fine with it.

I mean, with my own students, sometimes we would say, how do we want to handle that phrase today?

What if we just try it like this at this concert?

And then next time we’ll say, maybe at the next concert, how could we do that differently?

You know, the piece isn’t stuck in time as it comes to in the recording or as it looks in the music.

We want teachers and students to be involved in making artistic choices.

How would you recommend teachers search for music to find something that’s going to be the right fit for their students?

I think you have to look at a variety of different places.

This is true about anything, not just sheet music, but I never shop at just one store or just one shop.

I tend to look at everywhere that’s selling music, whether it’s my local music store, whether it’s my favorite website, whether it’s my favorite publisher, and see what they have.

If there are composers that you love, go to their own website and see what they’re promoting and what they have coming out.

If there are a particular series of music that you like, whether it’s choral design series with us or something else, look at other pieces in that series because they will probably have similar parameters of how the music is put together that will work for your kids.

The other thing is because I write in pop a lot, I think there’s this feeling that we have to do pop songs that everybody knows are the most popular on the radio right now thing.

And I have found from teaching that that’s often great, but also sometimes students have like strong opinions about what’s out right now.

They’ll go either they’ll love it or hate it.

So I love looking for songs from like six or seven years ago that are still great songs and programming those because of two reasons.

One, students might not have their immediate reaction to it or a strong opinion yet.

We can really build that opinion from scratch, just like you would with traditional choral piece.

This is true of that too.

But also because you can make choices as a director more because you don’t have to make it sound exactly like the original.

There’s not that expectation.

So shop around and make choices.

When you go in with the attitude of you’re going to not sound exactly like the choir that’s demoing it for you because you’re your own choir.

Yeah.

I’ve noticed the same thing with arranging.

It’s like the older a piece is or a song, the more you can get away with changing stuff.

Which isn’t to say that you can’t change current things, but just in terms of being creative and changing harmonies.

Or there’s those videos where they take a song in a major key and put it in a minor key, stuff like that.

Yeah.

You sort of pick up little arranging techniques when you’re teaching.

I mean, certainly in my own writing, and this is part of that lineage family kumbaya thing I was talking about, is like I can look at a piece of mine and say, Mac Huff taught me how to do that, or Mark Breimer, I learned that from studying his music.

Or I learned this little technique I use from Audrey or Roger.

Look at what the arrangers that you love are doing, and you can do those things in your classroom.

There’s nothing stopping you.

When a composer submits music, how many pieces do you think they have to send at a time?

One.

Don’t send a whole giant folder of things.

Send one or two of your best pieces.

Don’t think that you need to show your entire compositional breadth in one submission.

Like I said, that allows you to take more pride in your submission.

Really go through it, print it out, do some self-editing.

Make sure it looks great on the page.

Everything doesn’t have to be perfect.

It doesn’t have to look like it’s published.

But it should look like you put some effort into it.

If the word Dallas appears on page two and on page 16, did you spell it D-A-L-L-A-S on page two and D-A-L-L-A-S on page 16?

Look up every word in the dictionary.

See how you’re supposed to hyphenate it.

Make sure your slurring is correct.

Make sure that the layout of the pages looks good.

Make sure that that hairpin crescendo you have isn’t going for three pages without stopping.

Did you go through and check the map of dynamics?

If you made a recording, are the dynamics I hear on the recording, the choices you made there, what’s reflected in the music?

Also, if you choose to send a recording, because most publishers don’t require you to, only send it if it’s going to enhance the perception of your piece.

It’s perfectly fine to send a MIDI score.

That’s perfectly fine.

So find someone who knows maybe more about the look aspect of it as you do, and have them check it for you.

Call up some friends, hope you have some, and sing through the piece together.

See how it goes.

See what they say about it.

Our devil’s advocate here, why should a composer spend so much time getting things to look right in their score if you’re just going to redo all the engraving anyway?

Talk about that process of when you take the files from them, and you put it into the Alfred template.

I will, and no editor will ever, ever, ever, ever, ever turn down a piece because it doesn’t look good.

What I’m saying is you want to make the reviewer’s job an experience with your music as roadblock free as possible.

Whatever you can do to make someone’s experience with your work easy and fun and memorable will help you.

So what I’m saying is do everything in your power to make your music accessible to whoever it’s going to go in front of.

Those folks will help you with all the standard conventions.

No one’s expected to know everything.

That’s our job is to help you with that.

But I mean, it also shows in doing that, you will discover things that you want to rethink or change.

Just on printing out the music and sitting at the piano with my pen or pencil, playing it through one last time, I’ll say, that made me stop for a pause for a second.

I don’t quite understand what I meant there.

Let’s change that.

Or, gosh, like I use this chord in the first verse, but it’s a different chord in the third verse.

I should go back and maybe figure out if that was intention or not.

Another thing I learned from Mack Huff, if you’re going to make it different, make it very different.

So it’s a point of pride in helping your music rise to the top of what is inevitably going to be an enormous pile.

Anything you can do to help yourself.

So you alluded to this earlier, but publishers are not taking very many pieces from composers at a time.

The amount of music that they’re publishing compared to what’s out there in the marketplace is relatively small.

So if you’re a composer, hopefully you’re writing more than one or two pieces a year.

So I mean, it just depends on your goals.

Sure.

But where I’m going with this is like, okay, composers are likely to have a lot of music left over that’s not going to be published.

And I would recommend self-publishing that music.

And so I wanted to ask, what have you seen that has worked really well for composers trying to connect with their audiences and trying to promote their own music?

I think, well, all over the place, we’re more connected than ever now.

And so, doing social media, and I haven’t completely figured this out myself yet, in a way that’s more than, here’s a photo of my score, or like, here’s the entire song scrolling by.

But I think you’re better than most, all right?

You’re kind of downplaying it here, but you’ll hold up a picture of your music, but if it’s like a beach tune, you’ll dress like you’re going to the beach.

I mean, I’ve seen some of the things you do.

Yeah.

So I think that does help.

So to be creative in your content.

Be selling yourself short a little bit.

But I think to that end, people want to get to know me.

And so help your audience get to know you.

Maybe show a little bit of your arranging process in a short form video.

Or show just what you think is the, sort of the quote, best part of your song, that’s going to be the most ear-catching.

And then turn it into yourself talking about it.

It kind of piggybacks on, Kirby Shaw gave me great advice years ago.

He said, when you’re approaching someone that you want to show your music to, have it already printed out and looking nice.

Have the page ready to the part you want them to see.

The music pulled up to the moment and the headphones adjusted to the size of the person’s head that you are going to want to be hearing your music.

So, doing that in social media form is like, what is this audience looking for, right?

Is this audience looking for quick content?

Are they looking, is it Instagram and they’re looking for pictures of someone having fun and it’s related to the music somehow?

You have to let someone get to know your personality a little bit these days.

That’s what I think.

And it kind of circles back to you need to be more humble than ever because being a composer type personality is about connecting with people and really genuinely caring about what’s going on in the lives of teachers, the lives of students, what they need, what they care about, what other composers are writing, and helping serve them better.

Because our jobs as composers and arrangers are to be, to create music that will be the bridge to improving someone’s life somehow.

It sounds lofty, but making someone a better musician somehow, helping an audience member understand something new or escape from whatever their life is going through somehow.

So you have to keep your goals and perspective like that too, right?

So this is a question I’ve asked multiple guests on the show.

It’s one of my favorites to ask because it’s something that I struggle with a lot.

And that is, how do you make your music sound interesting with just words?

Because I think sometimes I write this really awesome piece, I’m super excited about it.

And then when I go to explain it to someone who’s not a musician, for example, and I’m like, yeah, but this time I used a violin.

And they’re like, okay, you know what I mean?

Like, I think being able to describe your music is a challenge for a lot of composers.

What advice would you have to them?

Well, I’ve written so many catalog blurbs in my life, but I have made the mistake in pieces of mine of writing about too many things in a single song.

So I sort of like to write or encourage others to write music that sort of stays on its topic.

What is this song about?

That will tend to help you explain what it is about better.

I’m also thinking about what does that person want?

Who are they teaching?

I think if you come at it from how is this going to affect your experience conducting it?

What are going to be the things that I thought about to make this a good experience for you?

What is it going to be like for the students?

What are the topics they could talk about while learning this piece?

How can I extend this to be an experience for your choir rather than just here’s what the music is, here’s the words we learned it, we put it together?

How is it going to stick with them?

What will it be for the audience?

Is it the sort of thinking about a topic piece?

Is it the fun open or closer piece?

Is it meant to impress the truth?

What Mac Huff would call Fred and Martha, the traditional choral people who are like, oh, that was very good.

Is it the piece that’s meant to go, oh, that was a cute piece that made me laugh?

Where does it fit in a larger concert program?

So to summarize, what does it do for the conductor?

What does it do for the ensemble?

And what does it do for the audience?

Well, I appreciate you coming on the show today and making time on your busy schedule.

Before you go, do you have a favorite choral memory you’d like to share?

Well, one of the things I’ll always remember is when I did my first publication, and Audrey Snyder was my very first editor and mentor in this business, and she recently passed away.

And she really held my hand and showed me, not that there’s a right way to do it, but how to navigate the publishing process.

She made me feel comfortable when my piece came back with a bunch of red marks on it.

But she also explained why she was making the changes she was, or making the suggestions that she was, and really established for me what a good editor-composer relationship can look like, and laid the groundwork for what it feels like to be part of a community of composers and arrangers.

And so working with her is a privilege and a memory that I’ll never forget.

And in my own work, I find myself in the position of editor now, which is like mind-blown, right?

And so I want to try and embody some of her tenets in the ways that I communicate and work with writers, especially new writers.

And the thing I learned from Audrey is that you have to put good into the world, whether it’s through your work or in your life, without expecting it to come back to you, because it will come back to you if you put it out there.

And so when we talk about the legacies of the writers that came before you, keeping her music alive also means keeping the things that she contributed to the industry and personally to us as friends alive.

And so I’m hoping that one day maybe someone’s favorite choral memory will involve me.

We’ll see if it does.