Ep. 46: Composition and Connection: Rob Deemer and the Institute for Composer Diversity

Well, thank you for coming on the show.

We’ve never met, but you come very well recommended, and I have a lot of things I want to pick your brain on.

But before we get into all that, I’d like to learn just a little bit more about you and your music.

What’s the kind of music you like to write, and how did you find your voice as a composer?

Well, first, thank you for having me on.

Looking forward to this conversation.

In terms of my own music, let’s say it’s been a journey.

I originally started out way, way back in the day, first starting out arranging big band charts when I was in high school and in college, had really no idea what composing was, even through my undergrad.

I had a couple of people ask me to write things, and I did, but I still didn’t really know what that was.

Went out to the film scoring program out at the University of Southern California back in the mid-90s, and still didn’t really know what composing was, but was doing it because it was a little bit easier.

You were basically scoring the picture.

So I did that for a few years out in LA, and then finally decided I should probably, it was in my late 20s at this point, should probably learn what composing was.

Also, I liked the idea of actually having a salary, as opposed to being a freelancer for the rest of my life.

So I went back to grad school, did a master’s and a doctorate in composition at Northern Illinois University and the University of Texas respectively.

And after a couple of years in Oklahoma, finally ended up here in Western New York, teaching at the State University of New York at Fredonia, where I’ve been for almost 18 years now.

In terms of my own music, it’s kind of gone, kind of a winding path from, if you heard some of my early, early stuff, it was probably, I had a weird sense of humor.

And so a lot of my music tended to have a bit of a tongue-in-cheek aspect to it.

And then I think over time, I’ve just either been exploring different aspects, whether or not in terms of time, there were a few years where I was kind of trying to stretch everything out to be able to see kind of like not just minimalist, but kind of trying to stretch things out.

So like how long or how slow of a tempo could you have and still have it make sense.

I think overall, whether or not it’s my choral stuff or my wind band stuff or my orchestral stuff or chamber, it usually has to have some sort of a melodic idea.

More often times than not, I tend to go not just beauty for beauty sake, but I tend to try to explore some sort of emotional impact.

Often times that tends to gauge either with like very visceral emotions like loss or sadness or joy or pain or a little bit of everything.

So I’m sure that was that’s entirely unhelpful to anyone listening.

But it’s those are at least some of the types of things that I think about in addition to, okay, I really kind of try and form fit whatever I’m writing to, not only the instrumentation or the ensemble that I’m writing with, but also for the people who I’m writing for, and do my best to try and kind of have it reflect who I’m writing for as much as anything.

So what is composition?

Did you ever figure it out?

It’s interesting because there are so many different kinds of composers.

More often times than not, it’s musical exploration whether or not you’re working with a tune or whether or not you’re working with a concept or whether or not you’re working with against something that’s already happening, whether or not it’s a ballet or a film or an idea.

It’s funny because there are so many different composers and at the same time, so many of them tend to either come up with ideas, kind of scattershot, and then they’ll put them together, and then they’ll come up with a piece.

Others will come up with an idea of a structure, and then they’ll fill in that structure with music.

I mean, that’s obviously very, very broad.

But those are kind of the two different ways that I’ve found a lot of composers over the last 10, 15 years, especially after having spoken with a lot of composers over the years.

They tend to focus on either, I’m sketching this little idea, and I’m going to sketch this little idea, and I might put them all together and play with them.

Or it’s like, no, I want to figure out what my environment is, how long is this thing going to be, how many different ideas, and then I can start to play around with what the content is.

I think that’s a great way of thinking about it, and I think it’s helpful as a composer to understand how you write and how you come up with ideas.

Believe it or not, you are the first professor of composition that I’ve had on the show.

Don’t know if you wanted that kind of heat.

The pressure is too much.

I can’t handle them.

But there are a lot of aspiring composers that listen to this show, and I wonder, I don’t have a really good sense on what gets taught in the world of what I’m called academic composition because my degrees were in commercial music.

And so it was a lot of production, songwriting.

I mean, yes, there was composition, but there was film score and there’s a bunch of other things.

I get the sense just looking at universities across the country, that what you get taught and how you get taught varies widely from school to school.

And so if you are a high school student who wants to study composition in college, how do you navigate that landscape?

How do you find the right match for your interests and your abilities with the faculty that are going to be able to nurture you and mentor you and take you in the right direction?

because I’ve encountered a lot of people who went into composition thinking it would be one thing and then were surprised by what it turned out to be and ended up going away from that.

I just wonder, that was a really long way of asking this question, but I wonder what your thoughts on that.

As you’re applying to colleges, as you’re investigating, what do you look for and how do you reach out to people and make sure that you’re making the best decision for you?

That’s a great question and a series of questions, and I deal with that a lot because many, well, first off, many composition programs tend not to have undergrad components to them or at least they don’t emphasize those.

Many programs, especially the bigger schools, will tend to have more masters and doctoral programs.

They may have undergraduate programs, but that’s not their emphasis.

Part of that is because there just aren’t as many students studying composition or at least having experience in composition when they’re in high school or at least pre-college, that has changed over, say, the last 10 years.

I think it’s gotten a lot better, but it’s still one of those things where it’s a challenge to find time.

And your question in terms of if someone is in high school and they’re thinking about exploring composition, one of the things obviously to do, if you can, is to look at who’s teaching there and to try and listen to their music.

Personally, I think if you listen to their music and it totally resonates, then that’s a good clue.

If it doesn’t, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re a bad composition teacher, but it may mean that you might want to at least go to the next step of looking at the curriculum and seeing how much experience does the student get while they’re in a program.

So if you’re looking at an undergraduate program, do they take lessons all four years, or do they have to wait till their sophomore or even their junior year to be able to start taking private lessons?

because it’s one thing to take class composition, and I teach that here, but we also make sure that they get private instruction because there’s only so much you can do in a class.

So much of what composing is, especially when you’re first starting out, is personal.

And you kind of need that one-on-one back and forth and kind of getting under the hood, so to speak, in order to allow the student to feel comfortable in kind of exploring things.

One thing that I have noticed is a lot of students, for whatever reason, for all of the reasons in our society, they want to study to be a film composer or a video game composer or something like that, because that’s a lot of the music that they themselves are exposed to and they interact with and they engage with.

We’ve kind of set it up here at Fredonia, and I know other programs have done so as well, where we want to make sure that they have an opportunity, and by the way, I’m trying not to do this as an advertisement for Fredonia.

Any composition program should at least give them a chance to be able to get their feet wet in those areas, at least a little bit, but then also be able to be like, by the way, that’s not the only thing you’re going to be able to do.

And I don’t want to describe it as you need to also eat your vegetables, but it’s also useful for them to be able to take a counterpoint class, and to be able to have a choral arranging class, and to be able to have as much experiences as possible.

So the idea of kind of looking at the classes that are being taught, as well as the experiences, how often do they get a chance to get works performed in a public setting?

How often times do they get to do readings with either student or professional performers?

All of those things kind of wrap into it, in addition to the personal relationship they have with the faculty, because obviously that’s going to be, they’re going to have to work with the faculty on a one-on-one basis, whether or not it’s one teacher or multiple teachers, they’re going to have to get a sense of, I mean, that’s a long haul, especially if you’re studying with one person for two or three or four years, that’s a long time to be working with someone and to continually come back and bring materials to them.

Yeah, you have to be able to get along with them and they’ll get along with you.

What are your favorite resources for learning about the business side of composition?

Ooh, the resources.

I guess what do you mean by business first?

because that’s pretty broad.

I don’t know the best way to ask this question.

But, okay, put it this way.

What do people that study composition formally get that those of us just learning on the job don’t?

because I think there’s a lot of composers out there who either they’re a conductor or a performer or a teacher and they get into it gradually on their own, writing on the side, eventually getting things published, and they come into the business of composing that way, but they haven’t had the formal education or structure.

So, if you’re one of those people that have done it on your own, what are you missing and what are those gaps that you need to try and fill?

No, that’s good.

I know because I literally have done both.

Like, I was self-taught for many years before I actually went back and studied composition.

And oftentimes, like studying composition, like if you go to school for it, more oftentimes than not, you’re taking specific classes to learn specific things, like say instrumentation, orchestration, choral arranging, counterpoint, different styles, hopefully.

You know, how to be, it’s not just thinking of like, oh, here’s set theory or here’s 12-tone.

That’s a tool that you can use, but there’s also many other tools that you can use in different ways.

And so to be able to get that information in kind of bite-size morsels that then you can both engage with the teacher asking questions as well as getting assignments.

My orchestration class right now is just in the process of finishing up their second project.

Where could they be doing that on their own?

Totally.

Are they getting a little bit more direction?

I would hope so in terms of both my reactions to what they’re doing, but also just having someone else give them an assignment.

Like it’s, especially with composing, there is something to be said for having the expectation.

Like you need to get this done in two weeks or you need to, this is due on Monday.

We can do that to ourselves, but that’s always a sliding scale, right?

You can always be like, oh, you know, something came up on Sunday, and so I’ll get it done on Wednesday.

But there is something to be said for having kind of like an external force saying, no, somehow you need to get this done by X time, which does help then in the professional world, because oftentimes those deadlines are real and can determine whether or not you get paid, be whether or not you get asked to do it again, all of those fun things, where oftentimes what I’ll describe it as is, it allows for you to screw up without it impacting your ability to be able to have a career, if that makes sense.

In terms of folks who are just kind of doing it without necessarily having to go through years and years of training, you mentioned the idea of resources.

Actually, it’s a combination of just being able to work with people, finding people who you want to work with, whether or not they are performers, or if they’re choral directors, or band directors, or teachers, or folks who are playing professionally.

The more you can actually just do the thing and then get feedback from them, that’s as helpful as anything.

Then also, depending on what kind of topic you’re looking at, books are great, but to be perfectly honest, there’s a lot of stuff going on YouTube these days that at least, maybe not to use the videos that are on YouTube that people are putting out as a substitute for education, but more of as an augmentation of that, to either check to see, oh, what does this person say?

What does this person say?

And then slowly over time, you’re like, okay, well, I’m starting to get a sense of things, and then I’m going to try this out in a real world situation, and if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, then you keep going.

So I was doing my Googling before this interview, and I came across an article you wrote back in 2012 called, They’re Finally Catching On, and it was about my score and self-publishing and the start of all of that.

I just have to ask, though, because I noticed you don’t have any works on JW.

Pepper or Sheet music plus or any of those.

So I’m wondering what, I mean, 12 years on, how do you think things have gone?

Oh, wow.

I was going to say, I was writing on a weekly basis for a few years back then.

So when you said my article, I’m like, oh God, which one?

Okay.

So, well, you’re right.

Do you remember the article?

Do I need to?

It has, I will admit, 12 years is a long ago.

In terms of catching on the idea of providing opportunities for folks to be able to self-publish their music, get their music out to people.

That’s always been a challenge.

I think in some ways it’s gotten a lot easier because folks can either totally self-publish or shifting to the distribution model, which is in some ways that’s what MyScore and others have been doing it.

It allows for the composer to not necessarily have to do all of the work, but still have a method by which folks can access their music.

It’s interesting.

I think we’ve seen a lot of different models over the last 10, 15 years of how folks can do that.

There’s a lot of different ways.

You see folks like Murphy music, which is slightly different than a big house, like a full publisher like Alfred or a distributor like Pepper.

You also have a number of different amalgamations or confederations, I might say, with different composers.

The groups that I belong to, Adjective New music, which is basically just a consortium of composers who have gotten together.

The folks who run it do the printing and the sending out of music.

They get a cut, which is similar to Pepper’s model.

I think it’s tricky because there are so many options these days, that it still hasn’t really shaken out in terms of how someone goes about it.

I think even for folks who are just coming into the industry, it’s still a little challenging to know exactly what’s the best method to do that thing.

I think slowly over time that is going to shake out, but we’re still on the front end of it.

It may take another 10 or 15 years for all of that to get figured out, which if you look at the history of music publishing is still relatively short.

Why did you decide to put your music there as opposed to one of those other options?

What was the thought process?

Sure.

Well, this particular one, it was because it’s run by two colleagues of mine, one who teaches here at SUNY Fredonia.

These are folks that I know personally, Andrew Martin Smith and Jamie Lee Sampson are the folks who run Adjective New music.

You see a number of these consortiums that have come up because of that.

It’s a little bit more personal, it’s a little bit more…

And by consortiums, you mean essentially groups of composers getting together to publish their music as a team.

Right.

It’s not like a commissioning consortium.

It’s more of just like a confederation of like-minded composers that kind of group together and they kind of share resources in order to be able to…

Everyone doesn’t have to do it all themselves.

And to be perfectly honest, I’ve…

Well, I don’t know if I’m a bad model at this, but I’m definitely something that I’m not sure if I would tell my students, do what I’ve been doing as a composer, because obviously I’ve been a bit distracted and have not put a lot of focus on my own composing or getting my own music out there for quite, you know, for let’s say at least five or six years because of other projects that we might talk about.

But in terms of options, these days, if I was to put some time and effort, which I keep saying I still will, but I keep finding other projects to dive into, I think the idea of being able to have multiple streams for even the same work, there are ways to be able to have a work be distributed by multiple places and that might be the best way to do it.

Unless it’s something where, let’s say, one of the big house publishers are like, we’re going to literally publish everything you write.

Yeah.

We’re going to push it.

That’s one thing.

If it’s just, okay, good luck, then it’s a little bit catches catch can.

So these days, especially if there’s a way for you to be able to get your stuff distributed through multiple means, like you can get distributed through this house, but also this house, the more the merrier.

The biggest thing that I would say, and one of the advantages of doing that is, it’s great to be able to self-publish your stuff yourself.

The challenge with that is, and this is one of the things I’m going to try and tackle over the next few years, is especially if you’re trying to write for educational forces, whether or not it’s K-12 or higher ed, oftentimes what will happen is that a school will have one PO with either Pepper or Stanton’s or somewhere where they can buy all of their music.

And then if a composer is completely self-published, oftentimes that creates a lot of roadblocks for that composer’s works to be performed.

One of the things I’ve been advocating for is, if a composer wants to do that, they could potentially have their works available both on their website and say through MyScore or one of the other self-run or at least self-engaged methods or even through Pepper itself as a fully engaged work.

And then to be able to say, look, if you can pay the composer directly through their website, but if you have a PO and you can’t, then here’s a link to go get that same work.

The composers aren’t going to get quite as much money, but at least they’re not going to get no money.

Right?

So you’re trying to figure out a system by which everybody can still access the music.

The composers can get paid as much as they can, but at the same time, it’s not creating so much roadblocks that it’s keeping self-published composers from being able to get their works performed.

Well, let’s talk about some of those other projects that you’ve alluded to.

Tell me more about the Institute for Composer Diversity and how somebody listening to this podcast can get their music included in that database.

So yeah, that’s the big one that has taken up a fair amount of my headspace and time and attention over, I mean, I started that in the summer of 2016.

So it’s been a while.

But to give you a sense of what this was, back in 2016, I started a small project where I thought it would be good to be able to create a spreadsheet by which my students here at Fredonia would be able to find out more about women composers, because it just seemed like the right thing to do.

It was one of those things where there weren’t a lot of resources.

And I thought, well, I wanted to learn how to use spreadsheets more.

So I started to play around with that and structured it in a way where you could filter the spreadsheet by various parameters, like whether or not they were living or dead, racial and ethnic identity, what type of music they wrote, so on and so forth.

And it went from a couple of hundred composers to almost 3,000 composers that over the course of a couple of years included both women composers and composers of color.

And then at that point, I was like, this should probably be a website and not a Google Sheet.

And so created a website, composerdiversity.com, about six months later, got permission from my colleagues here at SUNY Fredonia to create what is now the Institute for Composer Diversity, which is basically it’s a project by which we encourage folks to perform and teach about works by composers who are women, non-binary, composers of color, composers who belong to an LGBTQ plus group.

We even have a way to be able to search for composers who are disabled, basically to show that there’s a lot of different kinds of composers out there.

And it is useful and beneficial for students, as well as audience members in the professional realm, to have access to and engage with music by composers who are like them, as opposed to basically white guys like myself, that for all of the reasons have been the only game in town, so to speak, for a very, very long time.

And there’s a lot of reasons why that is caught on over time.

The main project that we have on our website, there’s a number of different components to it.

There are databases that we’ve put together that allow for searchability.

We’ve gone past the idea of just searching for composers, and we now have databases for wind band, for choral, for orchestra, and for art song.

We’re currently also building a chamber database that hopefully will come out later this year.

And that you can search for works by a lot of different search parameters either about the work, duration, instrumentation, voicing for choir, voice range for art song, as specific as like if you want to find a band work that has a harp part or doesn’t have a harp part, you can do that or you can look for particular works that were written at a certain time period, if you’re looking for older works or whatnot.

That’s the database side of it, and it’s gotten quite large, and we’re still working on growing, we’re still trying to backfill works by composers that are already in the database, as well as finding new composers to put in the database.

Part of the reason why we’re always trying to do that is because for living composers, we decided several years ago that we wanted to make sure that if we include any composers in the databases, that we not only got their permission to do so, but also that all of the identity information that was in our databases was self-reported.

And so it’s really become a very strong resource in that way, because you know that if you’re looking for someone from an LGBTQ demographic, that’s self-reported.

You know that that information is coming from the composer themselves, and same thing from racial, ethnic identity, or gender identity.

So that’s that component of it.

And then the other component is the analysis work that we’ve been doing, as well as creating resources for various organizations.

We’ve been doing analysis of programming, both at the K-12 and higher ed, as well as the professional realm.

We’ve got orchestra programming report that we’ve been we’ve done now for two years.

And we’re working on the third year where we’ve been looking at professional orchestra performances across the country, over 200 orchestras now.

And that’s in partnership with the League of American Orchestras.

And it’s really shown some fascinating trends just over the last several years to be able to show how programming has changed at the professional realm.

And then I can then take that information, bring it to folks at the K-12 level or at the higher ed level and say, things are already changing at the professional realm, now y’all need to catch up.

So it’s a big project and it’s taken a lot of time and a lot of sweat to be able to get it to where it is.

But it has definitely, I think it’s made it easier for folks to be able to both know what the situation is, as well as find ways to be able to make things better.

And we’re going from there.

What has the response been to the database?

I’m sure everyone’s happy, right?

I think for the most part people are, especially if you’re looking at folks.

And it’s kind of, it’s been over time.

When I first started putting this stuff out, I mean, I would just share the spreadsheet out on Facebook and Twitter, and people started to use it.

I think overall folks have been able to find that it is useful.

I’m hoping that when we get the chamber database out there, that’ll even help even more, because obviously if you’re focusing on just large ensemble stuff, that can be a little limiting, because obviously not all musicians are conductors.

So, you know, want to be able to do that.

I mean, there’s always been questions in terms of, from both sides, in terms of whether it’s being done right, and we’ve made adjustments over time, and I think we’ve been able to get it to a good place.

I think, overall, there’s still folks who are like, why do we need to do this?

But those questions, I think, have been muted over time.

I think there’s still some pockets in some areas within the broader musical community that are like, well, we don’t need to do that so much.

But for the most part, I really haven’t seen a lot of pushback in terms of whether or not it is a good thing to be able to program works by these composers who have been historically excluded over a good long time.

The challenge of it is, and this is where kind of the long-term aspect of it can be a bit of a challenge, is how to be able to do this new concept of programming while at the same time still making people feel like they’re not giving up all of the music that they got into music for, and that they’ve been taught that, oh, this is what you should be performing.

The dead guys.

Well, it’s not just even dead guys.

It’s the idea that we’ve been taught, like it’s a series of teachers four generations back, six generations back, we’re like, these are the cool kids, these are the cool kids, these are the cool kids, over and over and over, to the point where it’s like, well, how could we possibly not perform this work and this work and this work by this composer?

And at some point you’re like, we’re not saying that you can’t perform them, but maybe not every year, or maybe stretch it out a little bit more and provide more room in the repertoire to do this.

And I do think we’re finding more and more examples of people doing that.

But as with any progress with stuff like this, there’s also pushback.

Part of it is defensive and part of it is just they’re not sure.

And so then you just have to be kind of politely stubborn as with a student, right?

A freshman in college isn’t going to, it might have certain feelings about a certain thing that they get taught about.

And over the course of four years, they get more comfortable with it.

And then by the time they graduate, they’re cool with it.

Same type of thing with this.

And it’s always been a challenge for living composers, by the way, for all of the composers who are listening, because conductors like to conduct works that they already know that they feel comfortable with, that they’ve either learned from their teachers or they have experience with, and so it’s scary for them, for performers or conductors or educators, to deal with all of this new music all at once.

I think over time that will kind of plateau and people will start to be like, oh yeah, I totally know that piece.

I’ve played it a couple of times.

I heard it being performed by this other group.

Love it.

Like I said, those types of things, it just takes a little while, so you have to be comfortable with that.

Do you think that mentality like that there needs to be a canon or repertoire is part of the problem?

I was looking on Facebook last week, the Institute made a post about International Women’s Day, and they mentioned that the database now includes more than 15,000 pieces of music written by women composers, which is wonderful.

But if you’re one of those composers, one out of 15,000 is not very good odds.

I think if we’re limiting ourselves to pieces that have been performed before and that we’ve heard multiple times, that’s really going to cut down on the amount of music that’s getting performed, isn’t it?

Definitely.

I think the idea of a canon is always a little bit of a tricky subject, because so much of that has to do with relationships across different conductors or different ensembles.

Like, if you just look at professional orchestras, they’re looking at what everybody else is doing, but there’s always like a sense of, irrespective of what genre you’re in, there’s always those chestnuts that everyone’s going to be like, yep, this is cool, we’re always going to do this.

Whether or not are you doing it every other year, or if you’re doing it every five years and allowing a rotation of newer stuff, it’s always going to be a bit of a challenge because people are not necessarily worried about what everybody else is doing or what everybody else is thinking about what they’re doing.

But there’s that sense of like, if we say this work is considered a masterpiece, okay, by whom, under what auspices, what are the rubrics that you’re thinking it’s a masterpiece, all of the things, if it’s just a popular work, that’s great.

But I don’t know.

Well, and you want to program popular works because that gets butts in the seats.

I mean, that’s part of the problem is people want to hear music that they recognize.

I suppose you have to train audiences to be able to hear new stuff as well.

But I feel a lot of the same things that you’re feeling about how things are changing.

Especially, I’m primarily in the K-12 choral world, and there’s lots of discussions happening there about diversity and programming.

One thing that I don’t see changing though, is interest in the actual composers themselves and working with the composers and building relationships with those composers.

I think it’s just part of that mindset.

I don’t know, but I feel like it’s so easy now to email a composer, to have them come do a Zoom with your class, talk to them about the piece and ask questions about this retornando here or there.

I mean, I don’t know, other than commissioning, but a lot of groups don’t even think of that, of commissioning a new work.

What can composers do to change that?

What can composers do to encourage that?

because I think because of the sheer amount of music out there, I think it’s going to be important for composers to build those relationships, to put themselves out there, to be more seen, to be more visible.

I think that will help with marketing your music, to be a person who has a voice and a personality, rather than just an entry on a spreadsheet.

Right.

Absolutely.

And totally agree that the spreadsheets are literally just a way for folks to be able to browse or search.

But really, ultimately, yes, for composers, how to be able to get their stuff out there these days, I would say start local.

I have a good friend of mine who teaches in Northern Illinois.

She’s a choral director and she does band as well.

And slowly over time, she wrote a choral piece and one of the choirs that she sings with, sung it, and they liked it.

And then she wrote another one.

And now she’s like doing a lot of really good composing.

She’s kind of accidentally turned into a composer, which is funny because I don’t see that as accidentally.

Like that is one of the ways that people become composers, is they just try it and then they like it.

And then they find out they’re good at it.

And then they get better at it and all of the things.

But it’s a combination of really, you kind of have to work with the folks who are around you first.

Like if you’re trying to suddenly skip to, now I need to make all of the money and I need to get hundreds of ensembles to be performing your work, it usually takes a lot more of working with one person and then getting that person to encourage their friends to perform it and then have it grow organically, rather than using social media to kind of skip ahead.

And that idea of, I hate the idea of branding, but there is something to be said for like, people want to work with composers because they want to work with that person.

I do see, especially over the last maybe five, eight years, the concept of performing a work because of who the composer is versus what the content of the piece is has become more important because it’s gotten a lot easier.

And obviously, you and I are currently talking over Zoom.

This has become a huge, I think we’re going to, 10 years down the line, we’re going to see the idea of, of the ease of video communication will be seen as, as kind of one of those sea change moments where a composer doesn’t have to be brought in, like literally flown in to whatever town that particular school is in, and then spend two days.

They can create a relationship with people sitting in their living room across the country.

You know, people who are getting their degrees in music education, the more those programs and the professors in those programs are encouraging their students to do that and normalizing that.

And normalizing the idea that composers are not just a name but a real person.

Slowly over time, that’s going to really become the norm and not the exception.

I hope so.

And I think bringing it back to what we were talking about before, if students in K-12 get used to seeing composers and talking to composers, they’re going to come in to collegiate programs, especially composition, with eyes wide open, with more of an idea of who they are and want to write.

And I just see it sort of benefiting everyone.

I think for a long time, people have just sort of viewed composers as a music shop, more or less.

I need a piece.

I need a TTB piece.

So I’m going to go here.

Oh, I like this.

Boom.

And I’ve seen it too, the places people are going to find their music now.

It’s so scattered and it’s so for good or for bad, it’s so different than what it used to be.

And I feel like the entry points to finding a composer are so different.

It’s maybe a social media post here or a video here or a performance here.

You’re not necessarily Googling composer and then going to their website and then reading and then finding the music.

I mean, you can come at it from so many different sides.

And I think that’s, I don’t know, it’s just hard.

It’s just hard for composers to do that, to be writing the music and putting themselves out there and all of that.

And I think it would be easier if, well, okay.

I think still, like I’ve seen a lot of efforts to, for example, podcasts about composers.

And it seems like a lot of those things really struggle to get traction.

because people are interested in still the music more than learning about this composer.

I think that’s part of the change we’ve been discussing, right?

It’s still very focused on the actual piece and like the practicalities of it.

You know, will this work for my ensemble?

I think people care more about that stuff generally than the identity or the personality of the composer.

And this is something I want to throw to you.

How do composers describe their music in a way that’s not boring?

Like with words, because there is so much music out there, and unless someone’s going to take the time to actually listen to it, at best you’ve got them skimming through your description really fast.

And how do you grab people and how do you make your music sound interesting?

because I will write a new piece and I’ll be very excited about it, and then I’ll tell my wife who’s not a musician and she just goes, yeah, okay, because it sounds like every other thing I’ve done.

You know what I mean?

Like at a certain point, it’s like, well, I tried this really new combination of instruments.

I’m really excited about it.

But you can’t put that in the words.

And so how do you describe your work in a way that grabs people and gets them interested?

It’s a really good question because obviously each piece is kind of in and of itself its own thing.

My own penchant is usually to try and see if there’s a non-musical story that can go along with it.

Where I don’t bother with telling them about, okay, it’s in three sections and it does this thing, and there’s stuff in there.

It’s more about like, how did this piece come about?

And who is it written for?

And what’s my relationship to them?

And that idea of like, it gives folks something relatable, a toehold where they can be like, oh, he wrote this band piece, and the alarm clock that he used at the very end of it, he had, like in one of the performances, he had to borrow it from this girl who ended up being his wife, which by the way is a true story.

You know, and like this whole thing of like, oh yeah, and that that alarm clock, well, when I first did it, like it ended up being like, I had to borrow it from this girl, and she was really cool, and then the next thing you know, we were dating and all of these, like something like that, that suddenly takes that piece beyond the musical into the extra musical, and then it becomes just that much more interesting.

Then it becomes human rather than just musical.

So for me, that’s how I tend to work because I see this almost every musical piece I write as some sort of a human component to it where I’m writing it for these people, and I have a certain relationship to them, and rather than hiding that, I actually like lean into that because that helps the audience, even not just at the premiere, but even if at subsequent performances, they can see, oh, this is, I get that.

It’s not just music washing over them, but they’re invested in seeing what the music does because they have a context to it.

So I have a big picture question for you to wrap things up.

Do you think that self-publishing as a concept is maybe a solution to a lot of these issues surrounding diversity in music?

I understand it sounds bad to tell equity-seeking composers, the solution is just publish everything yourself, right?

But I do think it’s a sincere question because just with the economics of music publishing being what they are, I don’t think there’s enough music being published in the traditional formats to ever really account for the diversity we have just in the human population.

So do you think self-publishing is one of the driving forces behind all of this change we’re seeing?

Do you think that it’s just a step to something else or a byproduct?

Where do you see the future of the industry just generally going?

I think in part, there was kind of a hidden part of that question.

I think there are more people composing than there were.

And I think in part, it’s because we’ve kind of gotten away from that idea, from the blessed few who you have to be composing operas when you were six, in order to be able to be a composer.

It’s kind of been, I think, at least a little bit demystified, as well as the access that composers have with digital software and whatnot, and with self-publishing.

So I kind of group all of that as like, yep, you could totally do it on your own.

You don’t have to get Schirmer or Boozy and Hawks to be able to publish your works in order to be able to do the thing.

That being said, it has made things, so I’m thinking back, if you go back 30 years before any of this stuff was available, there wasn’t really an Internet to speak of or it was just starting.

Basically, the way that most people found out about their music was either through their friends or through CDs, or through publisher slash distributor, like paraphernalia.

Now, you have this one-two punch of now, you get to find out so much more than you could have 30, 40 years ago, but now you have way more choices.

And so, it’s kind of, it’s, they’ve both come at the same point.

I definitely think that self-publishing is a choice that composers need to be aware of, and they need to be cognizant of the fact that it is a choice.

They shouldn’t feel like they are forced to self-publish, and they shouldn’t feel like they are forced to go with, you know, a big publisher that’s going to take 90% of the take.

There’s a reason why that works, oftentimes because, you know, composers will do that because they’re making so much, they can make enough money at scale because they have a lot of works, and there are a lot of those works being purchased, that they can make a lot of money.

If they’re self-published, they’re probably not going to be, it’s going to be more difficult for them to be able to sell multiple, multiple works at scale that the large publishers can able to deal with, but maybe they can charge more and make the same amount of money without having to do that.

You do find composers starting off self-published, maybe going into published, and then maybe coming back, and everybody’s just at a continuum.

It is really tricky.

I think the distribution model where you are self-published and you can still get someone else to distribute it, so maybe you’re getting anywhere between 25 and 50 percent of the sale price of a work that’s coming back to the composer as opposed to 10 percent.

Personally, I think that’s probably a good option for a lot of composers, and then it’s just a matter of finding out how to be able to do that.

Then you can focus on just making your music, you make it look good, you give it to someone else, they’re dealing with the printing and the packaging and the sending and all of those things.

But then how to be able to do that and make sure that it’s not literally one distributor, right?

You still want to allow for a breadth of options out there.

It’s going to be fascinating to see how all of these things turn out.

We’ve been seeing about things like, are we talking about printing?

I literally just said printing and packaging, but the more things go digital, is that going to still be a thing as much?

It probably still will be because I can’t see choirs all sitting up there with iPads, dropping them and having them go out of energy, right?

There’s always probably going to be some aspect of that.

Part of the challenge is it’s not just that the playing field keeps shifting, but there are multiple playing fields on top of each other.

So I don’t know if that helps, but it definitely feels like it is a good option for folks to maybe start with and then kind of build from there, rather than wait and not do anything, which a lot of people do, or go all in with a big publisher and kind of paint yourself into a corner.

So final question for you.

You have devoted a lot of time and energy in promoting the works of other composers and talking to other composers and thinking about these issues.

At the expense of your own music, why and what have you learned from that?

That’s a good question.

I think in part, and it’s not like I’m thinking of like, oh, I’m doing it for the greater good, and I shall give up my art for everyone else.

Part of it’s just been you only have so much time.

I actually, I don’t think I mentioned it.

I did my undergrad as a music education major.

I thought I was going to be a high school band director in suburban Chicago.

I had no idea I was going to be doing any of the things I’m doing right now.

Until I was probably in my early 30s when I was doing my doctor, and I’m like, oh, I could probably be a composition professor.

That looks good.

I’ve always thought of myself as a teacher first, even from back in the day.

And the fact that I just kind of pivoted from being, say, a K-12 music teacher to a collegiate pedagogue that happened to be focused on composition.

I’ve always thought of myself as that.

And then the idea of people playing my own music is like, oh, that’s even better.

And so, that idea of wanting to be able to impact as many people as possible, that’s probably something that’s a little bit weird for me, because a lot of people are like, I want to impact my students.

And I’m like, that’s great.

But that’s small ball.

I want to, like, impact all the things.

For whatever reason, that’s something that’s firing off in my brain, always has.

And so, that’s why I was writing articles 12 years ago.

And now it’s like, wait a minute.

Once I realized that I could potentially put together resources that help people all over the place, be able to do different things and in that way, help all of these other composers, I’ve never really thought of it as helping other composers.

That is a good side, that’s a byproduct of it that I think is absolutely valuable.

But I’m thinking of it as you’re impacting all of your audience members and all of the students in your ensembles.

So it’s way bigger than just helping out my fellow composers.

It’s actually trying to, in some small way, trying to impact society as a whole.

So small, but that’s part of the reason why it’s not as big of a thing for me to be like, oh yeah, I should have already written another band piece or another choral piece by now.

Well, where can our listeners find you and your music and all of these different projects that you’re working on?

Oh my goodness.

Well, the biggest, if they’re interested in the Institute, composerdiversity.com is always the best place to go.

In terms of finding me, they can either find me on Facebook.

They might have to reach out and ask for me.

I do have a page that has a link to, if you just go to robdeemer.com, it should still have a link to my SoundCloud if they want to check out some of my music, or they can just reach me at Deemer at fredonia.edu, which is my email here at Fredonia.

If they have any questions, especially about studying composition at the college level, I’m always happy to help.

Well, thank you again.

This was a really fun conversation and we’ll have to circle back in another 12 years and see if we were right.

I love it.

Thanks so much.