RhythmArt Blog

I’ve heard other composers talk about the joys of printing music at Kinko’s, and I finally had my moment! I feel like I’ve become a real boy!

So, here’s the story. I finished up a piece I’ve been working on, finally got it tweaked just right and laid out in Finale so it’s readable, and I thought I’d get it printed in booklet form so the two pages are together and looking really professional-like. So, since my printer can’t do 11×17, I popped it on a flash drive and headed out to Kinko’s.

Oh yeah, the day before I stopped in to figure out what format I needed to put it in so they could print it for me, and I brought a piece of sheet music with me as a visual aide. The lady almost wouldn’t tell me, because the music was copyrighted – “No, I don’t want you to print this piece of music, I want you to tell me what to do to print a piece of music in this format!!”.

So, today I hand the guy my flash drive and the file name, get some nice heavy-weight paper, and wait for him to figure out the ling, complicated process of finding the file on the flash drive and opening it (which, apparently, takes about 5 minutes). Suddenly he yells out (literally, yells across the store) “I can’t print this, it’s copyrighted material”! To which I reply, “Yes, everything is copyrighted. I own the copyright to that music, because I wrote it.” He looked at me incredulously, thought about it for a minute, then said I’d have to fill out a form. So, I fill out a piece of paper asking myself for permission to print my music. Quite a surreal experience – “So, self, what purposes do you intend on using this music for?”. “Well, self, pretty much anything I want to use it for.” “Oh, well, I guess that’s OK then.” So I signed over the rights to myself (sweet, now I own the rights, wait, huh?) and got it printed.

What’s really interesting about this to me is that, had the file been the text of a novel, some poetry, a doctoral dissertation, etc., they wouldn’t have batted an eyelash at printing it. For some reason, people are skeptical of music. As if only “special” people are able to write music. “If you could write music, you wouldn’t live here, you’d live in New York, where all those professional musicians live.” Don’t even get me started on the “what do you do for a living” talk!

So, one more step on my professional development – I’ve had my Kinko’s moment. Here’s looking forward to many more!

By the way, the piece – Genesis 1:1, will be premiered at my concert January 14, 2010, and will be available via my catalog page after that.