This essay originally appeared in the Huffington Post on 13 November 2014. Click here to read it there.
Daron Hagen copying the full score of his opera "Bandanna" in Milwaukee in winter, 1998. (Photo: Ryan Hagen)
The Gospels were copied by hand. Every scroll in the Library of Alexandria was. The knowledge that survived the Dark Ages did so in manuscripts that were hand copied, mainly by monks. Came the revolution in the 1450s: moveable type (placed by hand) and the printing press. Gutenberg’s Bible changed everything. Shakespeare corrected galleys or proofs. The next revolution: the linotype machine, which made it possible to type words onto slugs of hot lead, a technology that originated in in the late 19th century and persisted until the 1970s. Came the computer....
Music was also copied by hand. In the late 15th century, “plate engraving” (carving the music, with a variety of metal styluses, into sheets of soft lead) became the preferred method for published scores, and it remained so until the early 1980s.
As late as the ‘80s, EC Schirmer sent my first published compositions to Korea, where non-English speakers engraved them on lead plates. Correcting proofs could be hilarious. A composer had to know all of the standard proofreading symbols back then if they were published by, or worked for, a music publisher. Sometimes, the red ink of corrections covered more of the page than the black ink of the music. “Rivers of blood,” we used to call proof sheets.
When an orchestra performs, each player reads a score that includes only his “part.” The only person on stage who sees what everyone is playing at the same time is the conductor; he reads what is called a “partitura” — Italian for score. From the beginning, the parts had to be “extracted” from the partitura by hand. This was an expensive, labor-intensive process that required a high level of expertise on the part of the copyist. Unless a piece was wildly popular, these parts, until as late as the early ‘90s, were still copied by hand.
Computer software “engraving programs” like Score, Finale and Sibelius have now rendered mine the last generation of American concert music and opera composers who shall have had the opportunity to serve our musical apprenticeships in the ancient, traditional, and I think honorable manner of extracting, by hand, using quills, India ink, and vellum, the individual parts from whence the musicians play.
Every musician should do it once. It is possible to copy music mechanically, without really engaging intellectually — sort of like driving while having a conversation. Sometimes I did marathon jobs during which I would listen to every Mahler symphony in order, go back, and begin again. But, if one is really engaged during the process of copying another composer’s parts, one is actually “playing” the composer’s process the way a pianist “plays” a composer pianist’s piece — your brain and fingers are going through the same motions that the composer’s did when he wrote it. Several of my employers’ styles and methods grew so familiar to me during those years that I blush to admit that I could still probably compose something in their style that would be pretty hard to spot as ghostwriting.
The money was good, the work was always interesting; and there is absolutely no substitute for learning a piece by another composer from the inside out by extracting all the parts by hand.
We professional music copyists during the 80s were like monks — only we were teamsters, too. Seriously — we were. (I still have my old union card.) We were a band of brothers who would run into one another at Associated Music just south of Columbus Circle when we stuck our heads out to pick up supplies, meet with our clients, share “secret saves” and anecdotes from the trenches.
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I recall a lesson (on the down-low, as I was a pupil of David Diamond’s, who would have been livid with me had he found out) in 1986 with Vincent Persichetti. His bird-like eyes shone as he spoke; his sentences came out in staccato, conspiratorial bursts. The score of my first symphony was spread out before him on the table that separated us. His cigarette smoldered, forgotten, between his fingers; the long, drooping ash hanging from the business end was on the verge of falling off.
“Golly, you’ve got a handsome hand, Daron,” Vincent said, paging through my score one last time. He got to the point: “Arnie tells me you won’t take his class.”
Arnold Arnstein, appreciated and respected by an entire generation of American composers, including Bernstein, Harris, Schuman, Barber, Piston, Persichetti, and Diamond, among others, was generally believed to be the finest living American music copyist. He really was. Years of the work had destroyed his eyes, which were reamed in red and watery, hugely enlarged by the thick glasses he wore.
Arnie taught a class in music copying at Juilliard that all of us composers were required to take. I had been working already for five years as a professional copyist, and had some pretty heavy clients, including Diamond (a sadistic employer), George Perle, Ned Rorem (an excellent, patient employer who — without telling me — customarily paid other copyists more than me), and others, and so I had figured, with casual ignorance, that I should be exempted from attendance.
“We’ve got to figure out some sort of way to work this out, Daron,” said Vincent. “Arnie’s a great copyist, y’know; he could teach you a lot.” He shot me a quick, inquiring look. “But, but,” he not so much stuttered as drew quick gulps of air, “y’know, if you weren’t so talented, I’d say, uh, sure, y’know, go ahead, take these copying jobs. But, I think you’ve gotta not do that. Um, do anything, uh, be a garbage man; just stop copying other people’s music for them.”
“But I need the money,” I replied.
The cigarette ash fell on my score, as I had feared it would. “Yeah, I know. Oops,” he said, brushing off the ash, “Sorry.” A quick, sweet smile, “Plus, you get half the money up front and all that; then you have to work it off,” he sighed, looked at the floor. “Well. Maybe I could ask Arnie to put you on his crew for this Menotti opera he’s copying right now. I hear it’s pretty wildly behind schedule and he needs extra guys. Then you could learn from him, y’see, get paid at the same time, and not have to take his class. How about that?”
I never took Arnie’s class, but I know that I should have. Despite Vincent’s advice, I went on to serve as a copyist, proofreader, or editor on hundreds of projects over the next fifteen years. Sometimes I hear a piece of music on the radio I’ve never “heard” before and realize that I copied the original set of parts for it during my salad days. It is even stranger to attend a rehearsal of one of my pieces and see yellowed, dog-eared, old rental library parts on the players’ stands next to mine for someone else’s piece that I don’t even remember having copied.
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Copying the score of "Sappho Songs" at Bellagio in 2004. (Photo: Gilda Lyons)
I haven’t copied anyone else’s music for about fifteen years, now. I don’t regret having done it, though. I learned humility at the back of colleagues’ hands as a copyist, and I learned the hard way that printed music serves as an imperfect mirror through which the performer steps in order to enter the world of the piece itself. The performer turns around and faces outwards, from whence he came, and performs what he has discovered for those of us listening on the other side of the bars, the other side of the mirror. I am amazed that anything comprehensible, let alone moving, results.
Measures, bars of music, attempt to cage the bird of song in an effort to preserve it, just as mad King George attempted to rescue his sanity by placing himself in his doctor’s care.
I found then and still find the transaction between composer, performer and audience that musical notation hopes to enable enormously puzzling. It is the reaching without end for the elusive note just barely heard in one’s imagination and just beyond the grasp of one’s conscious mind, what Schreker called Der Ferne Klang, Mahler Das Lied von der Erde, that is to me endlessly enthralling.
After all, music, an abstract art, doesn’t in itself mean anything; a composer can attempt to create through notation a psychological context in which the performer sings, but the resulting song in performance is as much the performer’s creation as the composer’s.
Music streams endlessly whether we are aware of it or not. It is a manifestation of the “world without end” described in Ephesians. In sadness, a composer comes to understand that as surely as the scorpion in the parable is compelled by his nature to sting the frog and drown them both while fording the stream, a composer must attempt to notate what he hears, and by so doing, clip his songs’ wings.
Even for Charlie Parker, the Bird himself, the chart was a cage; inspiration during performance was the key. The key.