Money Matters is a NewMusicBox x I CARE IF YOU LISTEN collaboration, supported by New Music USA
This was supposed to be a study on pay transparency. An anonymous survey was carefully written to elicit detailed responses on pay conditions from professional composers working regularly in the United States. “Professional” was defined as anyone who is regularly commissioned to write music, regardless of background or training. After two months of personally sharing the survey with colleagues and friends and plastering it all over social media, a mere 35 composers had weighed-in.
This scientifically unusable result led to a realization: when it comes to composing, there is a pervasive silence in our community on pay. I originally set out to do this study to bring discussions of pay transparency out in the open — not as taboo whispers, but as everyday utterances.
Through subsequent interviews and discussions with leading composers and mentors, my focus shifted to what happened: why the study failed and what the results (or lack thereof) mean for our field. What became clear through these conversations is that most people have had very few discussions with colleagues or mentors about pay, and very little is known about how much other people are getting paid, especially the top earners in our field.
If we look at a “typical” composer’s path into the professional world, we can see a clear rift between creative practice and the business of music, and this compartmentalization breeds a lack of transparency about pay.
In the beginning, the concept of pay is largely unconsidered and undiscussed, as you’re collaborating with friends, getting your first commissions, and winning your first prizes. You might overhear seasoned composers discussing how much their fees are over drinks, or rumors about the latest John Adams commission fee, but they quickly sink out of your mind. As a rookie in an environment that likes to imagine art as an endeavor unattached to labor, you focus on the excitement of creation — pay is simply a bonus. You weigh application fees, summer program costs, and emerging composer competitions and calls: the excitement for opportunity and the allure of perceived prestige masks the very real lack of pay.
Over time, you start to notice pay taking undeniable shape around you. You feel its presence reverberating in discussions with colleagues who worked with this-or-that ensemble and how much (or how little) they were paid. You ask yourself: Am I charging too little? Am I charging too much? How do I negotiate? How much is my time worth? How much is my work worth? How much am I worth? These thoughts start to permeate you. But more likely than not, no one around you will discuss it, not even your mentors or professors — your university likely doesn’t offer any pedagogy or resources addressing pay, fee negotiation, or even standard rates.
Perhaps a fully-funded doctoral program has provided you with a raft to climb atop for a time, so these concerns and considerations are just momentary blips. Pay has become an expectation, but only its presence, not its bounds. The bounds of pay remain undiscussed and undisclosed, both within the academy, among peers, or with your potential collaborators and commissioners — the presence of pay is enough for the moment. You feel you should be thankful you’re being paid to write.
As your time on the institutional raft draws to a close, your time and attention become more precious, and you begin weighing projects with their associated commission fees and time/labor requirements. Contract negotiations become more regular in your projects, and budgeting your own energy and abilities becomes just as important as your creative drive. You must juggle applications, commissions, and keeping up personal, creative, and business relationships as pay transitions to something regular in your life, both its presence and its associated conditions. All these elements are cobbled together with whatever business acumen you happen to have inherited, along with little snatches of information you might have heard in the community, but pay remains rarely discussed in-depth outside of private correspondences.
As you enter the professional world, all of your compositional, business, time management, and interpersonal skills are what sustain you. Bolstered by everything you’ve created and accomplished up to this point, you’ve hopefully built a vessel for yourself in the sea of other creators, and the mentorship you’ve received from your teachers and advisors has prepared you for this moment. Ideally, you complete a variety of projects that feed you both creatively and financially, you know your rate, you’re comfortable negotiating with this rate in mind, and you’re able to find balance in your creative, personal, and professional life — pay becomes a vital sail on your continuing journey.
However, it is likely that your path has diverged from the above scenario at some point in your journey as a creator, and knowing your rates and feeling comfortable negotiating might still feel out of reach. Even though my study failed, I’m still writing this essay, because my ultimate goal is to work together to move toward higher average pay across the board, to establish minimum standards of pay, and to improve working conditions for creators across the gamut of aesthetic, prestige, and experience in the wide field of composition.
Instead of the data I had intended to share, I think what is more useful is a set of actionable items we can collectively use to improve our pay and working conditions across the different strata of our industry.
Improving pedagogy
The leaders of our universities, conservatories, and training programs need to be giving students the tools and knowledge necessary to advocate for themselves as working artists. Students should not be leaving these programs without having had a discussion with their professors about fee negotiation and expectations of going rates among professionals. This approach should likewise move from pedagogy to praxis for teachers of composition; the deconstruction of the taboo surrounding discussions of pay must start from those most seasoned among us. Keeping these institutions solely hubs of creative practice — ignoring precisely what enables that creative practice to endure — is directly detrimental to the students graduating from these programs. Artistic excellence cannot be the only consideration in your success as a creator.
Crowdsourcing Your Rate
While commission fees and contracts vary widely, you can lean on your community to find a baseline for your work. My starting point was asking my colleagues what their rates were and how they calculated them. While many gave blank stares and nervous numbers initially, this was often a catalyst for further discussion that helped each of us learn and added to a larger knowledge pool of pay. I eventually brought these talks of fees and rates into composition lessons with my various mentors, and while some felt uncomfortable and refused to discuss their rates, others were open about it, and this openness was very helpful to me.
When creating my rate, I looked at others at my similar career level.To me, this meant: number of active years in the field, amount of previous commissions, who these commissions came from, scale and scope of these commissions, the prizes/fellowships/awards held by the artist, and frequency of works being programmed per year. With this ideal rate calculated, I now had a baseline for negotiating with ensembles and organizations who wanted to commission me. From this point, I let the commissioner know how much I would prefer to be paid, and an absolute minimum for me to be able to take the commission, which usually involves modifying the parameters of the commission in some way to accommodate the lower pay. However, these numbers are just one part of a commissioning contract.
Flexibility in Negotiations
Establishing your rate, understanding your own flexibilities, and being aware of how to negotiate is extremely important — pay is not simply a number that appears on a line. Pay is an entire web of compensation that we navigate as creators.
In a recent conversation that I had with Judd Greenstein in preparation for this essay, he emphasized the complexity of commissioning and the factors that exist beyond the fee:
[One] can’t easily account for the complex web of monetary and non-monetary compensation that often winds up leading to my decision as to whether or not to accept a commission. My fees are pretty wildly different, just depending on a whole host of circumstances. I’ll take a lot less from a young ensemble that I want to support, a group whose way of moving through the world resonates with me, I know that they can’t afford more, and therefore, I will take less, which has nothing to do with what I think a fee by a more established organization should be.
This sentiment was echoed by multiple participants of the survey I conducted, as well.
“I save some space in my calendar to work with small organizations and individual artists at a reduced rate. When I do that, it always must be accompanied by one or more performances plus a recording and permission to use that recording to promote the piece.”
“I value working with smaller schools, less prominently known performers, and students, who often cannot afford what we would think of as a “fair” rate, so I’m flexible with what I charge for these collaborations. However, I am privileged to have a day job to support myself outside of commissions.”
To this end, when I am negotiating contracts, I try to consider the entire relationship we’re working to build. Of course the commissioning fee itself is important, but it’s simply one piece of the puzzle. My negotiations always include mentions of non-monetary components of the commissioning agreement: professional audio and video documentation, multiple performances beyond the premiere, a dedicated recording session for the new work, workshop session(s) in the compositional period, and travel and lodging for the premiere and final rehearsal period.
If the new commission is for a more standard ensemble configuration, I also frequently mention the possibility of creating a consortium, which allows for the possibility of higher fees, more performances, and a chance for your work to have legs beyond the premiere.
If the numbers and negotiations just aren’t working, but I still have great desire to establish a relationship with the collaborator(s) at hand, I almost always suggest applying with the ensemble/organization for funding to support the new piece — while this delays the commission, it keeps the two of you in partnership, letting the relationship slowly build. However, it is easy for these kinds of projects to fizzle out. A commission placed on the back-burner requires attention, diligence, occasional check-ins, and patience.
Collective Action
Finally, I believe real change will manifest in our field when the onus of pay moves from solely an individual one, to a shared, collective effort to demand fairer compensation and working conditions. We need advocacy across the gamut of success and experience, from both the majority of creators and especially the highest earners in our field. As in other fields with significant income disparities, the longer we allow unchecked and unreported pay to continue, the longer we perpetuate a system where most workers are doing copious amounts of labor under substandard conditions for unethically low pay, while a small few garner substantially greater pay for similar amounts of labor under largely better conditions. This is not a system that is conducive to creation. This is a system that serves capital.
It’s about raising the floor up, not bringing the ceiling down. With the current industry, most composers don’t know where the floor starts, where it should start, or how high the ceiling goes. Our most direct path forward in this fight for higher pay and better conditions starts here: We have to talk about pay.
I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum, and is made possible thanks to generous donor and institutional support. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and may not represent the views of ICIYL or ACF.
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