Movement I (Allegretto)
Along with the obsolescence of the two-thousand-year craft of copying music by hand, technology has rendered notation itself obsolete, as composers lean into “digital audio work” stations. For that matter, as studios like Lionsgate partner with artificial intelligence firms, giving them “access to the company’s large film and TV library to train a new generative model,” A.I. is threatening film composers themselves with obsolescence.
American folklore tells us that the locomotive, what Indigenous Americans called the Iron Horse, made the horse itself obsolete. For some. But not for cow punchers. And certainly the art of riding remained. Eadweard Muybridge’s series of six cabinet cards, titled “Horse in Motion,” captured in stills the illusion of the horse’s movement, but not its essence. Not its beauty. Not the mutual respect and trust between a person and their steed.
Streetcar locomotives began replacing streetcar horses around 1850; by 1900 electric streetcars had replaced them both as a method for the conveyance of flesh and bone. And then, as the automobile swept across the land on ribbons of concrete, those parallel ribbons of steel that survived did so mainly because they remained useful, at least, for the conveyance of freight.
Hand copying of “scores” with quill and ink on paper for publication gave way in 1851 with the first use at scale of hand (or “plate”) engraving of music on thin sheets of lead. Music typesetting became a thing, and the 1930s brought the Keating Music Typewriter. All these were used for the creation of the scores to be published and sold to consumers. Hand copying of “performance materials,” that is, the individual note-covered piece of paper from which each instrumental performs their “part,” as extracted by a copyist from the full “score” (or “partitura”) for commercial music, music theater, and symphony concert works continued to flourish well in to the twentieth century.
The beginning of the end came in fall 1988, when the software notation program Finale was released. In other words, notation software captured in ones and zeros the illusion of the copyists’ job, but not its essence. For some. And certainly the art of composing (and of hand copying) remained.
The end of the end began in 1993 when the software program Sibelius outflanked its competitor, called Score, by being more “intuitive” as a creative tool for composers. Notation software made possible in ones and zeros a graphic representation so good that it looked better than most hand human copyist’s work: the illusion of the copyists’ job, but not its essence, had been successfully duplicated. For most people. But not for fine art composers. And certainly the arts of composing and of hand copying remained. But not its beauty. Not the mutual respect and trust between a composer and their copyist.
Of course, it is all part of the dialectic relationship between creation and destruction. Old ecosystems are destroyed; new ones emerge. I put my quill and India ink aside in 2002. Though some hand music copyists still ply their trade, the craft and art of it are now relegated to history.
Movement II (Andante)
I had the skills. I had a clear, attractive hand. I was fast and accurate. Because I worked for a living, I needed the money to buy the time to compose the music I wanted to compose (and it is safe to say that I composed a lot); and some of my peers had the money to buy my time. It is ironic that, even though composers once had to come and go through the back door, certain composers were happy to look down upon their colleagues who copied music to make ends meet. As though commercial viability of the music or personal financial security were a measure of artistic success! How composers and conductors treat their copyists reveals everything about them as people.
My life as a music copyist began in 1975 with nights spent copying the parts to my teenage opuses at the kitchen table in New Berlin, Wisconsin as the sun rose. By 1982, while a composition student at the Curtis Institute, I was working as a professional copyist for the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in Philadelphia. When I moved to New York City to go to Juilliard, I began fifteen years as a professional freelance copyist with heavy concert music private clients (including my former teacher, Ned Rorem, whose copyist I was for nearly a decade), before serving a final stint as a union copyist on Broadway.
For several hundred years, serving as one’s mentor’s copyist was an integral component of one’s training. I do recall learning more about how Leonard Bernstein made the “Profanation” of his Jeremiah Symphony go in spring 1981 at the University of Wisconsin Madison by hand copying the parts for my turn on the podium as a member of Catherine Comet’s conducting class (I could not afford to rent the parts at the time) than I had in my conducting lessons with Comet. For, if one is really engaged during the process of copying another composer’s parts, one is “playing” the composer’s process the way a pianist “plays” a composer pianist’s piece — one’s brain and fingers are going through the same motions that the composer’s did when they wrote it.
While a composition student at Curtis, I was able, thanks to the thoughtfulness of Philadelphia Orchestra Associate Conductor William Smith, to connect with the orchestra’s librarian, Clint Newig, to attend rehearsals of the school’s orchestra with the PO’s library copy of the piece in hand. Bill collected autograph facsimiles of scores and sometimes brought one for me to follow; and the school’s librarian (my work study boss, as I served as his assistant) Edwin Heilakka used to let me follow in Leopold Stokowski’s score (the school had just been gifted his papers). What a marvelous way to learn the repertoire.
I guess it is true that I have copied every kind of composer for every musical genre — from pop to film, opera to symphonic, academic incipits to television cues, chamber to salon — and a wide array of composers: Rorem, Leonard Bernstein, Elliot Carter, Ezra Laderman, Enno Morricone, Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Diamond, Giancarlo Menotti, George Delerue, John Kander, George Perle, Virgil Thomson, Joan Tower, Disney, Really Useful, Radio City Music Hall, and more of my peers than I’d care (or am able) to recall. I just looked at that list and thought of a dozen more but cannot make myself go back and add their names, as it feels unnerving, the way that seeing my handwriting on a set of orchestral parts when visiting an orchestra performing something of mine and not even remembering having done the job does.
In the callouses I still have on my fingers and the damage I did to my vision between 1984 and 2004 as a professional hand music copyist, I have in many ways far more in common with Atticus’ literate slaves than I do their master’s friend Cicero. There’s a lot to unpack there, and it has a lot to do with both earning humility and having it thrust upon one.
There is still some hand copying to be done, but, overwhelmingly, it is done on the computer now. Many composers’ own workflows have come to include writing in digital audio workstations and the young composers who clean up the notation and format the “midi dumps” for composers who don’t notate have taken the place in the ecosystem copyists once occupied. Soon A.I. will do that job as well.
Movement III (Minuet)
Titus Pomponius Atticus (later Quintus Caecilius Pomponianus Atticus, 110 BC – 32 BC) was a Roman banker, editor, and patron remembered for his correspondence with and (at his own expense copied by the hand of and distributed by his educated slaves) support of the philosophical and oratorical writings of his friend Marcus Tullius Cicero. The letters between them are an incredible testament to their friendship and moving in their candor and agape. The name Atticus is familiar to most people nowadays as the name of the father in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. As attorney Finch protected and lifted up his children in the American South in Lee’s book with his stalwart moral courage and sense of justice, the historical Atticus lifted up Cicero.
Authors like Lee name their characters’ with precision, alluding to the characteristics of historical figures to instantly summon an array of associations on the part of the reader. Some parents do, too, when a beloved progenitor doesn’t automatically command commemoration by way of passing along their name. Do they do it hoping that their child will take on those worthy traits? Names and the narrative weight that they carry are important. I am, for example, named after a brother who died in infancy just before me. In any event, moved by the lives of both of these men – one historical and the other fictional — my spouse and I chose Atticus as the name of our first son.
What father doesn’t dream of a better life for their son? My attorney father, reading Mockingbird to me as a child, voice breaking in the final pages — who’s voice wouldn’t? — lived long enough to see his son live the life of an artist, a Cicero to his Atticus, if you will. Reading Mockingbird to my son when he was small made us both feel the power of names, the sense of belonging and continuum, of history and struggle. I will live to see my son burst into the world as an Atticus.
Would we know today who Cicero was if Atticus had not had his writings copied and carried to the far ends of the Roman Empire? It is impossible to forget that the Gospels were copied by hand — as was every scroll in the Library of Alexandria. The knowledge that survived the Dark Ages did so in manuscripts that were hand copied, mainly by monks.
While I have trouble visualizing Atticus’ literate slaves, it is easy – perhaps thanks to Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs – for me to conjure the image of a portly friar, his faithful cat at his elbow, a quill in hand, an illuminated manuscript before him awaiting his ministrations.
The years spent as a music copyist have helped me to understand the sense in which the monk’s work was more than a job, more than a sort of literary ablution, more even than a calling. From the modern perspective, the illuminated manuscripts might seem to be more a mandala — a testament to impermanence, an attempt to extend into another dimension the ineffable truth of (in a monk’s case) faith. The manuscript in a music copyist’s hands has as its purpose to facilitate a live performance. Perhaps, afterwards, its existence represents what remains when the animation of human actuation is gone, like a plan for a house built of soundwaves.
As the Bible’s words strive to convey the mystery of faith, musical notation strives to convey the effect of song. “From whence cometh song?” asked Theodore Roethke. “They should have sent a poet,” observes the scientist in the film Contact, realizing that scientific language alone cannot explain or describe something that inspires awe. Composer Slavko Krstic once pointed out to me that his mastery of higher theoretical physics and math were one way to commune with the Divine, but that he had concluded that picking up his guitar gave him a clearer signal.
Notated music serves as an imperfect mirror through which the performer steps 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.
I think of my priest declaiming the liturgy on those occasions when, Ad Orientem (celebrating Mass facing away from the congregation), the words of the Mass land differently, the performative, ritualistic nature of the recounting of the Holy Thursday story simultaneously more abstract and requiring of one’s imagination because the congregation, deprived of the facial expressions of the celebrant, is compelled to listen harder.
Movement IV (Finale, Allegro con brio)
Iron horses and fleshly ones; hand copyists and engraving software; composers and “music generator apps” like Soundraw; musicologists and monks. There are mathematician fathers finding bliss by striving to number the stars and sons numbering the stars by finding bliss with a guitar. For every bull a matador; for every scientist a poet. Bring on the Ecclesiastes 3:1.
But before a final goodbye to all that, how about a working song, a roundelay about the joys of the work itself?
The walking into the theater, any theater, and delivering parts, getting a feel from the music team how it is going, the showing up at the reading of a new show, or the bonhomie of showing up for the backer’s audition of a Genuine DOA Flop anyway because you copied the reed books.
Leaning over the orchestra pit’s rail, tapping fifteen, squinting to identify the handwriting of the copyist who extracted the parts as a trombone player reads a paperback novel during the intermission.
The music for a show coming in over the fax machine from London with just lyrics, a melody, a bass line, and chord symbols and the directive to make it go, the cigarette smoke, the diazo machine spitting out ammonia fumes, the electric eraser shavings in your pockets.
Reluctantly giving a pre-performance talk at the insistence of the producer to patrons in an empty opera house in Arizona and looking up to see in the back row for the first time in years my librettist for the show, who, possibly between flights and on his way to somewhere else, has decided to see for himself if the old thing still has legs.
The arrogance of “heavy client” copyists, the gratitude of newbies from the provinces, the surprise of residuals, decades’ worth of canary yellow “Local 802 Music Preparation Invoice” sheets lolling like iris tongues from the file cabinets. And the stories: the stories told by the copyists already in their 70s about Garland, Sinatra, and copying music for the networks: Mutual, CBS, NBC, and ABC….
Six of us laughing and cross-talking in a cab on our way to Manny’s with the just-completed and printed instrumental parts of Kander and Ebb’s sizzling new chart for Liza Minelli’s new Vegas show and spilling out onto the sidewalk across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal like pilsner into a tulip glass.
Copying Lion King parts for the Mouse, who stationed a guy by the front door of the office who looked like he was a member of the Blues Brothers Band who we were pretty sure timed us when we went to take a leak. The Case of the Missing Lucky Electric Eraser that began when Brian Fairtile left his go bag in the Winter Garden pit and ended in laughter and tears when, retrieving it, we read the graffiti on the pit wall that said, “They’ll never get the Cats smell out of this pit.”
Drinking coffee and listening to the Portuguese cast album of Company, wondering how all those syllables could possibly be flying by at the rate that they were while trying to identify who the composers were in some of the older black and white pictures of clients on the walls, the beat-up spinet where emergency songs got written, and, as at Fleisher down in Philly, stories about WPA copyists, hard drinking, and the blacklist.
Atticus commissioned. Cicero orated. The monks illuminated the manuscripts. Those of us who were members of the Local 802 were Teamsters. My copyist colleagues were the most resilient, humblest, kindest, smartest, and wisest musicians I’ve ever known. I am proud that I was accepted by them as a colleague when I finally landed in Gotham. We were more than the batmen to our composers, far more than assistants to our employers. People like Mathilda Pincus and Arne Arnstein were legends for a reason.
For years Brian kept a copy of Wine Connoisseur atop his satchel at the office where we worked until, over seder, he and his brilliant spouse told Gilda and me how he intended to quit music copying and become an import-export buyer, like our friend, composer Stephen Dembski. His personal reinvention, from Broadway horn player to copyist, had now been from copyist to wine expert. The best all-around copyist I ever knew.
We were part of traditions that stretched back to the age of Christ. We were the angels witnessing the act of creation and — when it needed a hand, giving it one. We all remembered every piece we ever worked on until we didn’t. And, you know, even though we were all entirely aware of exactly who our clients were as people and as musicians, and of how little we mattered, and who our clients sometimes thought they were in relation to us, none of us ever ran them down. After all, we all become obsolete eventually. It was an honor to serve. It still is.