Why I started Ascenda Music

Music took hold of me at an early age. I remember my four-year-old self conducting the music playing on the record player with a Tinker Toy while standing on my little bathroom stool. When I was old enough to operate the record player, I played my parents’ small eclectic collection over and over. The trumpet didn’t come along until I was 9; the baritone horn was a year after that, and the trombone didn’t really happen until college.

Writing music came along gradually. Fast forward to many decades later, I began to arrange for my trombone quartet, The Trombones of the Saint Louis Symphony, and I wrote a few original compositions for us as well. As we performed these works multiple times, people would say, “Is that available?” “Can I buy that?” Well, I could give it to you, or even charge you money for it, but…

From the idea to the reality

It has bugged me for a long time: I buy someone else’s music and find out that the parts are unusable. I need to photocopy, cut and paste, and rejigger them to get a part into performance shape. Little thought has been given to readability or page turns, the paper is cheap, the pages are crowded, and the feeling of “I don’t care” comes through loud and clear. Finding a good and suitable piece is a throw of darts: publishers’ websites often give little information about difficulty, range, length, and I’ll be lucky to find a recording to help with my decision. Reading from an iPad doesn’t solve all these problems, either.

Could I do it better?

Getting what you paid for

The mechanics of music publishing are opaque to many musicians. I know I never heard a word about it in music school.  I didn’t know until recently, with the guidance of a kind mentor, that historically the composer gets ten percent of the retail price of a piece of sheet music. I didn’t know that much more reward can come from performances of a piece of music, through performance royalties from the performing rights organizations, such as ASCAP and BMI. But I do know, from my own work on this project, that it takes a lot of work from many people to get a piece of music into print. It makes as much sense for composers and publishers to get paid as it does for performers to get paid.

The reason is you

But in the end, what good is newly published music without musicians to perform it or an audience to enjoy it? I believe that there is lots of great music out there that rarely gets performed because the musicians who created it don’t have the time or wherewithal to make it available. Bringing good music to you is my mission. I pledge to consistently market the music I publish and share a fair percentage of the sales with the composers. My goal is to bring you, my prospective customers, the best music I can find, the best value I can offer, and the possibility to bring elevated musical experiences to you and your audiences.