Shattinger Music, the first place to sell my scores besides, you know, me, just placed their pre-Midwest Clinic order. I’m not completely sure what Jim Cochran was thinking (Jim runs the company), but he placed a massive order. The order was so big that I had to have a print run done just for him, and I took the rare step of having my copy shop bind the scores for me. (Normally, I bring my own custom covers and bind the scores myself from the copies that they make for me. I’m always afraid they’ll screw something up and, you know, bind the scores along the top or something. Seriously. They’ve done it before. Come on, people, it’s not a calendar.) Jim’s order was too large to imagine standing at the binding machine in Glendale for the number of hours it would have taken to do this right.

He ordered more than 60 scores. 60! Can you imagine? To give an idea of how much music that is, it took two large boxes and weighed 71 pounds.

Want a “Kingfishers Catch Fire” score? No problem. He has twenty copies. What about a score for the hot-off-the-press “Concerto for Soprano Sax and Wind Ensemble?” Check. He has 15 — and he’s the only one selling it right now. What about a large-format “Strange Humors” score? I mean, if you buy the regular set, you only get a 9×12 score. Bigger is better, right? Well, Shattinger has 11×17 scores. Not to mention scores for “Turbine,” “Turning,” “Sasparilla,” and the ol’ standby, “Redline Tango.” All of the cool band kids have a “Redline Tango” score. If you don’t, you’re a loser, but Shattinger will set you up and save you from future bandmate ridicule.

So, if you’re going to Midwest and want a Mackey score, come to the Shattinger Music booth.  I’ll be hanging out at there when I’m not drunk at the bar, so please say hi. I mean, only if you want to be really, really cool.

Once a year, I pull together all of my programs for the past year, make a nice spreadsheet detailing their contents, and send the package off to ASCAP.  ASCAP is a music licensing agency that collects performance royalties for their members. They don’t generally learn about performances on their own, though — at least not for college-level ensembles — so it’s up to the composer or publisher (in this case, I’m both) to tell them what was performed when so they can pay me the performance licensing fee associated with each performance.

I hate doing this, as it’s time-consuming to do it right. First, I go through the printed programs that I’ve received, highlighting my piece (literally, with a highlighter) in each one. My rental agreements state that each ensemble has to send me three copies of the concert program when they return the rented parts, but that often doesn’t happen. So, next I go through my signed rental agreements and find contracts for those missing performances. Then I make copies of those rental agreements, retaining the originals (although really, I don’t need them at this point), and include those with the mailing to ASCAP.

The spreadsheet that I send along with it ends up looking like this excerpt…

It all takes a few hours, but it’s only once a year. I think I do quite a bit more than is necessary (I used to just throw programs in an envelope and mail them to ASCAP), but if it means getting paid for one additional performance, it’s worth it.

Last year, I submitted documentation for 59 domestic performances. This year, that number climbed to 75, so at least I’m not on a downswing yet.

On Friday, it was cold and rainy here in LA, so AEJ and I baked cookies — some incredible oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, with a recipe courtesy of Rick Clary’s daughter, Emily. Lordy McJesus, these were delicious. I would have taken a picture of the finished product, but I was too busy eating.

After a bit of a false alarm several weeks ago, I now have a shareable recording of two (of the five) movements of my Concerto for Soprano Sax and Wind Ensemble. This recording, of the US Navy Band (conducted by Captain George N. Thompson) with Timothy Roberts on soprano sax, is of a performance at the VMEA conference about two weeks ago.

And it’s frickin’ fantastic.

The group is performing the same two movements at Midwest on Wednesday, December 19, at 9pm. If you’re at Midwest and you miss that performance, you are a stupid head. They’re playing the entire piece in January at the International Saxophone Symposium.

Go, get to it! Go check out movements 4 (“Wood”) and 5 (“Finale”) of my new sax concerto!

(My sincere thanks to Captain Thompson for allowing me to share this recording — and to Tim Roberts, who absolutely plays the hell out of the piece. You’ll see…)