The price of Price

In "Capitalism and the Future of American Classical Music Scholarship," an article for the Winter 2022 issue of American Music, musicologist Douglas Shadle writes about the challenges of performing Florence Price's music in the wake of an acquisition of her work by the firm of G. Schirmer:

According to my understanding of current U.S. copyright law, Price’s unpublished manuscripts will enter the public domain in January 2024. At the time of the acquisition, Schirmer therefore had five years to extract as much profit as possible from the Price catalog before others could freely pursue their own projects. Indeed, the cost of renting Price’s orchestral works is prohibitively expensive for smaller organizations, thus limiting its accessibility despite the promise of global availability. In October 2021, a staff member at a moderately sized orchestra in the South publicly disclosed that the rental fee for Price’s piano concerto cost the ensemble $2,200, or over $100 per minute of this relatively brief work. A standard rental agreement obliges the orchestra to return the scores and parts without keeping a copy with bowings and other interpretive markings in the orchestra’s library for future use. Schirmer also charges a per-measure fee for music examples published in books or journals, as is their right. Yet the fee dissuades analytical scholarship in the near term since it will no longer be necessary for writers who can create their own examples from the unpublished manuscripts after 2023.

Shadle talks more about these issues on Will Robin's Sound Expertise podcast. Also worth heeding is Mary Jane Leach's commentary on troubling tensions surrounding the performance and discussion of Julius Eastman.