After a long period of neglect (the length assisted in part by the fact that there is a separate e-mail address dedicated to this routine), I had some 883 new messages in the choralnet folder, which I finally sliced through yesterday.
I’ve written quite a lot of sacred choral music — not a lot compared to JS Bach, I don’t mean, of course. But a respectable fraction of my own oeuvre is taken up with music written for church use. And, even allowing for the fact that the demand for new sacred music is to some degree fragmented, and that there is a large swath of ‘users’ who won’t much require the sort of music I have written, I still feel that my music ought to be ‘moving’ a lot better out there.
It is a situation where (one would think) the existence of a high-volume network such as choralnet ought to furnish ample opportunity for mutually beneficial musical transation. In fact, in my experience, even with my (at times diligent) response to specific calls for a type of music which various works of my own seem apt to fill, interest is slight. I should curl up and die, if my musical identity depended on recognition in the sacred choral music sphere.
It is a network in which I have been a participant for (it must be) a decade and more, yet in all that time I can immediately remember only one significant instance of a music director returning my e-mail, with interest, and a chain of events being set in motion which resulted in an actual performance.
To all appearances, it is a waste of time.
But . . . you never know.
So, of all the 883 messages, there were two — two! — which were calls for pieces, for which I have music in the can, which would suit the occasion and (as far as I can tell from the description of the call) serve as practically a perfect musical fit.
Probably, no counter-response will come back.
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