To serendipitously follow up on my post about publishing and the unavailability of scores, I had dinner with a friend tonight who’s a tremendously successful composer, scads of orchestral performances, awards out the wazoo, you name it. And he’s telling me how he abandoned his big-name publisher, bought a fancy Xerox/scan/printing machine, and is publishing his own scores, with the same kind of binding and exactly the same quality he got from his publisher. He’s sick and tired of people not being able to get his music, or having to pay outrageous prices merely to rent it. And his publisher is nervous and wants a meeting, because my friend hasn’t sent them anything in four years. It’s kind of delicious. So if you were thinking of trying to get a commercial publisher, or fuming because you don’t have one – just forget about it. “What do they do for me?,” he kept asking. And there was no answer.