A commission to write a piece of music — that is the life’s blood of a concert composer’s career. Royalties may come along when the catalog grows and a few works get substantial play. But from early on and throughout the productive years, it is the commissions that denote professional status and at least help pay the bills.

Today, in addition to the time-honored tradition of affluent patrons, there are a number of competitive commissioning programs. Although small in comparison with the volume of fine American composers building careers, these programs fill a vital need. And historically, the majority of these programs, in terms of funds provided, have originated with one organization: Meet The Composer, Inc.

This book tells the story of Meet The Composer’s commissioning work with a particular focus on how it all started — with the Meet The Composer/Lila Wallace- Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program in association with the National Endowment for the Arts.

And that unwieldy program title really tells it all.

Three institutions came together to create the largest, most broadly based commissioning effort in American if not world history. The initiative proved a durable public-private partnership, both a product of its time and a model for many future efforts.

In 1987, Meet The Composer had already established itself on the national stage. Founded in 1974 to make small grants to New York State’s composers to appear at concerts of their music, John Duffy’s scrappy little organization had quickly proved two things: that composers were still important to a vital musical culture, stirring up excitement among all kinds of audiences; and that with minimal overhead Duffy and his comrades could deliver program to all corners of the state, and vivid testimony back to funders.

In the early 1980s, Meet The Composer gradually stitched together a network of national affiliates to help provide Meet The Composer grants nationwide. And in 1982 Meet The Composer sprang to public prominence with the Orchestra Residencies Program. Exxon, a principal sponsor, placed fullpage print advertising in national publications. Jacob Druckman, composer in residence at the New York Philharmonic, snared critical attention with the Horizons series of contemporary orchestra music. John Adams’ rising star was propelled by his residency with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. And behind these scenes and dozens more was John Duffy’s benign prod, inspiring his colleagues to make the most of every opportunity.

This was the context for Duffy’s initial conversations with Jessica Chao, then Program Director at the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, about the need for a major fund for commissions. “She was truly a visionary in the funding world,” Duffy recalls, “concerning support for individual artists. She had been a dancer herself with Martha Graham.”

Ever adept at playing the Americana card, Duffy struck upon a winning vision: that Reader’s Digest had a natural link with American composers. “Reader’s Digest is known throughout the world as a voice of America,” Duffy explains. “It’s an American icon. Wherever you go you see it. Why not let Reader’s Digest be the source for American music in our time too?”

Jessica Chao arranged a meeting for Duffy with George Grune, Chairman of the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds. “I talked with him about the whole gamut of American music, which is just like the gamut of material in Reader’s Digest.” Grune got it.

Next, Duffy and Chao flew together with Jane Moss (who came to Meet The Composer as Executive Director in 1987, when Duffy’s title became President) to Washington to see Hugh Southern, Deputy Director at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The NEA’s Music Program had offered for several years a Consortium Commissioning category awarding $150,000 to $200,000 annually. Duffy proposed combining NEA and Reader’s Digest resources. Southern took the idea to then-NEA Chair Frank Hodsoll. They saw that a merger could effectively triple the amount going into commissioning each year.

And so was born one of the longest-running publicprivate partnerships in the arts. (It continues today, post-Wallace Funds participation, under the name Commissioning Music/USA). That the whole deal came together owes much to timing. This was during the Reagan Administration, when the idea of public-private partnership was ascendant — all kinds of programs were moving out of government offices into the private sector. And for the Wallace Funds, which draw their resources from Reader’s Digest stock, an initial public offering suddenly multiplied their funds. Money had to get out the door.

The NEA now directed applicants to Meet The Composer for commissioning support, and committed $150,000 in 1988, then $200,000 in 1989 and each year following, to this new venture. The first grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund was for $750,000, over two years. Public and private funds together amounted to over half a million dollars each year, by far the largest fund for commissioning in U.S. history.

In 1990, the Wallace Funds followed up with a very handsome $2-million grant to support the next four years of the commissioning partnership. The largest single grant Meet The Composer had ever received, the money arrived as a check in the mail and went straight into the bank. There it grew to continue nurturing the field of music for a full six years.

Duffy and his growing staff put together an efficient operation to run the program. Jane Moss set up the system and Tracy Williams soon assumed its administration. The legacy of consortium commissions swelled fast and performances multiplied across the country. Eventually an additional staff person was necessary to track and document the activity. Still, the program boasted over 80% of its income going out to the field in the form of commissions.

Importantly for so fractious a field as music, the program’s panel process quickly became known as the gold standard in music funding. Duffy showed a widely-recognized genius for picking panelists who could respond to the widest variety of music, from the most cerebral work of the time, to mainstream voices, to every kind of jazz and the full range of downtown expressions. Among the six to eight people brought together for two days each June, a remarkable consensus would develop about the audible quality of music whatever its idiom — the sense of an individual voice expressed through confident craft.

But even more important was the consortium aspect of the program, inherited from the NEA model. Each application came from a group of at least three ensembles or institutions committed to performing the new work (two in the case of opera and musical theater) so that each work would have the chance to prove itself and have a shot at entering the repertory.

The program had categories for chamber music, orchestra music, opera and musical theater, choral music, and solo works. Although the applicant pool varied, the most competitive category was generally chamber music — small ensembles providing so much scope for innovation. Grant amounts varied according to the size of the work planned. It was important to Duffy that commissioning grants be generous to help establish a livable standard for working composers. In this, the program was complemented by Meet The Composer’s 1984 publication Commissioning Music, which defied tradition by laying out a range of professional fees for commissioning every kind of music. (The publication was reissued in 1995 as Commissioning Music: A Basic Guide.)

The essays filling much of this volume testify to the impact of this Meet The Composer/Lila Wallace- Readers’ Digest Fund Commissioning Program in association with the National Endowment for the Arts. Distributing $3,806,500 from 1988 through 1995, the program demonstrably changed every field it addressed, as the commentaries in this volume attest. It boosted composers’ opportunity to work and to be paid, and organizations’ opportunity to commission works ideally suited to them. But this program was only the start. Ever innovating, Meet The Composer quickly opened up new territories for commissioning.

The Composer/Choreographer Project (1988–1998) recognized and stimulated the great opportunity composers find in the dance world. Supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Ford Foundation, the Booth Ferris Foundation, the Helen W. Buckner Trust, and the Eleanor Naylor Dana Charitable Trust, the Composer/Choreographer Project again flouted tradition by granting parity fees to composers and collaborating choreographers. It also resulted in a publication, the Composer/Choreographer Handbook, addressing specifically legal and financial issues of collaborative work.

The Meet The Composer/Rockefeller Foundation/AT&T Jazz Program (1989–1992) provided support for the generally classical institutions — orchestras, opera companies, chamber groups — to commission jazz composers. Many such composers, who formerly had little chance to write for anything but their own ensemble, were able to explore other forms and enrich other repertories. In addition to those named in the program title, the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts supported this program.

International Creative Collaborations (1996–1999) opened up the borders so that composers could collaborate with choreographers and with dramatists around the globe. As part of a broad coalition including US presenters and Arts International, and with support from the Ford Foundation, International Creative Collaboration has championed new voices and influences and initiated rich exchange. Following the success of this program, the Ford Foundation has provided endowment funds so that over the coming years, Meet The Composer can include an international component in all of its core programs.

Commissioning Music/USA (1996–continuing) is the successor program to the Meet The Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program. The Wallace Funds changed their focus in the early 1990s, completing eight years of spectacular support for individual composers. The NEA placed a high priority on continuing the partnership, and Meet The Composer moved quickly to secure new private partners. John Duffy supplied the new program’s title in a characteristic flash of patriotism. Initially The Helen F. Whitaker Fund and then the Catherine Filene Shouse Foundation and Dayton Hudson Foundation came on board. Because in the first years funds were below what had existed in the Reader’s Digest program (as it is still affectionately called), Commissioning Music/USA offered support to different categories of music in different years. At this writing, the program is supporting the whole range of music each year. This program’s chief innovation was to encourage applications for more early-career composers by allowing single-institution, non-consortium applications — although still requiring multiple performances. The result has indeed been a great broadening of composers receiving commissions through the program.

And then there are Meet The Composer’s residency programs, all of them including aspects of commissioning — the original Orchestra Residencies Program; then New Residencies, taking composers into community venues; then Music Alive for the whole range of American orchestras.

Taken all together, and beginning with the Meet The Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program, Meet The Composer, Inc., has directed over $1-million per year to composers as fees for their professional work of writing music. Composers young, old, emerging, emerged; in jazz, dance, theater, and concert; in formal halls and housing projects; in purple hair and white — truly the entire range of America’s music. If it’s heard in nonprofit venues, it has been influenced by Meet The Composer’s revolutionary insistence that composers should be put to work.