What We Look For When We Publish Music
MusiCurate is a magazine, but it is also a publisher. Every month we read scores from composers and arrangers around the world, and we choose a handful to bring into our catalogue. People often ask what tips a piece from the pile into print. The honest answer is not difficulty, or pedigree, or how impressive it looks on the page. It is whether a guitarist will want to live with it. Here is what we look for.
A piece that earns its level
Every edition we publish is graded on a ten-level system, from a first-year beginner to a finished recitalist, and we publish across all ten. We are not looking only for hard music. We are looking for music that teaches something at its level: a beginner study that is genuinely musical, an intermediate piece that opens a new kind of phrasing, an advanced work that rewards a season of practice. A piece that knows exactly who it is for has already done half the work. Our Level Guide explains the system we hold every submission against.
A story worth telling
We publish the music and the story behind it, because that is how a player falls for a piece. Forest Waltz came out of the autumn forests of British Columbia. Ño Juan Carlos is an Argentine triste dedicated to the father of a great guitarist. Dance of the Ghosts was written by a Siberian who spent his life publishing guitar magazines. Seven Sojourns came from a composer who hears sound as colour. None of that is decoration. When you know where a piece comes from, you play it differently, and you remember it. If a submission carries a story, we want to hear it.
An edition that makes the music legible
A score is an interface. Most editions settle for printing the notes; we try to make the music visible. Our study scores are the clearest example. In our edition of Tárrega's Lágrima, the four voices each carry their own colour, so a player can follow the inner lines the way a quartet player follows a part.
Listen to Pepe Romero play it, then look at the page, and the hidden countermelodies stop hiding. That is the standard we hold our own editions to, and it is part of what we look for in the work we take on: music that rewards being seen clearly.
A composer we can stand behind
We are proud to publish living composers, and they come from all over the world. Canadian voices are a large part of what we do, and our Canadian Composers collection runs to dozens of editions, but it is one corner of a wider catalogue that reaches well beyond any single country. We pay royalties on the music we sell, because a catalogue that does not pay its writers is not one we want to keep. Story-driven relatability is not only how we present music to players. It is how we choose the people we publish.
If you write for the guitar
We are always reading. If you compose or arrange for classical guitar, at any level and anywhere in the world, we would like to see your work. Start with our Submissions page, and read the Composers and Arrangers page to learn how we work with the people we publish. The next piece in our catalogue might be yours.