Hmm...I can't think of any off hand.  Of course, there are many composers who have simply not been able to make money off their work and have had to finance themselves by other means (performance of some sort usually in Romantic times, say, was not linked to compositional ability at all).  Certainly I think very few composers have been able to sustain themselves on composition.  I do think that this situation is near universal, and I don't particularly link it up with the idea of composers who were born into lower income backgrounds.  But I, too, would be interested in hearing what the overlap might be.

Pettersson (http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/acc/pettersson.html) might fit into this overlap, from what I know about him.

Love the first bit - can we have Pax Europa instead, though?

Likewise.

And to me. Thanks.

Best,

Alistair

Alistair,
A stream of consciousness here really - I don't know if this counts as interesting or not but I would assume (from my limited knowledge of these things) that there are very few composers who write works that are performed enough to generate a reasonable income these days. Perhaps the best field for that sort of thing may be film scores as (I assume) you would get repeat fees whenever teh film is shown?  I freely admit that I could be wrong.  Maybe many who compose do so as a sideline from their day jobs (didn't George Lloyd run a nursery during the day and compose very early in the morning?) - as someone said earlier e.g. music lecturers. 

Personally, I have little time to write these days (not that I have ever had anything published - I used to write as for something to do to take my mind off my degree and once I left university, I pretty much stopped writing music for well over a decade) although I managed to write a lot on holiday last month.

Hmm, not really any useful conclusions there but it's my two pennies worth.

Steady on, old chap ! Some of us attended public school/Cambridge !

Were this remark to be taken seriously (and I am not saying that I am doing so or that this was the intent), one might be forgiven for assuming that this view of British "public school" and Britain's oldest universities is such that there can be nothing other than severely negative things to say about them. It seems to me that one of the worst things about "public schools" is the mere quaintness of the term itself, since what is meant by it is "fee paying schools". Now the same jibes may be made (at least by some of those who appear to feel this way about public schools and centuries-old universities) at so-called "private" medical treatment for the same reason - i.e., simply that is is paid for directly by the user.

From whatever moralistic standpoint such "criticisms" be levelled, it might be worth remembering that all that is involved is the paying of money for services. Leaving aside the fact that there are some scholarships to the said public schools and universities and that much "private" medical treatment is funded by insurance policies and employers rather than directly out of the user's wallet, it is worth noting that the alternative is rarely if ever "free", in the sense of being wholly funded by the state. A friend has put her four children through the state education system and told me that it cost her well over half of what she'd have paid had she sent them to public school - books, clothing, contributions towards school building repairs, you name it (she didn't mention backhanders to help subsidise poorly paid teachers, but you never know, I suppose). Likewise, less and less medical services are being offered on a "free at the point of use" basis and some such services are not offered under NHS at all - just look at opthalmic work, dentistry, osteopathy and chiropractic, for example. Not only that, but less and less such services are being offered under NHS when needed by the patient; I should know, for I have had on occasion to be thankful for my private medical insurance policy that has paid for immediate treatment for which I'd have had to wait a long time under NHS (and, let's not forget, this alternative would have meant that I'd have been forced to stop making a fortune from composition while I waited!).

Would you regard those taxpaing citizens who offer their professional services at all levels in the "private" education and health industries the same evident contempt as the public schools and private clinics themselves?

Ah, taxpayers! God bless 'em! (sorry, Ian, I realise that you don't believe in God, but it's just a harmless euphemism, you understand). Yes - it is always worth remembering that none of the above services and facilities come "free" in any case; they can't do, because they cost money (vast amounts of it), so someone therefore has to pay for them. Just try getting a decent school education or medical treatment if you're really poor; of course it can be done in many cases, but let's not kid ourselves that there are others where it's a whole lot easier to get at least some services "on the state" (insofar as it's possible to get them "on the state" at all) if one is better off.

No, Ian - this kind of thing just will not stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid. Nothing that is paid for out of taxpayers' money can be provided unless that tax is first paid; the British government has no money of its own, so has to rely solely on what it can extract from Britain's citizens and it has always been the case that, the better off one is, the more one can afford to pay for professional services to ensure as much tax avoidance as possible (and I'm specifically not referring to illegal tax evasion activity here, either).

A wealthy British person once told me that "only idiots pay tax"; when I asked why that person considered such taxpayers to be "idiots", the reply came that this was because they'd not managed to make sufficient money to be able to afford to avoid paying any. This is someone who has even set up perfectly legitimate businesses that actually cost the taxpayer VAT and recoup for him more than the total amount of VAT that he pays on all his business and personal purchases, so he has figured out how to avoid indirect taxes as well as the rather easier direct ones. Now I am not implying that I approve of this kind of activity - still less that I wish to consort with the kind of people that indulge in it to the point that they extract more from the state than they pay to it - but I do recognise that this kind of thing occurs in many different ways and on a not inconsiderable scale, with the inevitable consequence that poorer people who do pay tax are helping to subsidise people like him.

Another thing that those poorer taxpayers presumably do at some point is pick up the tab for state industry debt which, like all other personal and corporate debt, is not exactly small.

Anyway, none of this is any more directly pertinent to the hows, whys and wherefores of making money from composition than those hows, whys and wherefores are to that wonderful Zemlinsky symphony - at least not beyond the fairly obvious fact that the taxpayer is not obliged to dig more than a pinhole in his/her pocket to help fund strange people like me who write "funny modern music" (whatever that is). Because most composers' compositional activities fall under the self-employed sole trader category (or self-owned incorporated entity in the case of a few better-off composers) for tax purposes, HMRC (the equally quaintly termed "Inland Revenue" as was, which nonetheless never knowingly exempted any residents of Lewis, Unst, St. Mary's or the Isle of Wight from anything) regards most composers as businesses pretty much like any others; fortunately, however, unlike those who own businesses in the education, health, law, financial services, etc. industries, composers are at least able to avoid the worst excesses and costs of state regulation of their professional activities, so perhaps this is one small compensation for a bunch of people who, as Elliott Carter (remember him?!) implied, cannot expect to make much money out of their work.

Best,

Alistair