Maria Schneider is one of the world’s most distinguished composers for jazz orchestra, a key collaborator for David Bowie and a seven-time Grammy winner – but it’s likely that you won’t have heard her work, and never will. This is entirely by design.
Back in the early 2000s, it was illegal filesharing that angered Schneider. These days, the 63-year-old is confronting streaming platforms. “It’s a threat to democracy, to ideas, to creativity,” she says of business models driven by data exchange.
Having testified to the US Congress in 2014 about the “endless whack-a-mole game” of removing her music from filesharing sites, Schneider has pursued lawsuits, including a three-year battle to get YouTube to let small copyright holders access YouTube’s content ID system to spot videos that infringe copyright (that suit was dismissed in June 2023 just before it went to trial).
So it’s no surprise that the Maria Schneider Orchestra’s 30th birthday retrospective, Decades, like all her music, isn’t available to stream. It’s not even in record shops. The triple LP is available exclusively through the crowdfunding platform ArtistShare, the basket into which she put all her eggs more than two decades ago.
The composer, conductor and pianist began her advocacy as a reaction to the beginnings of a “free buffet” of musical content offered by sites such as Napster and Limewire. “A lot of people early on were like: ‘All musicians should give their music away for free,’” she says. “Excuse me? If you only knew the financial investment, the time, the heartache, the everything that goes into making music.”
Schneider has been making these points for two decades, but her anger is undimmed. Speaking on video from her home in New York, in front of an imposing bookshelf featuring some of her Grammys, she speaks in tumbling sentences, her voice breaking on occasion as an argument reaches its peak.
In a retaliation against filesharing, the record producer Brian Camelio began ArtistShare in 2000, with Schneider as its first artist. As well as better cuts for artists and more transparency about who was consuming which music, fans pre-ordering music in advance would gain insights into the musicians’ creative process.
For Schneider, this meant composition, an act that is solitary and at times torturous. “When you don’t have the ideas, there’s nothing worse,” she says. “It feels like the end of the Earth.” One night, she received a call from her father, who had been following her updates and was concerned. “Who wants to buy from someone who says they feel like they don’t know how to write?” he asked.
But she cleared the hurdles and in 2005, Concert in the Garden became the first crowdfunded album, and first internet-only release, to win a Grammy. ArtistShare never quite caught on, though, and will seem outmoded to many. “Now we’re in a situation where you’re invisible as a musician unless you give it away for free,” Schneider says. Today, she is one of a tiny cohort of musicians (including Joanna Newsom) still staying off streaming sites, having traded wider visibility for a shot at making a fair living solely through her art.
She says that everyone else is in the service of companies “who knew that music and movies were the things that glued people to the screen. So they used us as bait for gathering data” – which they then used to target us with advertising. Spotify, a particular target of her ire, is “not a music publishing company, but a big data company”. She cites an employee who stated that in the early days of the company, data analysts made up three-quarters of the staff. She wants any exchange of personal data for musical content to be taxed, given that, as she wrote in a 2020 op-ed for the Star Tribune in Minnesota: “We are exchanging something of value for something else of value.” But she would rather music was kept unsullied by these exchanges, and valued differently.
“One of the disappointments for me is that so many musicians just followed this stuff with a sense of resignation,” she adds. “I never felt resigned to what was happening. If 20% of the musicians out there had said no to the degree I did, we would be in a different world.”
Schneider grew up on the outskirts of Windom, a tiny city in rural Minnesota. “I don’t want to say it’s the middle of nowhere because to me it was the centre of the world, but it’s a very wide-open space.” Long stretches of her childhood were spent staring out of the window at a quiet highway, and her imagination would run free: every passing car carried talent scouts from New York, with devices capable of listening in on her piano practice. “It was ridiculous,” Schneider says now, “but that space fuels the imagination.”
Her early musical memories are precise, like the first time she heard the crunchy, sharp 11 chord that later would become an important harmonic colour in her compositional palette. “It was like tasting a pickle for the first time: at first eww, and then ooh.” Early experiences of flying – with her father, who had a small company aircraft for his job in agriculture – would also shape her music, which cycles through feelings of acceleration, taking off, coasting, reflection, deceleration and landing.
There is also something topographical about Schneider’s music: not only was her album The Thompson Fields inspired by Minnesota landscapes, but her work more broadly feels like a landscape. Rather than band members playing heroic solos in turn, Schneider merges her ensemble to create rolling vistas of sound. She credits another jazz composer, Bob Brookmeyer, with this idea. Along with Gil Evans – the great arranger of Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, and another mentor-figure for Schneider – Brookmeyer “broke apart form” in the big band context. “I really liked the idea of an improviser not just standing there, showing what they practised last night,” she says. “I want to make music that gets everybody out of the ‘me’ zone, and into the ‘us’ zone.”
Schneider would later enter the “us” zone with David Bowie, who had heard the orchestra in New York and enjoyed her darker earlier music. He arrived at her apartment in 2014 hoping to collaborate on a song. With some brooding sketches but no lyrics, Schneider asked him what the song might be about. “I don’t know, maybe vampires?” he replied with a big smile.
“David wanted dark and I went dark,” Schneider remembers. What followed – the 2014 single Sue (Or In a Season of Crime), which would appear on his final album Blackstar – marked a shift. Schneider credits Bowie with her rediscovery of the grittier sound she had avoided in recent compositions.
“When David came into the picture, he showed that dark can be fun,” she says. Just as Schneider finished The Thompson Fields – the peak of her pastoral, distinctly non-gritty era of music – Sue came on the radio. “It was such a clash. I emailed David saying: ‘What have you done to me?’ He replied: ‘My work here is done.’
“I feel like he cracked me,” she adds, “and maybe not in a good way.” When she did channel that feeling in her own ensemble music, the result was streaked with anger: her 2016 composition Data Lords and 2017’s Don’t Be Evil, a sardonic reference to the unofficial former motto of Google.
Listening to Decades, you are struck by a body of work that thrills even throughout its bleakest passages – those knotty works that an algorithm may well ignore. In the liner notes, Schneider writes: “Even after all these years of writing, it’s still a mystery how written music, combined with performance, can impart the very essence of one’s emotional experience while creating the piece. One thing I know is AI won’t manage that.”
