Interview with Emily Holt Crocker
Emily Holt Crocker is a choral composer and arranger, author, educator, and Director Emeritus of the Milwaukee Children's Choir.
She taught music in Texas public schools for 15 years before joining Hal Leonard in 1989 as an editor.
In 2000, she became Vice President of Choral Publications and served in that role for 17 years before retiring.
Emily is now back in her hometown of Fort Worth, TX, where she enjoys volunteering, consulting, and participating in cultural activities in the area. She has self-published with ArrangeMe since 2021.
ArrangeMe: How did you get started arranging and composing?
Emily Holt Crocker: I actually got started almost by accident. I was familiar with the editor for Jenson Publications: a lady by the name of Joyce Eilers, who was a well known arranger and composer for elementary and middle school. Well, she had actually been my eighth grade choir teacher! It made me think, “You know, if Miss Eilers can write music, I can write music!”
"Go Ye Now in Peace," one of Emily's most popular ArrangeMe titles, is an arrangement of Joyce Eilers' original composition.
So I decided to use what I was doing in the classroom—this is when I was teaching in elementary—which was mostly folk songs and games and that sort of thing. But I tried to give them more of a choral format: develop them a little bit, build harmonies, and make them interesting as a choral piece and not just as a game song or a classroom song. That's how it started.
Believe it or not, my first arrangement was “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?” People today can't believe that I let children sing that, but they loved it. And it did very well! It was my very first published composition. So it's an example of how I took a classroom song that my sixth graders loved to sing and turned it into a choral piece.
Now for middle school, it was a little different because it came out of a pedagogy need, and there was a lack of appropriate repertoire for this age group. It was the time when junior high schools were sort of evolving into middle school, so ninth grade was going to high school, and you didn't have full SATB choirs in junior high. You had to have limited-range repertoire, and so this gave me a chance to learn how to do that.
AM: What does the arranging process look like for you?
EHC: If I'm working with a folk song or another type of public domain title, I first evaluate the song. What's the theme, what's the mood, what's the range, what are the lyrics, and what do I need to change? In most cases, you don’t want to do a PD song exactly like everybody already sings it.
And sometimes when you're working with a PD song, the song is so extremely simple that you have to have a strategy to give it enough variety. I have an arrangement of a Woody Guthrie song called “Pastures of Plenty,” and it's basically just a 12-bar song that does the same thing over and over. You’ve got to do something with that: you need to have some variety, change the texture, change the rhythm. You've got to change something.
There's a song that I arranged, a sea chanty called “A-Rovin’.” It has a range of a tenth, and a junior high boy does not have a range of a tenth, even most treble singers don't have the range of a tenth. So the melody in and of itself has to be broken up into two parts. So part one gets to sing, then part two takes over, and you have to craft that in a satisfying way so it's seamless.
AM: You've talked about your origins as a music educator, but then you wound up as Hal Leonard's Vice President of Choral Publications! Tell us about your self-publishing journey since retiring from Hal Leonard in 2017. Have you experienced any unexpected challenges? What are some things you've done to overcome them?
EHC: Well, it's been good! I was in some of the initial discussions about Arrange Me while I was still there. And while I was at Hal Leonard, we had developed Sheet Music Direct, which was selling digital music, and so we had expanded our choral catalog to both printed and digital music. We published both simultaneously, and that made a big difference in the way we thought about music and how it was distributed.
Emily works in her Hal Leonard office.
I was lucky enough to be published through traditional publishing early on. I got my start and I kind of made my name. But I never composed as much as I really wanted to, just because of the time factor. So once I retired, I said, okay, this is my chance to write more and to see what I can do. I wanted to be intentional about what I wrote. I didn't want to write things just to be writing them. I wanted to write them because it was something that I needed to say, or some way I needed to stretch my own creativity.
That's really how I began approaching self-publishing. The pandemic created a space for this to happen because we were not publishing much new music, so it gave me a chance to think about how I wanted to approach self-publishing.
What I decided is that I would continue to offer certain types of pieces to the traditional publisher—the pieces that I was most known for. Concert festival pieces, pieces for middle school, folk song arrangements, pieces that when folks think of Emily Crocker, that's the kind of music they're looking for.
But ArrangeMe gives me an opportunity to experiment a little bit! I decided I would self-publish pieces that were outside of my norm. Early in my career I was involved in pop and jazz music quite a bit, so I decided to experiment with writing pop and jazz pieces for ArrangeMe.
The other thing that I decided to do was to use ArrangeMe as a way to establish my legacy as a composer by going back to my early catalog pieces. A lot of pieces have gone out of print, and I know having worked for them (Hal Leonard), it doesn't necessarily work with a traditional publisher to try to relaunch a piece that's been out of print for 20 years. But sometimes people contact me for a piece of music and it's great to be able to just send them to Sheet Music Direct without having to go through the whole rigmarole of permissions and all that. I can also add voicings. Maybe I have a piece that I wrote for SSA, and I can do an SATB, a TTBB, something that is easy for me to do.
AM: How are you going about getting good audio recordings of vocal pieces?
EHC: I will say that the best recording you can get is the recording you should use. I mean, if all that is is the playback on your computer, that’s fine! But to tell you the truth, I was involved with using professional studio recordings for so long at Hal Leonard that I like to keep to that standard. It’s cost me a lot more to do that and I don't know if I'll ever break even, but to me, it's worth it to have a good recording.
Oh, and recently ArrangeMe added the option to sell an MP3 audio option! So I've been working hard, especially with my older pieces that never had a full recording, to get good recordings that I can post and sell. And backing tracks, too, because middle school teachers especially are looking for those backing tracks for their choirs and for the rehearsals.
“The best recording you can get is the recording you should use.”
AM: Where do you find your inspiration most often?
EHC: It comes from everywhere. I mean, with these TV shows using pop tunes now, I hear songs on TV and a lot of times they're not the most familiar songs, but sometimes they're very cool. I just found an Enya song on a show I was watching, and I said, “That is a great song, nobody's done that, and I think maybe I'm going to do that.” So I've got that on my to-do list.
One of my recent pieces that I published in 2020 for the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage got my attention with a little graphic that said “courage calls to courage.” It inspired me to do a little research and find speeches and other things, and from that I created lyrics for an original piece called “Courage Calls to Courage.”
I subscribe to a lot of different YouTube channels and get inspiration there. And then one time, I had written down a little poem that I had found and I just stuck it in a book from my college days, and I turned it into a song. So you never know when you're going to find things. And if it's not for me, sometimes I pitch songs to my friends who are also composers and arrangers. I just can't stop myself.
AM: What do you find the most rewarding about arranging and composing? And what's the most challenging thing about that process for you?
EC: I cannot imagine not composing now. I used to think I was a teacher and a conductor that composed. Now, I think of myself as a composer that teaches—or at least taught. I see myself first as a composer.
Emily conducts a rehearsal of the Milwaukee Children’s Choir.
Everything is rewarding. Everything from the initial musical idea, all the way to a finished form is immensely satisfying. If I'm not working on something, I just feel like I’m at loose ends. I've got to have something going all the time.
Engraving, proofing, recording, marketing, website, social media … that can be sort of tedious and I'm ready to move on to my next piece by then, but it’s really important to pay attention to those details all the way through. I'm very lucky that my husband is an engraver, so I have a built-in source for really high quality music engraving.
AM: With the rise of self-publishing and digital distribution, what do you see as the main opportunities for independent composers and arrangers? How do you suggest optimizing your efforts for success?
EHC: Being published by a traditional publisher definitely gives you a boost in recognition. And working with a professional editor can help you avoid those sort of pitfalls that a rookie could make. So traditional publishing is very, very good.
But self-publishing is flexible. And now with ArrangeMe, the licensing is so easy and you have seamless access to customers and the commercial aspects of selling music. It's all kept track of for me so I don’t have to worry about that!
Now, my advice to a young composer or beginning composer is don't over-publish. I think some people write too much, and it's important to be thoughtful and intentional about this. When you write a piece, don't just throw it up there. You don't want to compete with yourself. So if you write an SSA, slow, pretty folk song, you might not want to write two of those in the same year. You might want to write a slow SSA piece and a fast SSA piece. I mean, you can write for the same type of choir, but maybe give it some variety.
Maybe find groups to test it out for you, even just have your friends over to sing through it and get some feedback from them, so that you can hear the results with live performers. They can give you their thoughts and their friendly critiques.
And like I said before, get the best recordings you can. Create a video score. That will put you on par with traditional publishers as well. If you're submitting your pieces to festivals or contest lists, they require recordings of some kind. So you've got to have it to even submit your pieces.
“Have your friends over to sing through [your music] and get some feedback from them, so that you can hear the results with live performers. They can give you their thoughts and their friendly critiques. ”
AM: What are the kinds of works that are most in demand? What's the best path to find an audience for self-publishers?
EHC: When I look at a lot of self-published pieces, I think some of them are unnecessarily difficult and overwritten. So I would say that for the composer to be successful, remember that the biggest market is music for younger and amateur choirs. So, simple is good. Don't overwrite.
J'entends Le Moulin is Emily's most popular arrangement.
And choirs are looking for everything. They're looking for original material, copyrighted material, unique PD arrangements. Number one, does it have that spark of creativity? And is it meaningful to the singer and to the audience? Is it worth the time it takes to learn it? Look at other people's music and find pieces that are popular, and then analyze those. Why do you think they're popular? Or ask people, “why did you choose this piece?” And you know, they'll tell you, “Oh, the kids love it.” Well, why? Try to figure out why, you know?
AM: Tell us about your promotional strategy. How is it influenced by what you know about the business?
EHC: Being at Hal Leonard was a huge advantage for me to learn all of this because every aspect of publishing was connected to marketing! When you’re developing your ideas for a catalog, you're thinking about how you're going to sell it and who’s the market, and how you are going to get to those groups. So I really carry that through.
For my promotional strategy, I had to get a website of my own, so I learned how to create a website. And then I realized that my website didn't work very well, so I redid it and now if you’ve got a two-part choir, you can just look at those pieces, for example. And each of those pieces, if you click on a cover, takes you to a product page with a description of the piece, the voicing, hopefully a video score, and links to purchase it. For my ArrangeMe titles, that takes you to either Sheet Music Plus or Sheet Music Direct, but I have my traditionally-published pieces and sometimes some other material on there as well.
I’ve got a “what’s new” feature, where if a group sends a video to me, I’ll put that there. Or somebody can jump in and see what’s new in the past year. I have a blog and I've recently started, and an occasional newsletter if there's a new piece or something. I’ve just learned how to do all of that, so I just sent out my first newsletter!
It might all seem obvious but I didn't know it, so I had to learn it!
Emily conducts the Milwaukee Children’s Choir.
AM: You founded the Milwaukee Children's Choir, which just celebrated its 30th anniversary. What advice do you have for composers and arrangers who write for young voices? What's something you learned about that age group along the way?
EHC: I think every composer of choral music should sing in a group themselves, because you'll learn a lot. A lot of composers are instrumentalists or pianists, and you need to sing yourself so you get the feeling of what it feels like to sing. And conduct if you can.
It takes a lot of time to devote yourself to a community children's choir. I didn't compose as much while I was actively conducting, but I was always needing a piece for this or that: “Oh, we need a processional. What can I write to get the kids from here to there?” So I had a lot of opportunities. Another great benefit of conducting a choir is that you'll begin to hear them in your ear as you're composing, and that will help you be a better composer.
Emily conducts the Milwaukee Children's Choir in a 2005 performance of her arrangement "Didn't It Rain."
When I was first writing music, I didn't give the kids enough places to breathe. It was just like bang bang from start to finish, there were no rests for the choir. So I learned I needed to give a little breathing space in the music, not just to breathe but to kind of rest the ear and change the timbre. You'll also learn the range and tessitura, you'll learn what's best in terms of what kind of harmonies they could sing. So I would say all of those things: pedagogy, repertoire, and then just the economics of if I wrote for them, it didn't cost anything.
I also learned that simple can be beautiful. So even just taking a simple canon and developing that into a concert piece is a great opportunity for you to actually write a choral piece that's going to be successful, not just for your choir, but for a lot of choirs. If you look at social media, they're all asking for canons and that sort of thing. If you can learn how to construct a canon arrangement, it's satisfying for the singer and the audience.
AM: What is your favorite thing about the ArrangeMe platform? What do you find most valuable?
EHC: It’s super easy to use. I was surprised how easy it was—that if you make a mistake, you can fix it. Of course, I try to get everything perfect before it goes up there.
I think the song search feature is incredibly useful. I mean, it's so great to look up a song or artist and see what songs you have and how many uploads there have already been for that song. And a lot of times it's zero! So that's good, you know, like there's more songs to do.
And I like the way you stay in touch with people: you send out your newsletter and, there's one other thing that I like that's a little silly, but it's very fun anytime something sells that I get an email. Like “Oh my goodness, ‘Hit the Road Jack’ just sold 20 copies in New Zealand! Isn't that wonderful?!” It's so cool. Just imagine that, halfway around the world. The positive reinforcement is a nice little ego boost. It's a good feeling when you get that email.
AM: What's next for you?
EHC: My personal goal is to just keep composing as long as I have good ideas, and I hope that my composing style remains popular. I'm just hoping to still be valid among the youngsters!
I am also enjoying encouraging young composers with Hal Leonard and the Texas Choral Directors Association. We have an award called the Emily Crocker Emerging Composer Award, which we've awarded for several years now, and we're looking forward to keeping that going. And I’m also working on a choral music education scholarship at the University of North Texas, which we hope will be awarded soon.
And maybe I'll write a book!
To find out more about Emily and her music, visit emilycrockermusic.com and be sure to follow her on YouTube and Instagram.
