Creative play: some musicians and presenters have used offbeat methods to get their music on disc.

As musicians try to get record deals made in the current economic climate, the talk typically is not about sales but about the value of the recording document itself. "I think we have to put the sound first," says Augusta Read Thomas, Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. "If I can't play my piece for anybody, then I am left with a pile of paper." Thomas's works are performed by major orchestras--most recently Gathering Paradise, a setting of Emily Dickinson poems for solo soprano and orchestra, was scheduled for a world premiere by Heidi Grant Murphy and the New York Philharmonic in late September at Avery Fisher Hall. Yet Thomas despaired that even though she had written twenty major symphonic works, none had been recorded.

"It didn't make any logical sense that I have been writing music for twenty-five years--major, major compositions on massive manuscript paper at an enormous drafting table. Yet it was as if I would build a huge cathedral and then it would get played once. It was very depressing."

So Thomas took out a home-equity loan and wrote a check for $40,000 to record one of her Chicago Symphony pieces, Words of the Sea, which she brought out on CD on her own label in mid-July. Thomas stands to make $7 for each disc sold at Amazon.com. "I know, it's phenomenally expensive. I may never get it back. But my thinking is, at least this way I can get my music broadcast. And this way maybe someone new will hear my music and commission me. My relationship with this orchestra has been important, and I was willing to go into debt for one little seventeen-minute piece that was a document of that."

Some other projects exemplify new ways musicians and performing-arts organizations are getting their recordings made:

* Live performances supplemented by patch sessions formed the model for the recording of Glimmerglass's 2004 production of Richard Rodney Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur. Chandos produced the recording at an estimated additional cost to the overall production of about $50,000, which was underwritten. Dallas Opera's recording of ...