Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos must be the most accomplished demo EP ever. This set of 6 concerti grossi (so scored for a then-normal strings-and-continuo orchestra plus a group of at least three soloists, who are employed more like a second, smaller ensemble) are each, it is pretty universally acknowledged, unique not only from the rest of Baroque music but also from each other, a staggering achievement. They were written to accompany Bach’s application to a chief musician post – which would have involved composing to request (mostly probably for the royal chapel or state occasions), but also and probably more importantly acting as day-to-day director of music at court (secular and religious), running the musical establishment and being main organist. Bach didn’t get the job (!), and we only have the scores to the Brandenburgs because the German minor princes he was applying to didn’t have a good clear-out between when they received them (and probably never even had them played) and when Bach became fashionable for really the first time (he was thought rather old-fashioned in his own time) about 100 years after his death. If he kept copies himself they were lost.

As my hard drive starts to fill up with not just solo demo recordings, but home overdubs showing what I could do with/on other people’s material – tailored collaboration / band demos if you will, the no-travel-costs postmodern equivalent of being asked to audition on a band’s core repertoire – I’m starting to know how Bach might have felt. And in the early 18th century printing music was a relatively very expensive and elaborate and fairly rare process – quite a lot of performers played largely music written in-house, as it were, rather than buying items out of catalogues or renting them from libraries. There had to be a large guaranteed market to make it profitable, and it wasn’t assumed to be a core part of a musician/composer’s work.

The 60s folkie title character in Inside Llewyn Davies says to his sister, ‘You don’t put your rehearsals out in public.’ And a lot of people have historically been keen to restrict what’s actually being sold with their name on it to what was produced for that intent, avoiding publishing technically lower-quality and possibly musically inferior ‘demos’ which were only intended to secure investment from music industry companies. But that was when publication of all kinds was owned by corporate entities and reserved almost exclusively for highly polished professional product.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and music can be distributed for free if that’s what you want to do, either as sheet music or recordings. And information overload has produced a substantial ‘more is more’ attitude, particularly to getting noticed. If I don’t blog for a few days (or strictly speaking if my website remains static for a few days), it starts to fall down Google rankings. Facebook, which I remember in the early days without a news feed (!), now pretty much bases its activity around feeds and timelines – which means you’re shown everything starting with the most recent; only what’s new is really visible.

So there’s a case to be made for trickling stuff out, even if in dribs and drabs, in order to stay in the public eye (however small your public – and also if seeking to expand it!). And maybe if you’re using it to build up attention towards something bigger, there might be a case that it doesn’t matter if it’s rough and unfinished – people will listen to it once if that, so it’s hardly likely to destroy your reputation. Webcam footage of rehearsals is increasingly common band teaser material.

But I don’t think I’m quite ready to run the risks of putting other people’s demos, with my overdubs, out in the public domain. It raises all sorts of questions about ownership and control that aren’t really settled for the internet / citizen publishing era yet. So maybe those collaboration demos should stay in my hard drive, whatever else I release. After all, I don’t think they’re quite the Brandenburg concertos.