Graphite celebrates 20 years!

Jocelyn Hagen and Timothy C. Takach discuss the story of Graphite Publishing.

From big risks and growing pains to creative breakthroughs and industry shake ups, Tim and Jocelyn share hard earned advice for starting a company and honest reflections on building a life as parents, artists, mentors and business owners. Read the full article for all the backstories, speed bumps, and happy happenstances!

The following is an abridged version of “Service, Craft, and Heart: 20 Years of Graphite,” written by Dale Trumbore.

Jocelyn Hagen and Timothy C. Takach had been searching for a name for their new publishing company for months when it finally arrived in the unlikeliest of places: a Red Lobster. As they sat by the bar waiting for a table, one of them suggested “Graphite.” At the time, they didn’t imagine that their newly-named company would eventually celebrate its twentieth anniversary.

Tim and Jocelyn approached starting their business with what they describe as a naïve optimism. “It was a grand experiment,” Jocelyn says. “I think that as artists, we do the same thing, right? We take these risks in our work and sometimes they pay off, and sometimes they don’t.”

Jocelyn and Tim founded Graphite Publishing in Spring 2006 but weren’t married until later that year. They brought the same optimism to their marriage that they brought to their new company, diving into both endeavors with “vigor, much excitement, and passion,” Jocelyn says. “We didn’t think much about the possibility of either of those things failing. We were bright-eyed, and I think that’s pretty magical.”

Graphite’s first website, 2006

Tim launched the first website in early summer of 2006, then went to bed. The next morning, he woke up to Graphite’s first score sale. “It was a piece for tenor-bass choir, and I think it sold ten copies. I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s working,’” he says. He still doesn’t know how the customer found a website that had gone online only twelve hours earlier, but it felt like a good sign.

When they founded the company, neither Jocelyn nor Tim had experience working for a music publisher. Still, their work as composers indelibly shaped the way in which they structured their new company. Much of the conductor feedback they’ve gotten about Graphite expresses how grateful people are that Graphite offers recordings, full perusal scores, the text, composer notes, and even educational resources, when they’re available. For Tim and Jocelyn, highlighting such materials seemed natural. They presented Graphite’s catalog the same way they had already been pitching their music to conductors.

1.Takach (back, right) and Cantus, 2006. Photo: Jenn Cress;
2.The Independent Music Publishers Cooperative, a group that helped Graphite shape our distibution model. Pictured here: J. David Moore, Jocelyn Hagen, Abbie Betinis, Joan Szymko, Linda Tutas Haugen, and Elizabeth Alexander.

By 2008, their own composing careers were flourishing and demanding more time, and they were now quite literally mom and pop to two young sons.

“There is a time when kids are little, and you’re going back and forth between writing and publishing and engraving, where you just have to do a lot of code switching in your brain,” Jocelyn says. With kids, it was tougher to muster the energy it took to fulfill their roles as parents, composers, and business owners.

When the site finally became profitable in 2016, Graphite opened up the company’s publishing model and expanded into distribution. The addition of Graphite Marketplace allowed composers, conductors, and choruses to partner with Graphite to distribute scores through their individual imprints. In the following years, Jocelyn and Tim saw a large increase in the number of works and composers on the site. Jocelyn compares it to the huge growth cycle that’s happening within the company now, twenty years after its founding.

On this big anniversary, Jocelyn and Tim are looking ahead to the future. For Jocelyn and Tim, the real richness in owning Graphite is the collection of people invested in the company: composers, conductors, and singers who trust what the brand represents. “We’ve built this company that represents people in a way that prioritizes their work, their ideas, and their intellectual property,” Tim says. They more committed now than ever to listening to the needs of conductors, finding out what they could use in the classroom and in rehearsal, and communicating those needs to the Graphite community. Over the next twenty years, Jocelyn and Tim plan to remain as flexible and optimistic as ever as they continue to work with collaborators who share their blend of service, craft and heart.

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