NEW YORK — By now, some young musical theater fans have received an e-mail from Stephen Schwartz asking them to stop illegally downloading sheet music from any of his shows. Or anyone’s show, for that matter.

The award-winning composer of the Broadway smash, “Wicked,” wants people to know it’s stealing.

“You wouldn’t walk into a music store and walk out with a piece of music under your arm. So why would it be acceptable to do it online,” Schwartz told The Associated Press Monday at an anti-piracy event.

He added, “I just went to the first of the websites that I’m going to be e-mailing, and I typed my name in to see how many individual pieces of sheet music that were available for free of mine — over 11,000.

“I didn’t know I had that many pieces of music,” said an astonished Schwartz.

The event proved to be a summit of musical theater composers that included Jason Robert Brown, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Amanda Green, Stephen Flaherty, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, and others.

The idea of reaching out to sheet music pirates began a few years ago, when composer and Dramatists Guild member Georgia Stitt found out during a talk with students that her husband’s sheet music was being illegally downloaded. Stitt is married to “Bridges of Madison County” composer Jason Robert Brown.

Brown took to a letter-writing campaign to ask illegal downloaders to stop.

“About three or four years ago, when Georgia had told me about it and I got on the Internet, I saw a whole list, about three or four hundred people pirating my sheet music that day, and I said ‘I’m just going to write them,”’ he said.