Found the perfect song for your movie?

Copyright law is such that you’ve got to license music before you use it in, basically, ANYthing, even if it’s nonprofit, for a great cause, etc., etc. But that licensing process isn’t in its nature prohibitive. It’s just a matter of getting permission.

If you’ve got talented singers/songwriters among your friends, the whole thing can be very simple. (And, by all means, support them!) Other artists are a bit more complicated, so here are the key things to know going in:

(1) Most important: there are two separate permissions you have to acquire, two “sides”:

• one from the song publisher, for the composition;
• the other from the record label, for the recorded performance.

Usually you have to negotiate the two separately and pay a separate fee to each.

(2) Pricing for both sets of rights is completely up for grabs. (So negotiate hard on what a good cause you represent / how artistically amazing your project is / what a good person you are.)

(3) Each side is likely to ask for “most favored nation” status, which is just an over-dramatic way of saying that you’ll pay, for example, the label no less than you pay the publisher, or vice versa.

(4) Everybody will want to know where and how you’ll display the finished film, including numbers of viewers or copies distributed, whether global or local, whether you’re charging admission, etc. (You need permission regardless, but it’s a negotiation point in your favor if you’re not making wads of money from the film…)

(5) The record label calls the permissions they give you a “master use license.” The publisher calls their permissions a “synchronization license.” There’s no magic to those terms — they’re almost arbitrary — but I guess “sync license” is a little shorter than saying “all the customary permissions I need from the publisher.”

Good luck! While some of the major labels are notoriously hard to reach, small or midsize labels can be surprisingly helpful.

I believe that, as a lawyer, I should end with a few disclaimers:

Get everything in writing. Think through the details — or hire an experienced attorney in the field to think them through. Licensing agreements can get pretty fine-grained, and you don’t want to get into trouble down the road because you inadvertently limited the film to VHS distribution in North Dakota. Make sure your agreement will survive transfer to new copyright owners, like when your songwriter friend sells out to the big record label.

And, of course, you should not treat this post as legal advice. That would take a detailed, confidential review of your specific facts and circumstances. (Sorry, though; I know you already knew that.)

I’m working on a loose curriculum that I can use to teach the basics of cello improvisation. Huge topic, but simple melodic figures are a good early lesson.

Key ideas are that the harmonic structure provides a foundation (the root of the chord) and a series of important platforms on top of that foundation (the other notes in the chord). So your bass riff or your melody or whatever fills in other notes–passing tones, ornaments, outright dissonances–that move you from platform to platform. The goal is to take advantage of the years of music listening that students have done–the subconscious layers of what music should sound like–and link that subconscious up with a handful of useful conscious ideas.

So I can talk on and on about that as it relates to our repertoire song of the moment, but at some point, students have to just try it out. And I needed a visual. Et voilà:

This is a standard 1-4-5 chord progression with the notes of the chord written out wherever they’re possible to play in first position on the cello. It gives students a visual hook as we play back and forth. The idea isn’t, of course, to play the chords; it’s to keep half an eye on these important tones while making up something melodic.

To be combined with your rigorous scale and arpeggio practice!

From time to time I need some particular bit of music as a cello teaching aid, but I can’t find quite the right thing in my standard exercise books. So I type it up myself. Thought I might post some of these on the blog, in case they’re useful.

Here, then, is a quick walk through triplet subdivision:

This made for a relatively easy way to talk about dotted triplet rhythms, which look scary at first. On top, it’s not too hard to divide a quarter note beat into three even triplets. On the second line, you can split those in half to make triplet sixteenths. Then, at bottom, you glue some of the sixteenths back together to make the dotted rhythm.

So I lined all that up vertically, and have used the resulting visual to good effect. Hope it helps someone else! (Otherwise, I suppose, I’ll at least be able to find this quickly the next time I need it…) You can click on the image for a high-resolution version that is suitable for printing.

Feel free to reuse this, or any music teaching aid on my website, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

And I should credit MuseScore, Inkscape, and Gimp, which I use to make this sort of thing.

Long ago, someone handed me my first tuxedo, a cheap school rental that I liked because it made me feel like James Bond.  Sadly, the feeling has grown rather tarnished.  It’s partly from glancing at pictures of those youth-orchestra years (painfully awkward; no glamor whatsoever).  But it’s also because, even today, my life as a working musician turns out to be very little like that of Mr. Bond.

Here, for the record, are some of the things that *I* do in a tuxedo:

Change diapers.

Lug trash out to the dumpster.

Eat at McDonalds.

Wrangle infant carseats.  My neighbors like to laugh at me when I’m bouncing up and down to ratchet a carseat back into position, especially on a hot summer day.  (Apparently my face gets very red…)

Use a porta-potty.  Came up at a vineyard gig, out in the mountains.  (Beautiful place — but — and I’m no expert — but do you really want a porta-potty right next to your tasting pavilion?)

Take custard pies to the face.   (Chamber music friends can’t always be trusted.)

Get stuck with feet hanging out the back of a moving station wagon.  (Again…)

Chase fold-up sun tent blowing end-over-end down a hill.  I can only imagine what the wedding guests thought.  Many thanks to the caterers, who were very helpful.  (Later, still in my tux, I helped the violist break the same tent into little pieces by jumping up and down on it.  It’s a long story.)

Jump-start old cars.

Mop the floor.

Love every minute of great music-making.

I’d like to, over time, begin collecting my own notes on interpretation and technique for the Bach Suites for solo cello.  Let me do that here, as a series of short posts related to specific movements.  I’ll post my notes as I generate them, and as I have time to roughly edit them for coherence.  (Which means, essentially, “in no particular order.”)

You’ll see that I come to these as a performer and teacher — not, for instance, as a scholar of baroque period performance.  I’ll more than welcome feedback (especially from those more-scholarly heads).  But my ideas do come from testing and reflection, trial and error on how to bridge between the source material and a given audience’s ears.  Maybe I can summarize that as “a reflective performer’s perspective.”

I find myself gathering these reflections — properly, I think — from a wide variety of sources, wherever I can find them: scholarly literature; popular reviews and discussion; recordings and performances I hear; my students; performances of other works; songs I hear on the radio, classical and otherwise; and, I suppose, myriad other sources that worm their way into my sonic subconscious.  I’ll try to talk about the influences of which I’m aware.

In writing these, I imagine my advanced students as the audience — I’ll cover the things on my mind that we’d talk about if we had a long evening to sit around the table listening to recordings and discussing interpretation, rather than a brisk hour where we (often) have to focus primarily on technique.  But I’ll talk about technique, too.  And I hope that the result will be helpful to students of the cello — and to anyone else who’s broadly interested in artistic processes.  Let me know what you think!

There’s a certain picture we share of the entrepreneur as a lone wolf: someone going his own way, bucking the establishment, and building a vision that belongs entirely to him.  It’s perhaps magnified in the arts, where each artist has to find a unique, personal voice to stand out from the crowd.  And — as a solo lawyer and a freelance cellist — I admit to feeling some of this romance in my own work.

But the farther I go down the road of entrepreneurship, the more I’m humbled by the impact of the help I’ve received from so many people around me.  So many, I know, artists and entrepreneurs, feel the same way.  They have a team they can count on (or maybe, in Seth Godin’s parlance, a “tribe” that they’re building).

Some of the team members are obvious and formal: funders, partners, employees, board members.  Even more are informal: friends who react emotionally to what’s inspiring about your work and help keep you going; mentors who share some of their hard-earned experience because they’ve caught the same inspiration; clients who are excited about working with you and who spread the word on your behalf.

There’s a bit of magic behind all this; it’s why entrepreneurs and leaders are so often thought of as charismatic.  They have to have something in mind that’ll draw a team together, even when nobody on that team really has to be there, even when so many team members will never properly share the spotlight.  But then — when the team does come together — it’s a remarkable thing.  The shared vision multiplies its impact, and the world changes a little bit.  And that’s what building an organization is really all about.

There’s lots of interesting fodder for conversation around copyright law, its use, and its potential reform.  Before weighing in properly, I’d like to simply collect links for some of the best discussions I’ve read.

Most interesting to me is the way writers and artists are weighing in.  It’ll be interesting to see how their comments filter, via a tangled web of lobbyists, through to Congress.

But on to the links:

Jason Robert Brown, the Broadway composer, posts a fascinating exchange with a teenage sheet music sharer, under the title “Fighting With Teenagers: A Copyright Story.”  I like the post — and the comments, of course — because Mr. Brown ends up focusing more on ethics, less on economics or existing law.  (Which is a good way to start any conversation on what the law ought to be.)

David Pogue, for the NY Times, responds to Mr. Brown in “No Easy Answers in the Copyright Debate,” legitimizing this as a debate with two sides.  In some cases, Pogue argues, copyright law raises barriers to just the kinds of artistic endeavor that it’s supposed to encourage.

And Tony Woodlief weighs in with essentially the same point in today’s WSJ, under the title “Curse of the Greedy Copyright Holders.”  I like Woodlief’s article for the way he writes, the way he’s chewing on the issues, and the perspective.  He writes more as a writer and less as a commentator, if that distinction makes sense.

More to come.  Meantime, I’m thinking about the way this conversation separates into ethics, law, and economics.  Although, eventually, they do need to weave together in some sensible way.

True story from a friend of mine, who’s an orchestra teacher:

Teacher: You’re fantastic.  Let’s talk about college music programs for which you might apply.

Student: Well, I don’t think music is all that practical.  I think I might study dermatology.  It’s very practical.

Teacher: What!? Do you even know what dermatology is?

Student: Well, uh, not really, no.

Teacher: Dermatology is popping other people’s zits.  Is that what you want to do for the rest of your life?

Student: Um, I hear that podiatry is also pretty good.

(No offense to any dermatologists who might be reading; my friend just had to make his point.  I knew this guy in college, and we both owe you our thanks.)

But I want to raise a quick, serious protest against the nonsensical idea that the arts aren’t practical.  So many people have this knee-jerk “oh, you’re a musician — eat a lot of spaghetti?” reaction, and it drives me crazy.  Especially when it deters talented kids from going into a career where they’d excel, and, in excelling, make us all better off.

We need artists, just like we need the thousands of other professions out there, just like we need lawyers (in fact, we need art and law for very similar reasons) or engineers or, of course, dermatologists.  And the arts are exactly as practical or impractical as each artist and his team.  Arts careers aren’t easy — good work never is — but if you treat your work professionally, if you build and market your skills properly, you’ll do fine.

That’s what you should tell the next talented kid who crosses your path.

Recently heard Joe Berlinger interviewed about his documentary Crude, which depicts a long-fought legal battle over oil drilling in Ecuador.  So I was interested to read the latest twist in the story: Chevron, the defendant in the Ecuadorian case, sent Berlinger a subpoena demanding that he turn over his 600 hours of raw footage.

The case is in Ecuadorian courts, but US evidence rules allow foreign litigants to subpoena relevant documents through the US courts.  See 28 U.S.C. § 1782.

So, in a May 6 opinion, the US District Court approved Chevron’s application for this subpoena.

It’s an interesting read.  The NY Times article (linked above) plays up a broader debate about journalistic privilege.  Judge Kaplan, on the other hand, focuses on a technical issue: “the standard release that [Berlinger's] subjects signed, however, expressly disclaims any expectation of confidentiality.”  (Opinion at page 22.)  Where the parties don’t expect confidentiality, he thinks, it doesn’t make any sense to talk about journalistic privilege.

I’ll leave it to others to discuss the big issues at stake in the case and in the documentary — and those are the important discussions to have.  But as I think about the mechanics of production, I do wonder whether legal documents can better serve intricate, real-world arrangements.

Many film subjects — as Berlinger’s lawyers tried to argue — give the filmmaker unique access based on trust that he’ll use the raw footage carefully.  On the other hand, filmmakers can’t expect everyone to sign off on their appearance in the edited film — that’d be a nightmare exercise in creating by committee.  So, before the cameras roll, and before the production assistants whip out release forms for signature, subjects and documentarians come to an understanding along these lines:

Any footage of me is confidential.  But I grant the filmmaker, in his sole and unlimited discretion, the right to select portions of the footage and juxtapose them with other components of the film, and to present the results to the public.

I’ve never seen that in a release.  (And I’d need to flesh this language out further before proposing it for use — which is sort of the problem.  Good legal documents are hard, and producers need to move fast.  Something to chew on…)

Meantime, what do you think about this opinion?  Shouldn’t we follow what people write in their documents?  Or is this just a cheap trick on a technicality?

With my cello students, there comes a moment when we’ve built a solid base of technique and we’re ready to start talking about putting emotional content into a performance.  If I do my job right, I’ve been modeling that all along.   But there’s a specific moment where we’re ready to start thinking about it verbally and deliberately.

When that happens, one of the first things I reach for is my stack of recorded Bach solo cello Suites.  They’re remarkable pieces, six of them, generally getting more difficult to play as you go along, and each movement a sort of world unto itself.  Most (all?) cellists develop a lifelong love affair with these pieces.

As such, there are myriad recordings of the Suites — a treasure trove for any cellist with an iPod or a CD player.  You can listen to them historically, starting with Pablo Casals’s gruff romanticism, moving to more recent flirtations with period performance — or, maybe hip today, a sort of transparent vocalism.

With Casals, you have to imagine the richness of his tone — the old recordings don’t quite capture it — but you can hear the sweep and drama in how he shapes phrases.  It must have been breathtaking to hear the master perform live.  Then you can proceed through Harrell and Ma (listen to Yo-Yo Ma’s old recording, then his newer one; the difference is incredible, and it teaches even my young students lessons that you can’t put into words about age and wisdom).

Or, if you’re a teacher, you might present the recordings topically.  I start off with two polar opposites.

First, Lynn Harrell is the master of the macrophrase.  He might start a movement softly, then gradually, precisely crescendo to a climactic moment, dozens of measures later; just as carefully, he backs away, ending as gently as he began.  It’s a landscape-scale vision of the suites, and of how to shape a phrase in the grand Romantic tradition.  There’s no clearer example of how music theory corresponds to plot arcs in literature.

Then I put in Anner Bylsma’s recording: the opposite, the master of the microphrase, on a baroque cello.  Bylsma captures tiny currents of emotion, changing his articulations and dynamics to stir drama even within individual notes.  Bach’s complexity more than supports this, and I, with my students, listen to these recordings with a fascinated rapture.

Lastly, I play Yo-Yo Ma’s more recent recording, which he made as the soundtrack for a series of short films on PBS.  For me, this recording captures the best of Harrell and Bylsma, adding a special polish from Ma’s masterful, effortless technique.

There are other wonderful recordings, of course, with their own gems.  Rostropovich has breathtaking moments — I think of the organlike chords at the end of the 2nd Prelude.  (Other cellists don’t dare the attempt and cheat with arpeggios.)  I haven’t yet heard Isserlis — forgive me! — but I hear wonderful things.  “Buy as many as you can,” I tell my students.

It’s a great moment to reach — one of the moments that makes teachers love what they do.  With these recordings — gifts from the masters, now over a couple of generations — I can start asking my students to think deliberately about how they shape phrases, where they find tension or peace in a phrase of music, and how they’re going to pass these same gifts on to their own audiences.