Tom Lehrer has released all of his songs into the public domain
wandering.shop
wandering.shop
“Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.”
“If after hearing my songs just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or perhaps to strike a loved one it will all have been worth the while.”
"I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up."
And now, perhaps the greatest of them all:
"In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money."
Godspeed, Tom, and thank you for your humor and your music!
There's a better one in An Evening Wasted, attributed to, IIRC, his friend Henry: "Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it."
https://tomlehrersongs.com/we-will-all-go-together-when-we-g...
In the sheet music for The Vatican Rag the expression is to play "Ecumenically"...
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/the-va...
In the intro to "So long mom": "You know, every great war produces its great hit songs. And, after each war, we like to gather around the piano or the guitar, and play these songs. We enjoy the songs because they remind us of how much we enjoyed the war. Now, World War III is almost upon us, as you know – by popular demand, it seems. And, it occurred to me that if any songs are going to come out of World War III we’d better start writing them now. So, I have one here."
I've know people in tech who have retired, often a bit on the young side. They often keep their fingers in tech in various ways. But I also have known people who just 100% walk away.
How many people? Any commonalities surrounding their choice?
I'd say it "feels very modern," but the truth is that Lehrer (re-)invented the modern form.
An Evening (Wasted) with Tom Lehrer (1959, 42m) https://youtu.be/w8d0GwzY6cA
Tom Lehrer Discovers Australia (And Vice-Versa) (1960, 49m) https://youtu.be/seaUERXJuyc
That Was The Year That Was (1965, 38m) https://youtu.be/8fSbbsWrxqc
Live in Copenhagen (1967, 51m) https://youtu.be/QHPmRJIoc2k
... funeral
... sooner or L(ater)
and
... tragic
... adjec(tives)
Listen here [1].
[0] https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/we-wil...
[1] https://tomlehrersongs.com/we-will-all-go-together-when-we-g...
His 1996 song "Infinite" could please your ear, if you'd care to listen :)
eg Curtsey for me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY7IjnxmGsE&t=39s
That said, while DOOM is the obvious example, I'd like to throw a personal recommendation out as well: Ivy Sole is criminally underrated as an artist, especially her lyricism. Lines like "No second coming of Lauryn I got bigger // Hills to climb, no disrespect but it's my time", or the election metaphor later on are clever, but also beautifully smooth and fit in so well with the music.
Thanks for sharing.
... Harvard
... discovered
Laissons le champs libre à l'oiseau
Nous serons tous les deux priso-
Nniers sur parole
I don't know if he was the first to try cutting words or if not, who tried it first.
But in Feb. 1830 people in Paris fought over the versification of Hernani, a play by Victor Hugo, because the author had dared cut a phrase in the middle across two verses:
Serait-ce déjà lui? C’est bien à l’escalier
Dérobé.
Word-breaks are hard to use because of the way the audience will react to the unexpected in language. In the literary standard, a poet would be considered to lack talent for breaking words in a sloppy way or making other clumsy structures.
Leonard Cohen may never have used word-breaks -- I can't recall an instance in any of his recorded material. The song "Halleleujah" contains some cheap rhymes where Cohen shifted the literary register for effect.
Cohen, Cole Porter, Lehrer, Al Yankovic, and of course the great Brassens are literary. But only Porter and Brassens were careful enough to use the technique for dramatic effect as well as the humorous.
Bob Dylan received a Nobel Prize for his work but he's notoriously hit-and-miss and by his own admission writes things as quickly as possible. As a lyricist, he has been prolific but not very careful about words, except in his early folk period where he imitated Woody Guthrie and the occasional later surprise (e.g a few compositions on Desire). Dylan is more of a verbose song writer. (Bettye LaVette is his best dramatic interpreter.)
Lehrer's and Yankovic's work is mostly humorous, even when there's a serious message behind the song.
Brassens may be the most brilliant of the 20th century's musical poets. His song *Les Philistins épiciers" is another good example of his style. Brassens worked his syllables to perfection. He was not typically in a hurry to utter his phrase, although he could use rapid delivery for humorous effect (e.g. Les funérailles d'antan).
There are brilliant moments in Lehrer's recorded work and he is making a clear gesture by putting his work in the public domain. Dylan sold his entire catalogue of song for an estimated $300m. Porter may have earned the most money because of his association with Hollywood and the royalties from the jazz repertoire. Yankovic is known for his satire of Amercian songs and society. Brassens is not well-known in English-speaking countries because his work is hard to translate and, alas, eating a croissant does not bestow linguistic powers to the eater.
Rap music is a (lucrative) counter-movement to almost every tradition. I leave this topic to those with greater affinity.
Minor nitpick: that song may be a good example of Brassens' singing or music-writing styles, but the words are from Jean Richepin, an eccentric poet from the late 19th/early 20th century.
If it’s uncut And in subt——-tle
Or
If it is swill Or really fil——-thy
There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
... We'll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb!
South Africa wants two That's right! One for the black And one for the white
But both it, and all the nuke-capable bases (MXF, RSA, etc.) are federal, not state, which has been an important distinction in the past (especially in 1963).
In Birmingham they love the governor cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_in_the_Schoolhouse_Door
So Israel's getting tense, wants one for self defense "The Lord's our Shepherd", says the psalm - but just in case, we'd better get a bomb!
Then many years later, iPad came out and there was an app which catalogued all the elements with that song as the lead-in.
Unfortunately it seems to have vanished from the app store.
Fun fact: when we made the app the song was of course not yet in the public domain, so I made a deal with Lehrer to trade him an iPad for the use of the song in my app. He was already talking at the time about eventually putting everything in the public domain. His main concern was to try to do it in a way that would prevent record companies from ever making money from his work.
Theodore Gray https://theodoregray.com
I remember The Elements, Barefoot Atlas(?). Was the animated story book also yours?
There's Aspirin, Adrenaline & also Aminophylline,
Amphetamine, Adenosine, Augmentin & Rifampicin,
Amoxicillin, Penicillin, Heparin & Warfarin
& Oestrogen, Progestagen & Canesten & Chloroquine
...
Lyrics: https://www.streetdirectory.com/lyricadvisor/song/elucjw/the...
And the obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1052/
"Is this really appropriate?," my mom to my dad.
"It's better than TV," my dad to my mom.
My 8-yo self rolling back and forth on the brown shag carpet wearing my pajamas in front of the wooden stereo console, warmed by the glow of the tubes inside, laughing with my dad to the pure comedy gold of Tom Lehrer's voice pouring from the speakers.
We didn't have fishing or hunting together, but Dad and I will always have those evenings with Mr. Lehrer and a sip of Balvenie.
> In 2020, at the age of 92, Lehrer donated all of his lyrics and music written by him to the public domain.[60][61] He followed this on November 1, 2022 with all recording and performing rights of any kind, making all of his music that he has originally composed or performed free for anyone to use.[62]
That makes sense. Legally, a recording of a particular performance of a musical work, is a separate copyright from the underlying musical work. Releasing the later into the public domain did not release the former into the public domain, which is why he had to do it separately.
Why did 2 years pass between one and the other? Maybe he just didn't fully understand all the legal details involved at first. Or maybe there was some contractual issue (with record labels/etc) he had to sort out, and that blocked putting the recordings into the public domain but not the music/lyrics
Also "committing to the public domain" is an idea with various interpretations and legal implications, particularly in an international context. That's why things like CC0 exist, which essentially grant a "license" to works that is as near as possible to being free of copyright even in jurisdictions where there's no legal way to surrender your copyright. I think this update is more of a clarification on those terms rather than a substantial change to the copyright situation of Lehrer's lyrics and music.
The US has unilateral copyright assignment though. I always wondered why you could not just assign the copyright to the federal government. Work-for-hire by feds is public domain.
Assigning work to the US federal government does not put it in the public domain. Work created by a US federal government employee, in the course of their official duties, automatically enters into the public domain in the United States (but not necessarily internationally.) However, if someone else creates a copyrighted work, and then assigns the copyright to the US federal government, as far as copyright law goes, the US federal government has the same ability to limit access to it (or charge for access) as any private copyright holder does.
I think that's not the right way of wording it. [0] says:
> 3.1.7 Does the Government have copyright protection in U.S. Government works in other countries?
> Yes, the copyright exclusion for works of the U.S. Government is not intended to have any impact on protection of these works abroad (S. REP. NO. 473, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. 56 (1976)). Therefore, the U.S. Government may obtain protection in other countries depending on the treatment of government works by the national copyright law of the particular country. Copyright is sometimes asserted by U.S. Government agencies outside the United States.
It might be more accurate to say that US law limits the rights of the US federal government to own copyright in its works, but that US law was only intended to apply domestically within the US, not overseas. However, whether it effectively does apply overseas, is not ultimately up to the US, it is up to overseas legal systems – if an overseas legal system wants to make that US law effectively applicable in their country too, that might not be what the US wants, but there is nothing the US can do to stop them, and the US is unlikely to even complain much about it, just because this is not a particularly important issue as far as international relations goes.
I'm not aware of any country (other than the US) whose copyright laws explicitly mention US federal government works. Instead, I think the situation is simply due to this:
a) The majority of countries, their copyright laws just say that any work becomes copyright automatically upon creation, even works created overseas, and they have either no exceptions to that rule, or else no exceptions relevant to this case
b) A minority of countries, have a rule saying that their domestic law will not grant foreign works greater copyright protection than they have in their country of origin. Under such a rule, a US federal government work in the public domain ab initio in the US will also be in the public domain in that country ab initio. (You could interpret this as "the rule of the shorter term" being applied to the case when the term is zero.)
Neither rule was adopted with US federal government works in mind – such works have rather limited economic significance, and as such have never been a major consideration for overseas legislators. It is just how copyright laws, which were adopted for other reasons, happen perchance to apply in this case. Most international copyright treaties permit both approaches, leaving the choice up to each nation's legislators and court system to decide upon.
[0] https://www.cendi.gov/pdf/FAQ_Copyright_30jan18.pdf#page=17
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Somewhere in HN history there was an article about him where a guy convinced him to donate his master tapes to an archive. Lehrer had them in a basement somewhere and was just going to throw them out. He was surprised to hear that they were valuable at all. He seems to be one of those humans who gets more interesting the closer you look.
Wikipedia tells me they're just a few months apart in age, too.
That's a little misanthropic? Most people get more interesting the better you know them.
All of them, even, since before you actually know someone, all you have is your projection of their personality, based on a first impression?
(Or maybe I misunderstood what you meant.)
The snag is that some of his songs are set to others' melodies, for instance, Gilbert & Sullivan provided the melody for "the Elements".
Now, he is adding the melodies and other rights which he owns.
[0]: https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/trotll...
[1]: https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/trotl1...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
Thank you Tom Lehrer for all the memories and the laughs, and a biting satire that's still fresh.
I always appreciated the sarcasm.
"And this is what he said, on,
his way to arma gedd on:
So long Mom,
I'm off to drop the bomb,
so don't wait up for me.
But while you swelter
Down there in your shelter
You can see me, on your TV.
So long Mommee,
I'm of to get a commie
So send me a salami
And try to smile somehow.
I'll look for you when the war is over
An hour-and-a-half from now."
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews
— National Brotherhood Week, https://youtu.be/CgASBVMyVFI
On the site I think it is a double L
Watch some companies are going to do copyright claims on his songs on Youtube.
============
Be prepared! And be careful not to do
Your good deeds when there's no one watching you
If you're looking for adventure of a
New and different kind
And you come across a Girl Scout who is
Similarly inclined
Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be scared
Be prepared!
Sample: $0 for the first decade, $1 for the second decade, $10 for the third decade, $100 for the fourth decade, $1k for the fifth decade, $10k for the sixth decade, $100k for the seventh decade, $1M for the eighth decade, $10M for the ninth decade, etc.
The problem I see is that under both alternatives mentioned above, there is no way to express the intensity of preference / how badly an author wants protection. Also, authors receive the benefit of copyright protection without paying anything to society. This is why I proposed an escalating cost - the longer the protection, the more you pay. And it's essentially impossible to win against an exponential in the long run. Can Disney really afford to pay $100M per title to renew for the tenth decade? Or $1B per title for the eleventh decade? Or $10B per title for the twelfth decade? And if you don't like these numbers, you can choose whatever initial value and multiplier you want, e.g. $3, $90, $2700, $81000, $243000, etc.
In a way, I'm proposing something ideologically similar to quadratic voting, where the more intensely you want your preferred outcome, the more you have to pay to society to vote this way.
> Perhaps it needs to be an inverse of how much revenue it's already brought in?
This could lead to phony movie accounting though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIoDfWgbVgU
The answer to "how badly an author wants protection" will almost always be "very badly" at least while a significant amount of people are interested in the creative work in question. Maybe instead of worrying so much about what the billion dollar corporations want it would be better to set a default, but make the copyright term for a work shorter according to how much the public wants to access it (as measured by sales). It's the public's interests that copyright was created to serve after all.
To be honest though, all of that seems needlessly complicated. I think it'd be better and much more fair to just set a solid cut off of X number of years that applies to everyone equally no matter how much money they have. That'd also mean the public doesn't have to do so much to try to figure out when each individual work's copyright expired. If they know something was released longer than x number of years they know in every instance if it's available for them.
Ideally, we'd make everyone register for copyright protection by sending a DRM free copy of their work to the state who will automatically release it online at copyright.gov as soon as the copyright expires. Then everyone can just go there to see what's available and access anything they want. Kind of like a less curated. but more accessible Library of Congress.
As autoexec stated in the sibling comment: due to the successes of copyright lobbyists we now have essentially indefinite copyright terms, and for the time being it doesn't seem there's any realistic chance of meaningful copyright reform. At the risk of sounding defeatist, I'm not hopeful.
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://tomlehrersongs.com/category/songs/ `
| Select-Object -Expand Links `
| Where-Object { $_.href.EndsWith(".pdf") } `
| ForEach-Object {
$path = $_.href
$fname = $path.Split('/')[-1]
$stuff = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://tomlehrersongs.com$path -o $(Join-Path -Path ./ $fname)
}https://dweb.link/ipfs/Qmf21k4uAz2PMnYQUDDHUKPX8787JoyXLbKUz...
I'll try to "seed" it for a while but likely will not keep it alive forever. It would be appreciated if others can help keep it alive in case the site goes down. The data is 1.2GiB after deduplication.
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/trotl1...
[0] https://www.vulture.com/2007/10/trent_reznor_and_saul_willia...
they also had their own tracker: https://torrentfreak.com/nin-launches-bittorrent-tracker-for...
There's no standard form for placing something in the public domain in the US either but there is a legal concept of "copyright abandonment" which is what probably governs if you place a work in the public domain.
I grew up to these songs and it's great to know they're avaliable in perpetuity.
Sharing random post from Mastodon instead of url is unclear