Tom Lehrer has died
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I, Tom Lehrer, individually and as trustee of the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, hereby grant the following permissions: All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been permanently and irrevocably relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain. In other words, I have abandoned, surrendered and disclaimed all right, title and interest in and to my work and have injected any and all copyrights into the public domain.
The permission granted includes all lyrics which I have written to music by others, although the music to such parodies, if copyrighted by their composers, are of course not included without permission of their copyright owners. The translated songs on this website may be found on YouTube in their original languages. Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included.
In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.
Some recording, movie, and television rights to songs written by me are merely licensed non-exclusively by me to recording, movie, or TV companies. All such rights are now released herewith and therefore do not require any permission from me or from Maelstrom Music, which is merely me in another hat, nor from the recording, movie, or TV companies involved.
In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.
So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.
NOTICE: THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG.
Tom Lehrer November 26, 2022
You can help out by hosting a copy somewhere!
It’s sad that these things will eventually be lost to centralization and digital aging. Make physical copies as well. How long does the USB standard last?
Think about the music that has been lost to time/death/natural disaster/RIAA
It will last approximately forever. See how we can still use all the Commodore 64 hardware and software thanks to enthusiasts.
Until the next update./s
If not, do we know which subset of his work is free?
EDIT:
His Wikipedia page lists the following labels:
- TransRadio
- Lehrer
- Reprise/Warner Bros.
- Rhino/Atlantic
- Shout! Factory
- Needlejuice Records
His sheet music was published by Crown Publishers Inc.
His public domain dedication is a noble gesture, but legally it probably doesn't mean much.
> As a souvenir for [his graduate student friends], Lehrer decided in 1953 to make a record of the songs he had written at Harvard. He recorded Songs by Tom Lehrer in one session at Trans Radio studios in Boston on a 10-inch LP.. bought the rights to the record from Trans Radio, and began selling it by mail order.. By 1954.. he had sold 10,000 records.. By the end of the decade, he had sold 370,000 records.
The songs aka compositions/lyrics may be controlled by publishers
We are thankful.
Seeing the New York Times publish wrong out-of-date information has been funny since Judith Miller.
GEO: As a mathematician did you ever make any brilliant discoveries?
TOM LEHRER: Oh,nonono. I have no desire to extend the frontier of human knowledge; retract them, if anything. I like to teach it and I like to think about it, but that's about it.I almost ended up TA'ing his class the next year but I had to focus on my undergraduate thesis instead. I would have loved to get to know him better, as his sense of humor was incredible.
I also had Ralph Abraham- a chaos theory guy and psychonaut who taught hist class (Nature of Math) in a natural amphitheater- at points, I could almost picture him wearing a toga, lecturing us on greek math.
I wouldn't say there's a ton to connect. Hash collisions are expected and you don't rehash as soon as the first one occurs.
What's the point of your rude post? OP already knows this. In fact, they learned it from Tom Lehrer.
"Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain" (2020), 130 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24833683
"Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire" (2018), 80 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774608
Tom Lehrer and Santa Cruz: the trail of one of America's premier satirists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40986181 - July 2024 (26 comments)
Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439810 - May 2024 (170 comments)
Tom Lehrer DAT Recordings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778749 - Dec 2023 (2 comments)
That's Mathematics – Tom Lehrer Songs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38471908 - Nov 2023 (1 comment)
Tom Lehrer puts all music and lyrics in public domain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34038206 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
Looking for Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034896 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
Tom Lehrer has released all of his songs into the public domain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34024968 - Dec 2022 (130 comments)
Tom Lehrer – We Will All Go Together When We Go - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30509279 - March 2022 (2 comments)
Tom Lehrer – So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III, 1967) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30496103 - Feb 2022 (1 comment)
Tom Lehrer Puts His Music into the Public Domain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24882384 - Oct 2020 (1 comment)
Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24833683 - Oct 2020 (132 comments)
Tom Lehrer's Mathematical Songs (1951) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24279151 - Aug 2020 (44 comments)
Tom Lehrer’s memorable “Revue” session - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036813 - Sept 2018 (6 comments)
Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774608 - April 2018 (83 comments)
Looking for Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684409 - Dec 2015 (3 comments)
Tom Lehrer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10675682 - Dec 2015 (32 comments)
Tom Lehrer's last (math) class (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1914399 - Nov 2010 (1 comment)
Godspeed, Tom. This has been a rough week - three of the heroes of my formative years have checked out of existence - Lehrer, Ozzy and author Ingvar Ambjørnsen. Sigh. Who's next?
I still have a T-shirt somewhere proudly sporting the domain name under the NTNU (Norwegian abbreviation for Norwegian University of Tecnology and Science) logo, slightly modified - the real logo is a circle bounded by a rounded square; the T-shirt has a hazelnut standing in for the circle.
> Reflecting on his bicoastal life in a 1981 interview for Newsday, he said he planned to keep his Massachusetts home “until my brain turns completely to Jell-O, at which time I will of course move to California full time.”
To think he is only a couple years younger than Mel Brooks.
> Lehrer once stated that he invented the Jello shot during this time, as a means of circumventing the base's ban on alcoholic beverages.[18]
18. Boulware, Jack (April 19, 2000). "That Was the Wit That Was". SF Weekly. Archived from the original on November 28, 2018. Retrieved November 27, 2018.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181128164739/https://archives....
Full text at https://web.archive.org/web/20211025111743/https://archives.... for the time being. Save your copy while the Archive still exists!
Some years ago they asked me to have Jell-O, and - thinking of Lehrer - I replied that it's adult only, as you make it with alcohol. Much to my surprise that explanation stuck - and they never had Jell-O so far.
.. important to get the German english right!
"Diseases of the rich" has always seemed like a useful metaphor for one way to decide on what product you are going to build. Does it heal a "disease" of the "rich"?
An example: Angry Birds 2 made hundreds of millions by selling at 79p to hundreds of millions of people. Think what it takes to make an app to sell to 10 rich people to make the same amount of money.
I'm not saying it's impossible to make money selling to rich people. It's just in no way the only way. Many ways of making money involve selling to many people.
His comments between songs are at least as funny as the songs themselves. For many years I thought that recordings only existed of those comments for An Evening Wasted and That Was The Year That Was. Then I discovered The Remains of Tom Lehrer, a 3 CD set that includes, not only the original Songs By Tom Lehrer (straight off the 10 inch LP), but also a live recording of the same songs from a concert, with comments between the songs! (This set also has studio recordings of the songs from An Evening Wasted, done before the live concert recording.)
Just to give a taste, before he even plays the first song in the concert version of Songs By Tom Lehrer, he gives a biographical introduction of himself, as though he were a toastmaster or an impresario. Here's how it starts (at least as much as I can capture it with just typing):
"Endowed by nature with perhaps the most glorious baritone voice ever to be heard on an American stage since the memorable concert debut in 1835 of Millard Fillmore; endowed also with twelve incredibly agile fingers..."
I'd only heard of him from a song of his, "Poisoning pigeons in the park", that has been available on DECtalk since way back.
Searching for this, I just found another of his, "I got it from Agnes", that has also been adapted for DECtalk. Similar dark humor!
https://chordify.net/chords/i-got-it-from-agnes-by-tom-lehre...
https://bsky.app/profile/opalescentopal.bsky.social/post/3lu...
Your witty lyrics combined with virtuoso piano play have not yet been surpassed, to my or your knowledge, which you might have found sad; it might alternatively be seen as testament to talents that may appear less than once in 100 years.
Your departure saddens me greatly.
I first heard him when I was 13: it was mind blowing. Can’t wait to show my kids
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/musicshow/tom-lehrer-...
Truly a gift of a person, we were fortunate to have him for nearly a century.
Originally I was going to use one of his albums but I found that his humor still hits hard after all these years, to the extent that I thought the songs would detract from my project. In the end I just used my three favorite song: The Elements, We Will All Go Together When We Go, and the absolutely brutal takedown of Werher Von Braun.
The V1 was more cost effective - not because the V1 did much damage, but because it diverted a great deal of British effort at trying to shoot them down and blow up their launch sites. The Germans eventually figured the latter out, and built lots of fake launch sites for the RAF to uselessly destroy.
Missiles only became effective due to better targeting or nuclear warheads.
Von Braun was not because Russia had also captured a number of rocket scientists, the US rocket technology was way behind, and von Braun was needed to get the US rocket program going.
Modern liquid fuel rocket engines can directly trace their evolution back to the V2.
However, if you combine it with modern image recognition and you know your target it will be probably enough
But most were done at Berkeley so I hope they then told Haaarvard.
Stallman says in https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html:
> Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking. (...) It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".
However:
> The concept of hacking excludes wit and art as such. The people who began to speak of their activities as "hacking" were familiar with wit and art, and with the names of the various fields of those; they were also doing something else, something different, for which they came up with the name "hacking". Thus, composing a funny joke or a beautiful piece of music may well involve playful cleverness, but a joke as such and a piece of music as such are not hacks, however funny or beautiful they may be. However, if the piece is a palindrome, we can say it is a hack as well as music; if the piece is vacuous, we can say it is a hack on music.
(So I think The Elements qualifies, if barely.)
And with respect to
> Hackers typically had little respect for the silly rules that administrators like to impose, so they looked for ways around.
perhaps we should mention mention the origin story of the Jell-O shot from https://web.archive.org/web/20211025111743/https://archives....:
> A rumor has circulated for years that in the 1950s, Lehrer invented the Jell-O shot, a cup of flavored gelatin infused with booze, which has now become a frat-house favorite. He throws his head back and laughs.
> "That's amazing how that got around! What happened was, I was in the Army for two years, and we were having a Christmas party on the naval base where I was working in Washington, D.C. The rules said no alcoholic beverages were allowed. And we wanted to have a little party, so this friend and I spent an evening experimenting with Jell-O. It wasn't a beverage," he says with a shrug.
> "And we finally decided that orange Jell-O and vodka was the best. We tried gin and vodka and various flavors and stuff -- of course you can't sample too much. So we went over to her apartment and we made all these little cups and we thought I would bring them in, hoping that the Marine guard would say, 'OK, what's in there?' And we'd say, 'Jell-O.' and then he'd say, 'Oh, OK.' But no, he didn't even ask. So it worked. I recommend it. Orange Jell-O."
So, yeah. Definitely a hacker.
And I actually knew the Austrian counterpart Georg Kreisler in person.
A few days ago I played them for my children on a whim.
The universe is weird some times.
I was raised on his music. Much of it would not fly, these days.
RIP
His songs helped me through so many difficult times.