Sometimes I feel...
It's always fun when law and music overlap in my life...
Sometimes that happens
when past fans become future colleagues (you know who you are),
or contracts and license agreements begin to make more sense,
or songs about lawyers strike my funny bone (my favorite of the genre is "My Attorney Bernie," immortalized by the great Blossom Dearie).
And most recently, something I learned in law school opened up a beehive of creative possibilities and collaborations.
This is where Creative Commons Licenses come in. Creative Commons Licenses provide a user-friendly legal framework for sharing your music and other creative works in ways less restrictive than Copyright. If you create and release something under a Creative Commons license, you are giving permission to use that work - with some restrictions - in ways that would be covered by Copyright. You could require licensees to give you credit, or you could allow using it only for non-commercial projects, or you could forbid changing the work in any way - it's as easy as checking of a few boxes, and voila! you've given a green light on future creative exploitation of your work under those terms. Much more on that at the Creative Commons Website. Note that there's a reason to be careful about stamping a Creative Commons license on your work if you ever plan to make it a huge commercial hit - revocability of Creative Commons licenses are questionable at this point (according to at least one Copyright scholar according to a recent talk I attended). But I digress...
Recently, I've been intrigued by the idea of collaborating online through sites like ccMixter and SpliceMusic - ccMixter (via Creative Commons) provides the legal framework for easy colalboration through Samples Licenses; SpliceMusic also offers a very impressive online sequencer and community tools for music collaboration with very little know-how and no upstart costs.
thesoupasonic has uploaded some very specific viola gestures and textures -- odd sounding notes, whacks, crashes -- sounds which can't at all be found in ordinary sample libraries. He also uploaded one of his newest tracks, an Indian-inspired "Heat Me Up", posting all the parts of the tracks (melody, bass, plucks, etc) and inviting a remix (see here: http://ljova.com/heat_me_up). Meanwhile, I uploaded an accapella version of the Spiritual "Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child", and in the near future, I'm hoping to record various vocal gestures, riffs, ornaments.
Several intriguing re-mixes have already been posted by users, but one collaborator stands out, and he goes by the name of Minimal-Art. For those of you in the know, it should be no surprize that this collaborator is from Budapest - the city where cutting-edge musicality is served with every sip of palinka.
So here is Minimal-Art's take on "Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child": http://ccmixter.org/media/files/minimal_art/9058
Enjoy!