More personally and specifically:

(1) My wife and I have always called our amalgamation of freelance work — joking a bit because it sounds so pretentious — “The Thulson Studios.” It made a natural title for a blog where I talk about that work. I just wouldn’t want you to take it too seriously.

(2) Except … I do love the word “studio,” coming from Latin for zeal or devotion; it’s a wonderful etymology for the way we describe, in English, both the process of learning and an artist’s physical workplace. If I’m a student of how art interacts with society, I suppose that this blog is one of my primary workplaces. Each of the posting categories becomes a workshop of its own, a place I can assemble ideas and test them out. Each navigational point of entry, I hope, becomes a place of its own for collaboration.

That meaning — a place for students/devotees/artists to work together — seems like the highest and best meaning of “studio.” And those places, online or off, are what I work constantly hoping to create.

Then I moved on to testing the permalink settings themselves, checking (and regenerating) the .htaccess file, then testing alternate permalink structures. And I found, essentially, that 3.1 requires a little more tidiness from me.

Previously, my site had run with this Custom Structure, which overrides the native WordPress category archives but did work until the 3.1 upgrade. Under Admin | Settings | Permalinks:

After testing alternate configurations, I found that this structure continues to work in 3.1 without a hitch:

So the issue was my archive system override. (From a usable-URL standpoint, the second structure, /%category%/%postname%/, is cleaner. But it’s disfavored for performance reasons; WordPress documentation indicates that %category% as the first element of a permalink Custom Structure adds database load and slows down the site.)

So providing an alternate Category base, as follows, took care of the problem:

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.)

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!

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.

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.

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!

It’s also produced a range of software that I find myself using often, or even daily.   So I thought I’d take a minute to inventory the open source projects on which I rely.  Turns out to be a long list:

Office Productivity

• OpenOffice.org desktop office suite.
• KeepNote list and note-taking application.
• Feng Office virtual office suite (especially for its contact management / CRM capabilities).
• Firefox web browser.
• Thunderbird email reader.
• PDFsam tool for splitting and reassembling PDF files.  (When you need it, you need it.)
• Whyteboard paint program for annotating PDFs.
• PDFCreator print driver to create PDFs.
• GNUCash double-entry bookkeeping.
  

Music

• MuseScore editor for complex music notation.
• Audacity audio recording and editing program.

Imaging

• Inkscape vector illustration tool.
• Gimp photo editor.
• Debugmode FrameServer video post-production tool which serves individual frames of video from one program to another.  (An oddly useful thing to do, as it turns out.)

Web publishing

• FileZilla FTP client.
• PuTTY.  Nope, I’m not afraid of the command line.  (Yup, I probably should should be.)

Under the hood

• 7-zip file compression utility.
• LAMP web server stack.

The kicker is, of course, that each of these projects was developed using non-traditional economic models.  Some are easy to grasp: a big software company like Sun decides to release their in-house office suite; programmers need base tools (like LAMP) for other work, so they invent clever ways to collaborate and piece those tools together; a guy in his dorm room captures a following among fellow hackers.

But I’d submit that there’s more to even the obvious stories: how these projects gained traction outside the original developer’s head; how they got good enough for daily use; how they turned the organizational corner into a sustained and active development community.

Clever use of copyright law is part of these stories.  OSS lives by combining the rights of copyright ownership with very particular licensing terms: code can be redistributed, but only subject to conditions that keep future developments open source.  So OSS isn’t a donation-based model that only works for techno-hippies.  It’s, instead, a brilliant application of law and economics — just one that’s more complex than “I make software and you buy it from me.”

The result is, at least potentially, spontaneous organization.  And a lot of great software.

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.

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.