Creative Commons Music in Practice

Feature | robin, August 24th, 2005

About ten days ago we put up a request for music licensed under Creative Commons, to use in our show and podcast.

We got one response from Max Avery Lichtenstein, a New York composer who wrote the original score for the documentary film Tarnation.

Now, if you haven’t seen this film yet, it’s really quite remarkable. Director Jonathan Caouette started filming himself and his mother, who suffers from severe mental illness, when he was eleven, and continued to do so into his thirties. That footage is the bulk of the film, which is alternately touching, frightening, and hallucinatory. Apparently quite a few people liked the film (this is an understatement, btw) because the film won for Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival, was the Official Selection at Cannes and Sundance, and had Gus Van Sant sign on as executive producer upon completion.

So needless to say, we were pretty excited when Max responded to our little experiment. I called him to find out a little bit more about the music from the film, why he had licensed some of it under cc, and how he came to offer it to us.

There was a big reaction to the music in the film. I kept getting emails from people who really liked it, but there was no plan and no budget to release a soundtrack from the film. Because Tarnation was a low-budget film to begin with, when they did hire me, I was able to do the music and retain the rights, which is a lttle unusual.

I’ve always thought music was a great way to communicate. To me successful music is music that other people respond to, so it was so nice that people responded to this. I wanted to make sure that as many people as possible could hear this music, so it struck me that the best thing to do would be to put it up on the internet. I also wanted to make sure that people didn’t feel inappropriate about sharing it with their friends, if they wanted to pass it along and copy it and trade it. So I decided to release a couple tracks under the Creative Commons license. Now there have been over 45,000 downloads of the song, and it’s only from my site. It’s made it onto lots and lots of other sites on the internet, and as long as it’s not being used for a commercial use, people can distribute it as they wish.

One of the bands I’ve worked with, Mercury Rev, one of the ex-members of that band, Suzanne Thorpe who plays the flute, she’s active in the New England music world, and somebody emailed her a note about [Open Source], and she passed it on to me and a bunch of other people. It was a community train that brought it to me. It so happened that I had this particular piece of music, and that it was also instrumental, so it sort of seemed perfect.

Max Avery Lichtenstein

If you’d like to purchase a digital only EP of the film score, you can do so here.