Upcoming concerts and license woes
More stuff I wasn't taught in music school.
San Francisco Bay Area friends, I’m playing some concerts near you in June!
On Tuesday, June 17 at 12:30 PM, I’ll be playing on the Noontime Concerts series at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco. The concert is free and open to the public.
On Saturday, June 21, I’ll be playing a private house concert in San Jose; as you might have guessed from the word “private,” the concert is not open to the public, but if you are absolutely clamoring to make it and aren’t able to come to the San Francisco date, contact me and I can see what we can do. (The host has indicated that we’ve already hit max capacity, but you never know.)
Please come hear me if you are interested and available—I’m doing slightly different programs for both concerts, but I’ll be playing music by Frederic Chopin, Maurice Ravel, Mel Bonis, Maria Szymanowska, and Florence Price.
If you are elsewhere in the US and wondering when I’m coming to you: hang tight, I’m working on it.
Also quick note: every once in a while someone reaches out to me to say “Hey, can you come play at X venue/Y series in Z city sometime, I want to hear you live and I know people here would love it!” These messages always, always, always warm my heart, so thank you, keep them coming! I often do reach out to venues/series that people suggest but my success rate with cold emails is…well, let’s say it’s not 100%.
So if you are an avid concertgoer and you want to see a not-a-big-name artist on your local concert series—not just me, but any small timer you believe in—drop your favorite community series an email saying that you’re a fan of so-and-so (linking to the artist’s website is always helpful), that you’d love to see them brought on, and that you’d totally come to hear them play. These go a longer way sometimes than the artist themselves cold-emailing. 🤷🏻♀️
The Independent Artist Blues
Sing, O muse, of the rage of Sharon, who at this point is ready to fight the recording industry with her bare hands.
How I feel. Source
You may recall that, in my last newsletter, I very assuredly said that my recording of Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 2 would be coming out “later this month.” And that, at the time, it was the beginning of April. You may also have noticed, if you own a calendar, that we are pretty firmly into May now.
Many weeks ago, I submitted my track and cover art for distribution, feeling pretty proud of myself for being a well-rounded artist capable of wearing many hats. I perform! I record! I do my own graphic and web design! I do my own distribution! I do my own bookings! I do my own social media! I don’t deal with middlemen! I’m HUSTLING, I’m GIRLBOSSING, I’m—
—apparently someone who does not understand the basics of how public domain works.
The distribution of my recording to streaming platforms was canceled because I’d submitted it without a license, which I was confused by, because as I understood it, Florence Price has been deceased for over 70 years and her works are therefore in the public domain. Turns out, copyright law is slightly more complicated than that. Does scrolling through Title 17, Chapter 3, “Duration of Copyright,” of the United States Code make your eyes glaze over? Because it certainly does for me.
Well before any of this happened, I’d briefly talked to one preeminent interpreter who’s recorded Price’s works, because another Florence Price scholar had mentioned in conversation to me that there were some unique copyright complexities around her work, and I wanted to get my ducks in a row. I asked how they handled the legal, copyright, and licensing issues around recording and releasing Price’s works, and they very kindly told me that they didn’t handle that stuff—their record label did.
Oh.
So that’s what record labels are for. Macklemore made the independent life look so great.
Oh well, I thought. I am SMART, I am DETERMINED, I will figure this licensing thing out like I’ve figured everything else out in my career so far!
Well. At some point I will probably be able to tell this story in a funny and entertaining way at parties, but I don’t think I’m at that point yet.
Oh what the hell, I’ll tell it anyway.
So here’s what happened. I set up an account with a license management agency that seems to exist solely to crush the spirits of young independent musicians, and then had to read up on the different types of music recording licenses. (I am pretty good at reading, but this process went more slowly because I was hampered by my own indignant rage that a conservatory of music handed me a whole ass music performance degree and told me I was ready to be a musician in the world without ever considering that a music performer might need to understand the very basics of how releasing music works and what their rights are.)
I then went to buy a license for the work I’d recorded, only to discover that the license for that specific work was not available. At this point, indignant at the very existence of licensing agencies that can’t even do their one job, I could feel myself turning, Animorphs-style, into Ron Swanson.
I submitted a request to obtain the license for the Fantasie nègre No. 2, then got an automated message saying that the result of my request would be dependent on the publisher who held the rights to that work.
Oh, you mean the publisher whose flaws I very publicly aired, getting their VP and other publishing houses involved? That publisher? Who now holds the future of my little release in their exclusive-rights-owning hands?
I was left on read for several weeks and, like a recently jilted lover, wondered whether I was being frozen out intentionally or if the other party was, you know, just really busy.
Seasons changed. New buds unfurled on dormant trees and baby birds broke out of their shells. I submitted a customer service ticket regarding my license request.
Thankfully, a kind but anonymous representative answered, giving me the precious 6-character code that would allow me to obtain the damn license. I carefully entered the code into the little form on the website, filled out the rest of the form indicating what type of license I wanted to get, and then paid real American dollars (RIP) for said license. Sometime later, I received a legal document indicating that I had the right to make my recording available to be heard by mostly just my parents. Success!
I triumphantly re-submitted my track for distribution, attaching my hard-won license (and double- and triple-checking that the license was attached to the submission) and started planning out all the decidedly non-artsy release strategy nonsense that independent artists are supposed to do these days.
Last week, I received a notification that my distribution for release had been canceled because my submission required a license.
I am so over all of this and now think the entire recording industry was a mistake. If you need me, I’ll just be over here lost in furious fantasies about dragging every miserable business involved in this aborted process behind my chariot around the walls of Troy.
My boy Achilles gets it. Source
——
Get in, loser, we’re “centering patrons”
Emily Hogstad continues to be essential (and grimly entertaining) reading about the ongoing shenanigans at the San Francisco Symphony, whose leadership appears to gearing up for a labor debacle, unveiling a glossy but meaningless website about their “vision.” Emily has unpacked it all in her post “Centering Patrons at the San Francisco Symphony.”
She notes that SFS leadership’s latest move is a typical one from the playbook of management that has, historically, lost at this game:
Is it normal for orchestra managements to create these kinds of sites during labor troubles?
Yes. If negotiations go well, they will be conducted privately. If things get a little spicy, a quote or two might be released to the press. After the negotiation is finished, a press release hailing the achievement will be posted on the orchestra website’s press room page. Then everyone will move on with their lives. This is how the contract negotiations at other large American orchestras played out this past season.
On the other hand, if shit is about to hit the fan, and a labor dispute seems possible, a management team will hire a PR firm, buy a new domain name, and build a new website there to frame the story on their terms.
These management-built sites invariably employ certain dog whistle phrases. They will read innocently to normies just tuning in, but freaks like me know they come from the comms playbook of crises of yore.
She also, to my great relief, lays open the “business model” fallacy as it relates to orchestras; bolding is mine:
When leadership teams are seeking to shrink a symphony orchestra, they like to refer to the orchestral “business model.” People are generally more receptive to cuts to a business than to cuts to a non-profit.
I once heard Kevin Smith, the beloved CEO who oversaw the post-lockout recovery of the Minnesota Orchestra, say something along the lines of, it’s an orchestra’s job to lose money. The function that an orchestra serves in society is to convert dollars into intangible benefits for a community that are otherwise very difficult or outright impossible to access or assign a dollar value to. A major orchestra is a kind of magical currency converter.
Of course orchestras can’t be wasteful. But there are better terms than “business model” that more accurately describe this process.
The whole post is worth a read.
Miscellaneous Great Reads
I read so many great things the past few weeks that I feel like I can’t not share them here; blurbs and thoughts will be shorter as I am quickly running out of time and energy, but these are all worthwhile reads.
Ruth Graham: "‘The Only Person in the World Claiming to Be the Pope Right Now’" (New York Times)
Easily one of the most delightful things I've read all year. Pope LARPing!
John Paul Brammer: "PopeCrave" (Substack)
I thoroughly enjoyed Conclave; I went into it thinking it was going to be a ponderous movie of exacting subtlety, and was delighted that it is, in fact, high drama and camp masquerading as a prestige film. JP Brammer's screamingly funny—yet thoughtful—review sums it up perfectly. (I also find it extremely funny that the actual cardinals in the real-life conclave watched the film to prepare.)
Estelle Puleston: "Lingerie & Hosiery Fabrics Under the Microscope" (Blog post)
A roundup of amateur photographs of various textiles under a microscope is either the sort of thing that you'll find not remotely interesting or INCREDIBLY interesting. As you might guess, I am in the latter category; I was absolutely riveted by images showing how the fibers of textiles we take for granted are constructed and woven, and how their structure creates the characteristics we love so much in our clothes.
Frank Shyong: "Why are Taiwan’s 7-Elevens so much better than ours?" (Los Angeles Times)
There are two types of people: those who have experienced 7-Elevens in Taiwan and will never shut up about them for the rest of their lives, and those who haven't. I loved this piece so much.
Som-Mai Nguyen: "Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility" (Astra Mag)
This is a very thoughtful, very smart read which tackles the problems with the superficial understandings of culture, language, and authenticity in media that is often heralded as a "win" for representation.
Chris Gayomali: "Resurrector: 'Like a G6'" (The Believer)
Maybe it's because I'm a Baysian of a Specific Age, but "Like a G6" is always going to be a perfect song to me. I adored this retrospective on how the track came to be, which validates my deeply held conviction that to make "dumb" art, you have to be really, really smart.
And, of course, we can't talk about "Like a G6" without listening to it. Here you go, and have a great weekend!
This post was updated on May 10, 2025 to remove an extra "is" and fix two broken links.