Singing and moving – at the same time!

This is an updated version of a post which first appeared as Making a song and dance of it in June 2007.

From my experience with choirs and singing groups it appears that we are a rhythmically challenged nation!

photo by The Failed Photographer

I often try to introduce a bit of clapping or some steps into our warm-ups and songs and am always amazed at the apparent lack of co-ordination and body-awareness amongst the group.

i can’t dance, don’t ask me!

As soon as I begin teaching simple dance steps, or a simple clapping rhythm (especially one that is not on the beat), several people just sit out and don’t even bother to try because they ‘know’ they can’t do it. And some people sit out because “I’ve come here to sing, not dance!”

Of course, everyone does have a sense of rhythm, it’s just that we don’t practice it very often. So people give up too quickly thinking they can’t do it. Rather like people who think they can’t ‘sing’ because they can’t immediately pick up a tune – they are simply out of practice with their listening skills.

we live in a visual culture

It seems to me that this is a cultural phenomenon. Our culture has become very visual and rational. We use our eyes and thinking brains far more than our ears and bodies.

Once people have sung in a choir for some time, they get in contact again with their innate listening abilities. They learn to trust their ears and not just their eyes. Similarly, given time and patience, I believe that people can re-discover their innate sense of rhythm and body-awareness.

putting different activities in separate boxes

In our culture we tend to compartmentalise different activities. So, for example, when we’re singing we’re singing – we’re not dancing. So we think we don’t need to pay any attention to our bodies. Similarly, when we’re dancing or clapping, we think we don’t need our voices.

I came across this time and time again when I taught at drama school. The lessons themselves were even compartmentalised: a movement class followed by a voice class followed by a tap class. When I arrived and tried to teach everything at the same time, there were a lot of confused students!

in other cultures singing and dancing are the same thing

In many other cultures – notably African cultures – there is very little, if any, separation between dance, vocal melody and rhythm. You only have to see a group of South Africans, for instance, singing a song and you cannot see where the dance ends and the song begins – it is all the same thing.

So when learning songs from these cultures, we often find it difficult. It is no good trying to count some complex off-beat rhythm in your head using your conscious brain, it’s just too hard. You have to let your body ‘dance’ the rhythm and then the song’s timing will come automatically. Similarly with the complex 7/8 rhythms common in the Balkans – just learn the dance at the same time and it comes easy!

trust your body and instincts

Sometimes we find ourselves carrying out a complex task such as patting our head whilst rubbing our tummy and find that sweet moment when it all falls into place. But then as soon as we begin to think (“great, it’s working” or “I hope I’m getting it right”) it all goes disastrously wrong! We need to trust our intuition, our body intelligence, our non-rational brain which is just getting on with the task quite nicely thank you.

The Natural Voice approach to singing (which I follow) places the relationship between breath, body and voice at its heart. We believe that you simply can’t separate these components to be fully in the song. And it’s no coincidence that much of our repertoire comes from cultures which don’t make these separations.

I once met an instrumentalist who wouldn’t even begin to play tunes from another culture until she’d been to a few dance classes from that culture. She needed to embed the culture’s ‘dance’ into her body before she even picked up her instrument.

dancing the song is often better than reading the song

A few years back I was taught an amazing Ysaye Barnwell gospel-like song called Lawd it’s midnight (from LESSONS An a cappella suite of songs for mixed chorus, 1993).

This is an amazing song with some quite tricky rhythms. We learnt it by having the sheet music in our hands and it took a long time to get it right. Most of the difficulties were to do with the cross rhythms.

It occurred to me afterwards that we probably would have learnt it a lot faster if we had put the music down and simply let the rhythms into our bodies!

learn it all at the same time

It’s far easier to learn a movement or clapping sequence at the same time as learning the associated song. In the same way as learning lyrics whilst singing, it is stored in a different part of the brain. If you try to learn everything separately, it will be much, much harder.

A few years ago I tried an experiment which involved teaching a movement sequence at the same time as I taught a new song (Dancing the song). The movements had no connection with the meaning of the song, but I wanted to see if it helped people learn more quickly. It was a big success, and even years later when we revived the song, everyone remembered the movements! If I had asked people to just sing the song or just do the movements, I don’t think they would have been able to.

So next time somebody asks you to move or dance at the same time as you're singing, they're not trying to make life difficult for you, they're actually making it easier for you to learn the song. Just go with it!

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

 

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I must go down to the seas again

I’m in the middle of moving house from pretty much the centre of England (Coventry) to be near the sea (Woodbridge in Suffolk).

I’m a bit behind the times and all my blogging is done from my home office PC which means that things might get a bit hectic over the next few weeks!

We complete our purchase next Friday 3 September. We are then going down the following week to do some decoration and plan to move fully in the middle of September.

I’ve written the next few posts already (wow!) and they will be auto-published (clever!), but I won’t be able to moderate or respond to comments (shame!) until we’re properly settled in (when? when?).

So this is by way of a little advance apology that I may not be on top of things as much as usual for the next few weeks. Please bear with me, and I hope you enjoy the next few posts:

• singing and moving (at the same time!)
• how to get the best from your singers (don’t tell them it’s hard!)
• is community singing dead?
• music is too freely available (a bad thing!)

... and much, much more.

Remember: if you have a suggestion for a post, a question you’d like answered, or would like to write a guest post, then please don’t hesitate to contact me.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

 

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Dealing with individual singers in a large choir

This post is part of a series of occasional Questions and Answers. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Morning Star asks:

“What do you do with your big chorus, when there are some folks that have real trouble with the pitch and some of them tend to sing loudly and throw others off?

I have spoken to the whole group many times about blending and we have done exercises to work on blend, but when those people get back in the group it often continues to happen. Do you ever speak with people individually?”

 

Fortunately, this hasn’t happened to me very often!

things usually balance out

If you run an open-access choir there will always be a range of different voices, experience, talent, needs, interests, etc. etc. This is one of the joys of community choirs – the amazing mix and variety of people.

Usually there is a reasonable spread of ability across the choir so things tend to even out. The more experienced singers carry the less experienced along with their enthusiasm and confidence, and any small tuning problems or glitches are ironed out in the overall mix.

But sometimes you will find that your choir is quite evenly balanced, with most people having similar experience. So if you get just one or two people who have far more or far less experience, they will stick out like sore thumbs.

giving individual attention

I often get frustrated with large choirs (anything over 20, say) because I can’t give people individual attention.

In a community choir there is always an element of training and vocal development in the warm ups each week. Sometimes I can see that people are struggling or just getting an exercise wrong and would love to go over and spend some one-to-one time with them, but there are 60 other people in the room who need my attention too.

For this reason, I try to pitch the warm ups so that everyone is challenged, whatever their level or experience. I constantly remind people that they are not to judge themselves against others, but only against themselves. Also, even if a warm up is very familiar, there is always something new to be learnt. In this way, I hope that each individual will develop at their own pace week on week.

However, there will always come a time when you get down to learning or singing a song and one voice will dominate.

the odd one out

The issue of whether or not they’re in tune, singing the correct part, have too much vibrato, have a screechy quality, etc. can be dealt with in the warm ups, but you need to be patient.

The only reason that there is a problem is that the person is singing too loudly. It will upset the overall sound and also put off other singers in their section.

There is a variety of reasons why someone might be singing too loudly:

• they have little self-awareness and just don’t notice
• they need to sing loud in order to hear their own voice
• their voice is very powerful and they have not yet learnt how to control it
• they have not yet learnt how to control their breathing properly
• they are over-confident
• they are under-confident
• they don’t have enough experience of singing in harmony

Most of these can be fixed in the warm up session, but again it will take some time. The one thing that is very hard to fix is lack of self-awareness!

singing too loudly

You can take individuals aside and point out that they’re singing too loudly and draw their attention to how to blend in in terms of volume:

• if you can only hear your own voice, you’re singing too loudly
• if you can only hear everyone else, you’re singing too quietly

It’s a bit like Goldilocks: you need to find the “just right” volume.

The aim is to sing and hear your own voice AND the other voices in your part AND the other parts which make up the harmonies. A tricky balance, and one that only comes with experience.

If you do need to have a chat with a particular individual, make sure it is in private and not in front of the rest of the choir.

for the greater good

There is only one time I’ve had to ask someone to leave a choir and I felt awful! After all, the choir was founded on the principle that everyone can sing and everyone is welcome, no matter what their experience is. But there was one person who consistently sang loudly and out of tune. It didn’t affect the overall sound of the choir too much, but it DID affect the other people in the part who kept getting put off.

For good of the choir as a whole, I had to ask the person to leave. What I said was that they needed to go and develop their listening skills (not their singing skills). The fact was that the other people in the choir had more experience in this area. I told the person to go an get more experience singing in unison, for instance, singing hymns at church. In this way they would learn when they were singing the same notes at the same volume as everyone else.

It was a hard thing to do because I didn’t want to knock the person’s confidence, but I felt that I had to do it for the greater good of the choir.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

 

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When rehearsals go bad

This is a revised version of a post which first appeared as Blame it on the weather in April 2007

Occasionally a rehearsal goes totally pear-shaped and I have no idea why.

 

la la la la ... I don't wanna hear this! by hebedesign

Despite my best efforts everything goes horribly wrong, and there’s no easy explanation. Perhaps it’s down to the weather?

everyone’s having an off night

Sometimes we’re really bad. All of us. Whether it’s six, or sixteen or sixty singers – everyone is out. They’re out of tune, the harmonies aren’t working, the pitch is dropping, the timing’s off – nothing is right.

If this were just one or two people then OK, perhaps they’re having an off day or are tired or had a difficult time at work. But the whole group??!! What’s going on here? A few out-of-tune voices might have a slight effect to those around them, but how come the whole choir is off key? Or out of time, or coming in at the wrong place?

This doesn’t happen often, but it’s happened enough times for me to realise that it’s a recognisable phenomenon. There is nothing I can do about it (I’ve tried!). So I just blame it on the weather, chalk it up to experience, and move on.

just one of those things?

It’s not the singers’ fault, it’s something outside them that’s affecting the whole room. Maybe it’s the full moon, or we’re in a high pressure area, or the humidity’s low – whatever it is, it’s nothing to do with us.

This is very different from those rehearsals where things are going wrong, but it’s just a case of a bit of a pep talk, a heightening of focus and attention, or simply running the song again and everything's back on track. This we can fix. In those cases we get back in tune OK. But not on bad weather days.

It’s happened enough times for me to just point it out and try to get everyone to accept the situation: “It’s just one of those nights! Next week will be fine.” They trust me and breathe a sigh of relief.

At first it really spooked me. We had such a good session the previous week and now it’s all going pear-shaped. It must be my fault, I’m not teaching very well or maybe I should be doing something different – like becoming an accountant.

Then I remembered my days as a runner.

no expectations

I used to be a long-distance runner, culminating in a half-marathon before I had to give it all up (don’t ask!). Most nights I would go out jogging for a good few miles come rain or shine. Often I’d get home on a real runner’s high. No matter how wretched or tired I felt when I set off, I’d come back glowing and full of energy.

The next night I’d set off perhaps feeling a bit low but knowing that at the end of it I’d feel great. Only sometimes I didn’t.

I began to realise that how I felt at the end of my run was kind of random. Many times I’d feel good, but sometimes I’d feel lousy. If I tried to hang onto the memories and feelings of the last good run and expect to come back feeling wonderful, I’d only get doubly disappointed. So I learnt to have no expectations. What happened would happen, despite me.

I think this is what Zen calls Shoshin or beginner’s mind.

as if for the first time

The idea is that each time you do something – no matter how many times you’ve done it before – you approach it as if it were the first time.

This also connects with my time as an actor. I used to do a lot of improvisation and at first would try to repeat the things that went well the last time. But of course it’s never as good or as spontaneous the second time round. So I learnt to approach each improvisation as if it were the first time (which of course it was!).

This can be applied not only to ‘bad weather’ rehearsals, but also to warm-ups and performances. I try to vary the warm-ups and vocal training each week, but inevitably (and usefully) we often repeat the same exercises.

There are two ways of dealing with this: either you can just go through the motions because you’ve done it loads of times before and you just want to get through it to get onto the singing (the fun part!), or you can have a beginner’s mind and approach the exercise as if you have never done it before. You may then discover new things about how your body and voice work, you will stay engaged and fascinated, and you will benefit from the warm-up much more.

Similarly, when a concert comes along, you can try to re-create the wonderful performance that you had the last time and fail. Alternatively, you can remember that awful concert last year which will stop you from being in the moment and doing your best for this concert.

Or you can behave as if you have never done this before, be totally in the moment, and move into the unknown, learning, wondering and developing as you go.

who can we blame?

Sometimes things just go totally wrong in a rehearsal or at a performance. We need to blame someone.

Often we blame ourselves (“I knew I was a rubbish singer!”, “If only I’d spent more time learning my part”), or sometimes the person in charge (“Our last musical director was much better than this one”), or the song (“I don’t know why we’re singing this stupid song any way”), or the venue (“It’s so cold in here! No wonder we can’t sing properly”). Or maybe it’s just the weather.

But blaming something doesn’t change the situation, nor does it help us move forward.

Thinking about the phenomenon has made me believe more and more in the principle of ‘living in the now’ or ‘being in the moment’. If you’ve done all your preparation and you come to the rehearsal or performance without expectation, you will always be rewarded – often in unexpected ways. But if you come to the warm-up or concert with a particular outcome in mind, you will almost always be disappointed. A hard skill to practice perhaps, but a very worthwhile one.

Have you had bad rehearsals where everyone seems off form, but you just can’t figure out why? Do drop by and leave a comment.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

 

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Songs and copyright 7: alternatives

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen how copyright works and considered both the legal and moral angles.

Some people have a problem with the current law, feeling that it is too restrictive. However, they still want to have some control over their intellectual property. This week I look at several alternatives to the existing copyright laws.

public domain

The simplest way to make a song available to everyone is to put it in the public domain. Sometimes people use the term ‘public domain’ in a loose fashion to mean ‘free’. However, ‘public domain’ is a legal term and means, precisely, ‘not copyrighted’. A work is in the public domain either because its copyright has expired, or the owner of the work forfeits their rights over it.

Under the Berne Convention, which most countries have signed, any literary or artistic work is automatically copyrighted. Therefore, if you want a work to be in the public domain, you must take some steps to disclaim the copyright on it. This isn't very hard to do — the copyright holder merely has to make a statement that they release all rights to the work. Once this irrevocable act is complete they no longer have any power over how the work is used since it is then owned by the public as a whole.

It is controversial, however, whether it is possible for a copyright holder to truly abandon the copyright of their work. Some scholars of copyright law, agree that it is difficult to put works in the public domain, but not impossible. The Creative Commons website, for example, has a public domain dedication form which produces an electronic receipt which is meant to act as legal backing for the dedication. It might be that another licensing option, such as the Creative Commons Attribution-Only license (see below), is a safer choice.

creative commons

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

There are a range of licenses available where you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify. Ranging from attribution only (i.e. as long as people say where the work came from, they can then do anything they like with it), to attribution, non-commercial, non-derivatives (i.e. people must say where the work came from, can’t use it commercially, and can’t alter it or build on it in any way).

If you visit the home page of this blog: http://blog.chrisrowbury.com you will see that it is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 which means that I am allowing anyone to copy and make derivative works of any of my posts as long as they acknowledge that I wrote the original.

copyleft

In general, copyright law is used by an author to prohibit others from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of the author's work. In contrast, an author may give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute it but require that any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same licensing agreement. This is called copyleft. Copyleft type licenses are a novel use of existing copyright law to ensure a work remains freely available.

Copyleft is usually associated with computer programs, but it can also be applied to music. When a work is ‘copylefted’, it means all derived works (even if they mix in other works as well) must be distributed under the same terms (usually the same exact license) as the original work. Licenses can be obtained through Creative Commons. Copyleft is sometimes known as Share Alike.

informal arrangements

Whilst retaining copyright, you can make clear that you are giving users certain freedoms over your intellectual property. For example, putting “This page may be photocopied” on sheet music (e.g. the OUP’s Voiceworks series)

change the law!

Some people believe that the current copyright system is failing, but rather than adapting it, they are calling for wholesale change. There is a recent article from the BBC World Service – Copyright: time to change the laws? – which considers why the current system is now out of date.

further reading

Tom Ewing wrote an article in The Guardian pointing out that modern music marketing (i.e. giving away music for free) is close in spirit to the Native American practice of potlach.

A story in The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses lessons from the history of book publishing, the evolution of copyright and what might happen in the future. “History shows that intellectual property is more complex than either its creators or copiers care to admit.”

Counterpoint online has started a debate on the future of copyright. It’s 300 years since the passing into law of the very first copyright act the British Council Creative Economy Team has launched a debate and year-long series of forums framed by the question: if copyright hadn’t been invented, what kind of copyright would we want?

The Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University has created a course called ‘Copyright for librarians’. Module 6 of the course looks at Creative Approaches and Alternatives.

the end

Well, that wraps up this series of seven posts on songs and copyright. A complex subject, but I’ve tried to give as clear an explanation as I can. I’d love to hear your views on the series. Do drop by and leave a comment.

If you’ve missed the rest of this series, here are links to the other posts:

1. Even if it’s a folk song, somebody wrote it
2. Basic principles of copyright
3. Different kinds of rights
4. How the law works
5. Who owns the song?
6. How to get permission to use a song
7. Alternatives

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

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Balancing fun with rehearsing for concerts

This is a revised version of a post which first appeared as What a performance! in July 2007.

Last week I wrote about choirs that choose not to perform. None of the choirs or singing groups that I have run were formed as performing groups.

Stellenbosch University Choir South Africa

I’ve always made it clear that our main priority is simply to have fun and to sing together. But if (and when) performance opportunities arise, how can we balance having fun with the requirement to perform well? (Coincidentally, Liz Garnett recently wrote about the balance between fun and discipline on her own blog: Are we having fun yet?)

we didn’t plan to be a performing choir!

Life being what it is, performance opportunities arise and people like to perform. So we ended up doing the occasional performance, and before we knew it, we were doing regular concerts.

I make sure that everyone understands that performance is an added bonus and is in no way compulsory. Yet almost all choir members want to perform. Having put all that hard work into learning and perfecting songs, it’s inevitable that people want to share them with others.

So we perform. And we do – even if I do say it myself – perform to a high standard. We often sell out many of our regular local gigs, and have a strong following amongst our audience. But this brings its own problems.

Whilst each week the emphasis is on learning new songs and having fun singing them (plus reviving a few ‘oldies’), there has to come a time when we ‘rehearse’ for our upcoming concert.

finding a balance

Many performing choirs can have a dozen or more concerts each year. This means that their emphasis is very different from ours: each week’s session is a rehearsal for the next concert, always brushing up on performance skills and honing songs drawn from a relatively small repertoire.

But we have a repertoire of over 200 songs to draw upon (not all of which are up to speed at any given time) and we only perform a maximum of three times a year.

The skill then is to balance fun singing sessions with the more serious business of getting songs ready for the next concert.

My usual plan is to introduce a small number of new songs at the beginning of each term (roughly 12 weeks), whilst going over some golden oldies at the end of every session. As the concert approaches, I stop introducing new material and just focus on polishing the old stuff.

Two weeks before the concert we spend one session running through the first half of the concert and the next weekly session running the second half. On the day of the concert we have a full rehearsal in the afternoon running the whole concert in order.

Sometimes – if circumstances permit – we spend a whole Saturday near the concert just running through the set. This is less pressured than a regular session as it’s most people’s day off and we share lunch and try to make it a fun, relaxed day.

so many songs, such little time!

Since many of our songs are relatively short (between one and three minutes long) it means we use up a lot of repertoire in a concert. Our concerts are usually two halves of 45 minutes each, which may mean we get through up to 30 songs – most of which are in foreign languages. That’s a lot of material to get through in a term whilst still trying to have fun!

There is always the frustration that if only we had more time to work on the songs, then the concert would be even better. And if we were a proper performance choir then we could work on performance skills each week and really get good. But I think we’ve got the balance right.

performing vs. not performing

If we never performed, there would never be a need to really hone in on a song, get the subtleties right, play with the dynamics, find the right voice for it, really get to grips with the strange words, find the joy of actually singing the song rather than feeling that you never quite know it properly.

Yet if we performed all the time we would lose a lot of the fun from our weekly sessions, there would be more pressure to “get it right”, our performances might end up just that little bit too slick (our audiences really like our laid-back informal approach coupled with accomplished singing ability), we wouldn’t be able to keep adding fabulous songs to our repertoire, we couldn’t afford to experiment and play around with songs or to try to learn something really complex without the pressure of having to deliver at a certain time.

fun or discipline?

Of course, you need both if you’re going to perform. But if I had to sacrifice one, I would definitely keep the fun element. If everyone's having fun it creates the perfect atmosphere for excellence. If the focus is entirely on product, then it's oh so easy for fear and lack of confidence to feed in.

How about your choir? Do you feel you have enough fun? Are you always frustrated because you never really get to grips with a song? How does your choir find a balance? Do drop by and leave a comment.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

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Songs and copyright 6: how to get permission to use a song

We’ve seen that songwriters, music publishers, recording artists, song arrangers, etc. all have copyright over the songs that they ‘own’. We’ve seen how the law works and what you can and can’t do with other people’s songs.

If you want to use a copyrighted song (to teach, record, arrange, copy, perform, broadcast, etc.), how do you go about it?

Office Depot copyright warning by gruntzooki

Before you can use any work that is in copyright, you must first get permission. Often that permission is not obtained directly from the creator, editor, recorder, performer or arranger of the song, but from an organisation that helps to deal with creative rights.

Also, as we saw last week, the original creator may have sold the rights to their work to another person or organisation. You will need to find out who that is so you can ask their permission.

Each country has its own organisations. The rest of this post refers to the situation in the UK.

important UK organisations

The Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) – now part of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, PRS for Music (see below).

PRS for Music (formerly the Performing Right Society) is a royalty collection society that was founded in 1914. As the MCPS-PRS Alliance, it is an organisation which pays royalties to composers, songwriters and music publishers when the music they have created is sold. This includes sales of the music alone such as CDs and downloads, and also products which use the music as a part of their soundtrack, such as films and computer games.

PPL (formerly Phonographic Performance Ltd.) is the company which licenses recorded music and music videos for public performance, broadcast and new media use. The income generated is then allocated and paid as royalties to their record company and performer members.

Music Publishers Association (MPA) is a non-profit organisation representing music publishers in the UK. It exists to safeguard their interests, and those of the writers signed to them.

UK Music is an umbrella organisation which represents the collective interests of the production side of UK’s commercial music industry: artists, musicians, songwriters, composers, record labels, artist managers, music publishers, studio producers and music collecting societies.

who to ask for permission

For permission to:

• arrange a song – you need to contact the copyright owner. The MPA can help to direct you to them
  
• record music – contact PRS for music (MCPS)
  
• perform music live – contact PRS for music (PRS)
  
• broadcast music – contact PPL and PRS for music
  
• play a recording of music in any public space – contact PPL and PRS for music

what does that mean in practice for my choir?

• If you perform a copyrighted song in a concert, you will need to pay PRS. The payment is usually collected by the venue that you are performing in (if they are licensed). This also applies to performing live for broadcast.
  
• If you want to make a CD, you have to first get permission from MCPS who will tell you which songs are in copyright and then you will have to pay a fee for each copyrighted song based on a percentage of potential income from the CD. You should do this even if you are only selling the CD for peanuts to choir members or friends and family (although in practice, many choirs don’t bother!).
  
• If you want to arrange a song that is in copyright, you will need to ask permission of the person who ‘owns’ the song (not necessarily the original song writer). The MPA can help direct you.
  
• If you want to write a song using text or lyrics that are in copyright, again, you have to ask permission of the copyright owner. In both this and the case above, you may have to pay a fee.

Once you have obtained the right to record or perform a copyrighted song (see above), then you need to protect your rights as a choir in terms of any recordings that are made. Once you’ve legally produced your CD or download, then you will need to protect your rights over someone using that recording to sell, broadcast, copy, etc. PRS for music will be able to give you advice or ask the distributor you use.

if you’re a song writer or arranger ...

There is no need to register a work in order to obtain copyright protection, but there are certain precautionary measures you can take. MPA has a useful guide: How do I protect my music?

You will need someone to administer the rights you have over your work.

• If you become a member of PRS, your rights will be transferred to them. Whenever your music is performed in public or broadcast, they will collect the royalties for you.
  
• If you become a member of MCPS, they will act as an agent on your behalf to administer your rights if someone wants to record your music, and sell or rent CDs, downloads, etc.

further reading

PRS produce a very useful document covering all aspects of copyright law.

Sound Rights is a free online learning resource produced by UK Music, written by professionals in the music industry and music education expert Leonora Davies to answer the national curriculum's new requirement regarding the music industry and copyright.

British Copyright Council is a national consultative and advisory body representing those who create, hold interests in or manage rights in literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, films, sound recordings, broadcasts and other material in which there are rights of copyright or related rights; and those who perform such works.

As a liaison committee and pressure group for change in copyright law at UK, European and international level, the BCC provides its members with a forum for the discussion of copyright matters.

The Copyright Licensing Agency is aimed at organisations which regularly photocopy and distribute documents (such as sheet music). They license organisations for copying extracts from print and digital publications on behalf of authors, publishers and visual creators.

next week

In the final post in this series on songs and copyright I’ll be looking at alternatives to the familiar copyright law: copyleft, public domain, creative commons, etc.

This is the sixth in a series of seven posts about songs and copyright:

1. Even if it’s a folk song, somebody wrote it
2. Basic principles of copyright
3. Different kinds of rights
4. How the law works
5. Who owns the song?
6. How to get permission to use a song
7. Alternatives

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

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