I, Tom Lehrer, individually and as trustee of the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, hereby grant the following permissions:
All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been permanently and irrevocably relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain. In other words, I have abandoned, surrendered and disclaimed all right, title and interest in and to my work and have injected any and all copyrights into the public domain.
The permission granted includes all lyrics which I have written to music by others, although the music to such parodies, if copyrighted by their composers, are of course not included without permission of their copyright owners. The translated songs on this website may be found on YouTube in their original languages.
Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included.
In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.
Some recording, movie, and television rights to songs written by me are merely licensed non-exclusively by me to recording, movie, or TV companies. All such rights are now released herewith and therefore do not require any permission from me or from Maelstrom Music, which is merely me in another hat, nor from the recording, movie, or TV companies involved.
In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.
So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.
NOTICE:
THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG.
It’s sad that these things will eventually be lost to centralization and digital aging. Make physical copies as well. How long does the USB standard last?
Think about the music that has been lost to time/death/natural disaster/RIAA
weinzierl · 1h ago
Aren't his songs owned by a label?
Did he really keep all the rights, so he was able to do what the text above says?
If not, do we know which subset of his work is free?
SoftTalker · 1h ago
Sounds like maybe he self-published: "All such rights are now released herewith and therefore do not require any permission from me or from Maelstrom Music, which is merely me in another hat"
justin66 · 24m ago
His work was self-published.
philodeon · 2h ago
As sad as today is, the one ray of sunshine here is that Tom Lehrer’s obit was written so long ago (and saved for the day it would be needed), that no one updated it with the subsequent revelation that his work at the Atomic Energy Commission was actually a cover story for his far more sensitive work at the fledgling National Security Agency.
Seeing the New York Times publish wrong out-of-date information has been funny since Judith Miller.
GEO: As a mathematician did you ever make any brilliant discoveries?
TOM LEHRER: Oh,nonono. I have no desire to extend the frontier of human knowledge; retract them, if anything. I like to teach it and I like to think about it, but that's about it.
Tom Lehrer has been my go-to source of acerbic wit and brilliant satire since I first encountered him when attending the Norwegian University of Tecnology and Science; a group I joined there held Lehrer in high esteem and I, too, was blown away by how timeless a lot of his songs were; a lot of satire ages very quickly, but chances are my unborn grandchildren will laugh hysterically to 'Who's Next?' or 'Wernher von Braun' after doing the mid-21st century equivalent of googling to find out who WvB was, of course.
Godspeed, Tom. This has been a rough week - three of the heroes of my formative years have checked out of existence - Lehrer, Ozzy and author Ingvar Ambjørnsen. Sigh. Who's next?
dekhn · 2h ago
I loved Lehrer growing up- my parents had his record "That Was the Week That Was" which I think is his finest work. Anyway, when I went to college (UCSC), I took his 'Nature of Math' course, which was quite enjoyable. He was a great presenter, I learned all sorts of neat stuff like the the quartic factoring challenge and the pigeonhole principle/birthday paradox (at the time, I didn't know much about hash tables and didn't make the connection).
I almost ended up TA'ing his class the next year but I had to focus on my undergraduate thesis instead. I would have loved to get to know him better, as his sense of humor was incredible.
I also had Ralph Abraham- a chaos theory guy and psychonaut who taught hist class (Nature of Math) in a natural amphitheater- at points, I could almost picture him wearing a toga, lecturing us on greek math.
sitkack · 3h ago
What a wonderful soul.
> Reflecting on his bicoastal life in a 1981 interview for Newsday, he said he planned to keep his Massachusetts home “until my brain turns completely to Jell-O, at which time I will of course move to California full time.”
To think he is only a couple years younger than Mel Brooks.
nocoiner · 2h ago
Speaking of Jell-O: I have heard, and perhaps this is apocryphal, that Tom Lehrer was the inventor of the Jell-O shot.
> Lehrer once stated that he invented the Jello shot during this time, as a means of circumventing the base's ban on alcoholic beverages.[18]
18. Boulware, Jack (April 19, 2000). "That Was the Wit That Was". SF Weekly. Archived from the original on November 28, 2018. Retrieved November 27, 2018.
"In German, oder Englisch, I know how to count down Und I'm learning Chinese!" - as relevant as ever. Maybe less so German and more matrix multiplication
andrepd · 2h ago
"'Nazi Schmazi' says Werner von Braun" is an amazing joke
SoftTalker · 1h ago
"National Brotherhood Week" is another great one.
nocoiner · 2h ago
Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department.
rimbo789 · 9m ago
“ Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?
I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley”
I first heard him when I was 13: it was mind blowing. Can’t wait to show my kids
dlcarrier · 3h ago
I never would have thought that he was still alive. Until reading the article, I don't think I ever saw a picture of him in color.
SoftTalker · 3h ago
Same. I would have guessed he died years ago. Loved his satire.
HarHarVeryFunny · 2h ago
RIP Mr. Lehrer.
I'd only heard of him from a song of his, "Poisoning pigeons in the park", that has been available on DECtalk since way back.
Searching for this, I just found another of his, "I got it from Agnes", that has also been adapted for DECtalk. Similar dark humor!
In "An Evening Waster With Tom Lehrer" he chats a little between songs and tells a short story about someone who becomes a doctor: "He soon became a specialist, specializing in diseases of the rich. He was therefore able to retire at an early age".
"Diseases of the rich" has always seemed like a useful metaphor for one way to decide on what product you are going to build. Does it heal a "disease" of the "rich"?
nmca · 3h ago
I feel the AI safety community has not made enough of Lehrer’s masterpiece on the topic:
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my father loved Tom Lehrer - had all his records. My brother and I joked about the “sliding down the razor blade of life” lyric a lot.
too_root · 28m ago
I recall listening fondly to his music as a child. The Elements and New Math stand out in particular.
A few days ago I played them for my children on a whim.
The universe is weird some times.
bitlax · 31m ago
I'll always remember him for playing the piano acceptably.
AndrewStephens · 1h ago
I used his songs as examples in a web audio project a few months ago - as others have mentioned Lehrer generously put all his music in the public domain making it perfect for use in other projects.
Originally I was going to use one of his albums but I found that his humor still hits hard after all these years, to the extent that I thought the songs would detract from my project. In the end I just used my three favorite song: The Elements, We Will All Go Together When We Go, and the absolutely brutal takedown of Werher Von Braun.
philodeon · 2h ago
He gave a lovely little performance in the late 1990s to celebrate one of his fellow mathematicians:
I loved his wacky songs. He made poisoning pigeons in the park and nuclear proliferation funny.
ChrisMarshallNY · 29m ago
That is sad, but he lived a long, rich life.
I was raised on his music. Much of it would not fly, these days.
comrade1234 · 56m ago
Did he have a song "when you're dead" about when you learn that someone is alive that you thought was dead? Because google ai thinks that he did but I can't find it...
cormorant · 1h ago
Richard Severo, the author of this obituary, died two years ago!
I grew up with a tape of Tom Leher songs and memorized the periodic table of elements song in middle school, which has mostly stuck with me. I loved his sense of humor - what a wonderful soul.
kolinko · 2h ago
97 years, wow! I guess he waited to go together with everyone else, and just couldn’t wait any more :)
nickdothutton · 1h ago
We need Tom Lehrer more now, in these times, that ever!
42772827 · 3h ago
Lehrer taught me, at a young age, that the “division” between music and mathematics was completely arbitrary, that you can be interested in both, and indeed there is significant overlap.
Truly a gift of a person, we were fortunate to have him for nearly a century.
jebarker · 1h ago
When I did my maths degree in the UK in the early 00s it was quite popular to do a “Maths and Music” degree that was equally split between the two. I’ve also been a musician all my life so one more sample point!
serf · 3h ago
Some of the most clever songs i've ever heard, and a good person too. RIP.
shiandow · 2h ago
Is it to much to ask for a black bar? For reasons I can't articulate I've always considered him a hacker in spirit.
kragen · 2h ago
He was a math professor, a secret government cryptographer, a comedian in technically challenging musical-theater forms, and reportedly the inventor of the Jell-O shot.
> Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking. (...) It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".
However:
> The concept of hacking excludes wit and art as such. The people who began to speak of their activities as "hacking" were familiar with wit and art, and with the names of the various fields of those; they were also doing something else, something different, for which they came up with the name "hacking". Thus, composing a funny joke or a beautiful piece of music may well involve playful cleverness, but a joke as such and a piece of music as such are not hacks, however funny or beautiful they may be. However, if the piece is a palindrome, we can say it is a hack as well as music; if the piece is vacuous, we can say it is a hack on music.
(So I think The Elements qualifies, if barely.)
And with respect to
> Hackers typically had little respect for the silly rules that administrators like to impose, so they looked for ways around.
> A rumor has circulated for years that in the 1950s, Lehrer invented the Jell-O shot, a cup of flavored gelatin infused with booze, which has now become a frat-house favorite. He throws his head back and laughs.
> "That's amazing how that got around! What happened was, I was in the Army for two years, and we were having a Christmas party on the naval base where I was working in Washington, D.C. The rules said no alcoholic beverages were allowed. And we wanted to have a little party, so this friend and I spent an evening experimenting with Jell-O. It wasn't a beverage," he says with a shrug.
> "And we finally decided that orange Jell-O and vodka was the best. We tried gin and vodka and various flavors and stuff -- of course you can't sample too much. So we went over to her apartment and we made all these little cups and we thought I would bring them in, hoping that the Marine guard would say, 'OK, what's in there?' And we'd say, 'Jell-O.' and then he'd say, 'Oh, OK.' But no, he didn't even ask. So it worked. I recommend it. Orange Jell-O."
So, yeah. Definitely a hacker.
wolfi1 · 1h ago
Does anyone know if there exist videos of his tv shows?
I, Tom Lehrer, individually and as trustee of the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, hereby grant the following permissions: All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been permanently and irrevocably relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain. In other words, I have abandoned, surrendered and disclaimed all right, title and interest in and to my work and have injected any and all copyrights into the public domain.
The permission granted includes all lyrics which I have written to music by others, although the music to such parodies, if copyrighted by their composers, are of course not included without permission of their copyright owners. The translated songs on this website may be found on YouTube in their original languages. Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included.
In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.
Some recording, movie, and television rights to songs written by me are merely licensed non-exclusively by me to recording, movie, or TV companies. All such rights are now released herewith and therefore do not require any permission from me or from Maelstrom Music, which is merely me in another hat, nor from the recording, movie, or TV companies involved.
In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.
So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.
NOTICE: THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG.
Tom Lehrer November 26, 2022
You can help out by hosting a copy somewhere!
It’s sad that these things will eventually be lost to centralization and digital aging. Make physical copies as well. How long does the USB standard last?
Think about the music that has been lost to time/death/natural disaster/RIAA
If not, do we know which subset of his work is free?
Seeing the New York Times publish wrong out-of-date information has been funny since Judith Miller.
"Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain" (2020), 130 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24833683
"Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire" (2018), 80 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774608
Tom Lehrer and Santa Cruz: the trail of one of America's premier satirists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40986181 - July 2024 (26 comments)
Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439810 - May 2024 (170 comments)
Tom Lehrer DAT Recordings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778749 - Dec 2023 (2 comments)
That's Mathematics – Tom Lehrer Songs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38471908 - Nov 2023 (1 comment)
Tom Lehrer puts all music and lyrics in public domain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34038206 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
Looking for Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034896 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
Tom Lehrer has released all of his songs into the public domain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34024968 - Dec 2022 (130 comments)
Tom Lehrer – We Will All Go Together When We Go - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30509279 - March 2022 (2 comments)
Tom Lehrer – So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III, 1967) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30496103 - Feb 2022 (1 comment)
Tom Lehrer Puts His Music into the Public Domain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24882384 - Oct 2020 (1 comment)
Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24833683 - Oct 2020 (132 comments)
Tom Lehrer's Mathematical Songs (1951) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24279151 - Aug 2020 (44 comments)
Tom Lehrer’s memorable “Revue” session - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036813 - Sept 2018 (6 comments)
Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774608 - April 2018 (83 comments)
Looking for Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684409 - Dec 2015 (3 comments)
Tom Lehrer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10675682 - Dec 2015 (32 comments)
Tom Lehrer's last (math) class (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1914399 - Nov 2010 (1 comment)
Godspeed, Tom. This has been a rough week - three of the heroes of my formative years have checked out of existence - Lehrer, Ozzy and author Ingvar Ambjørnsen. Sigh. Who's next?
I almost ended up TA'ing his class the next year but I had to focus on my undergraduate thesis instead. I would have loved to get to know him better, as his sense of humor was incredible.
I also had Ralph Abraham- a chaos theory guy and psychonaut who taught hist class (Nature of Math) in a natural amphitheater- at points, I could almost picture him wearing a toga, lecturing us on greek math.
> Reflecting on his bicoastal life in a 1981 interview for Newsday, he said he planned to keep his Massachusetts home “until my brain turns completely to Jell-O, at which time I will of course move to California full time.”
To think he is only a couple years younger than Mel Brooks.
> Lehrer once stated that he invented the Jello shot during this time, as a means of circumventing the base's ban on alcoholic beverages.[18]
18. Boulware, Jack (April 19, 2000). "That Was the Wit That Was". SF Weekly. Archived from the original on November 28, 2018. Retrieved November 27, 2018.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181128164739/https://archives....
Full text at https://web.archive.org/web/20211025111743/https://archives.... for the time being. Save your copy while the Archive still exists!
I first heard him when I was 13: it was mind blowing. Can’t wait to show my kids
I'd only heard of him from a song of his, "Poisoning pigeons in the park", that has been available on DECtalk since way back.
Searching for this, I just found another of his, "I got it from Agnes", that has also been adapted for DECtalk. Similar dark humor!
https://chordify.net/chords/i-got-it-from-agnes-by-tom-lehre...
https://youtu.be/R6qFG0uop9k
"Diseases of the rich" has always seemed like a useful metaphor for one way to decide on what product you are going to build. Does it heal a "disease" of the "rich"?
https://youtu.be/frAEmhqdLFs?si=DYsY5Juco-kJ5eWD
A few days ago I played them for my children on a whim.
The universe is weird some times.
Originally I was going to use one of his albums but I found that his humor still hits hard after all these years, to the extent that I thought the songs would detract from my project. In the end I just used my three favorite song: The Elements, We Will All Go Together When We Go, and the absolutely brutal takedown of Werher Von Braun.
https://youtu.be/zxFCQplZgKI
https://youtu.be/QEJ9HrZq7Ro?si=RDu536cWahc2Oct7
I was raised on his music. Much of it would not fly, these days.
https://youtu.be/frAEmhqdLFs?si=iJqkfAUqkHHkkwP2
Truly a gift of a person, we were fortunate to have him for nearly a century.
Stallman says in https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html:
> Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking. (...) It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".
However:
> The concept of hacking excludes wit and art as such. The people who began to speak of their activities as "hacking" were familiar with wit and art, and with the names of the various fields of those; they were also doing something else, something different, for which they came up with the name "hacking". Thus, composing a funny joke or a beautiful piece of music may well involve playful cleverness, but a joke as such and a piece of music as such are not hacks, however funny or beautiful they may be. However, if the piece is a palindrome, we can say it is a hack as well as music; if the piece is vacuous, we can say it is a hack on music.
(So I think The Elements qualifies, if barely.)
And with respect to
> Hackers typically had little respect for the silly rules that administrators like to impose, so they looked for ways around.
perhaps we should mention mention the origin story of the Jell-O shot from https://web.archive.org/web/20211025111743/https://archives....:
> A rumor has circulated for years that in the 1950s, Lehrer invented the Jell-O shot, a cup of flavored gelatin infused with booze, which has now become a frat-house favorite. He throws his head back and laughs.
> "That's amazing how that got around! What happened was, I was in the Army for two years, and we were having a Christmas party on the naval base where I was working in Washington, D.C. The rules said no alcoholic beverages were allowed. And we wanted to have a little party, so this friend and I spent an evening experimenting with Jell-O. It wasn't a beverage," he says with a shrug.
> "And we finally decided that orange Jell-O and vodka was the best. We tried gin and vodka and various flavors and stuff -- of course you can't sample too much. So we went over to her apartment and we made all these little cups and we thought I would bring them in, hoping that the Marine guard would say, 'OK, what's in there?' And we'd say, 'Jell-O.' and then he'd say, 'Oh, OK.' But no, he didn't even ask. So it worked. I recommend it. Orange Jell-O."
So, yeah. Definitely a hacker.