Well, it’s late afternoon here in Lithia, Florida, on Tuesday, May 30, 2023, and it’s a sunny, hot (88°F/31°C) late spring day. It’s much too warm and muggy for me to venture out now, and in any case, I’m too tired to go for a long walk like the one I took this weekend.
This post is going to be brief; I finally was able to at least begin one scene for the New Story’s Chapter Nine, but I started later than usual – around 1:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time – and I could only coax 441 words out from my “little gray cells.” I was hoping to write at least 500, and if by some miracle I ended up with 1,000, I would have been ecstatic.
No such luck. After three hours or so of typing, jiggering and then re-jiggering words, sentences, and paragraphs into something that looked semi-coherent, I stopped writing. Partly because I was sleepy and having a hard time choosing my words, but also because I was fretting over whether Concord Music, the entity that has the copyright for the score and lyrics from West Side Story, will give me permission to use some of the lyrics from the song “Somewhere.”
One of the reasons for my late start today is that I spent a good amount of time trying to find out who to contact in order to get that permission. Using some of my journalism training, I figured that I would contact the Leonard Bernstein Estate’s licensing department. Once I found the proper email address, I wrote the following:
To whom it may concern,
Hi. My name is Alex Diaz-Granados, and I’m a writer. I’m currently working on my first novel, a love story of sorts, and in one scene, I want my narrator/protagonist, to sing “Somewhere” as a duet with his crush, a girl in his mixed chorus class.
My question is this: How do I get permission to briefly quote from the lyrics without, you know, violating any intellectual property rights or otherwise getting in legal trouble with the copyright owners? I will, of course, present the material in a positive light, and shall do my best to not use any lyrics at all if I am told not to. Of course, allusions to the work of Mr. Bernstein and Mr. Sondheim will be difficult since I am more of a blogger/film reviewer/and minor league screenwriter than I am a novelist.
Again, the scene I am planning to write is crucial to the narrative of the novel, and it won’t quote the entire song or reflect badly on its authors.
Hope to hear from you soon with any advice.
Sincerely,
Alex Diaz-Granados
After a couple of hours – during which I was already working on the bit of writing that yielded those 441 words – I heard back from the Bernstein licensing people:
Dear Alex,
Thank you for writing, and for your interest in quoting Somewhere in your novel. Please contact Allison Rau at Concord Music Publishing and she will assist you with this request.
Best wishes,
Licensing
I then contacted Concord Music Publishing, but Ms. Rau is not in the office, and the person who handles permissions in her absence has not emailed me. So, of course, now I’m checking my email inbox every so often…hoping for the best, obviously, but preparing to either read that getting permission will cost a certain amount of money, or that Concord Music Publishing denied permission to use the lyrics to “Somewhere.”
I don’t have any other news to share, so I’ll close for now. Until next time, Dear Reader, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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