Steve Savitzky's
Collected Works

This is the official, cannonical URL and grandiose title for songs, recordings, and writings by hacker/songwriter/blogger Steve Savitzky (bio).

Mostly Retired: I officially retired May Day 2017; I am now working on several blogs, and taking occasional freelance writing gigs. You can find my resume, software, and related writings at Stephen.Savitzky.net. Longer term I'm working on a travel blog, GoingSideways.blog, with Naomi Rivkis.

Location: We moved our household, now called The Rainbow Caravan, lock, stock, and pussycats from the house we called "Rainbow's End" in West Seattle, to Whidbey Island. A couple of years later, some of us moved back to Seattle for health reasons. A year or so after the death of my wife Colleen, I joined them, living in a converted garage behind their house. Our household in San Jose was called Grand Central Starport.

Band: Lookingglass Folk, with Naomi Rivkis. Our debut as a duo was at Conflikt 2012. Up-and-coming band: Kaleidofolk, which is me, Naomi, and Magpie.

Code: This website is (mostly) written in raw HTML with Emacs, version-controlled using git, and managed using a combination of GNU Make, bash, perl, and LaTeX that is available on GitHub as MakeStuff. LaTeX is used for song lyrics and leadsheets; there are programs and scripts that convert it to HTML, plain text, PDF, and ChordPro formats.

Copyright Notice: unless otherwise noted, all material below is copyright Stephen Savitzky, and is released under a Creative Commons or free software license. See below for details.

Gigs and other travel plans

Conflikt	Jan 27, 2025 on Zoom. No concerts planned; look for me in the one-shots, if there are any.

Collections:

Music

Albums/ Coffee, Computers & Song! (blog): Published and planned CDs. The first one, Coffee, Computers, & Song!, was released in August of 2007; three more are planned and the first of those, Amethyst Rose, is in the early stages of recording. There is a LiveJournal community (multi-user blog) devoted to discussion of my albums; some of that discussion will be moved back here eventually.
Concerts/: Recorded concerts. The earlier ones are mostly low-quality recordings and/or dodgy performances, but may be of interest to rabid fans, if I have any. Concerts after 2007, especially the ones with Tres Gique and Tempered Glass, are better. There appears to be a long gap in recording after 2012.
Songs/ (index): Collected songs: song lyrics and sheet music; occasionally sound files. Not all songs in this directory were written by me; the ones with lyrics are either in the public domain, under a license (e.g., a Creative Commons license) that allows me to distribute them, or are published on the site with the explicit permission of the author. Other songs in my repertoire are listed without lyrics, but some have associated notes.

Other

Doc/ (doc/): Textual works of nonfiction. Could have been called "Writings", but "doc" is traditional in the Unix world; I've been using it for a long time. It's also more accurate, since fictional text is in a separate directory. The lowercase alternative name is provided for tradition's sake.
Lit/ (Formerly Fiction): Textual works of literature: fiction and poetry. At the moment all of this is "work in progress" stuff, and would take quite a lot of work to get it into publishable shape. It's included here mainly as background for some of my songs.

Elsenet

Src/ (src/): (open) Source code. All of the code and software documentation on this site is distributed under one or more open-source licenses (e.g., the MIT License) that give anyone permission to use, study, modify, and redistribute the code. As with doc, the lowercase alternative name is provided for tradition's sake.
MakeStuff/ [also on GitHub] [and Gitlab]: Open-source tools, mainly scripts and Makefile templates, shared across all of my websites. These include the tools for song formatting, album and track management, and demo CD production, as well as for web deployment and version control. Open source -- feel free.
Honu/ [also on GitHub] [and GitHub]: Configure an Ubuntu or Mint system just the way I like it, with one command. Open source -- feel free.
Personal Blog: I have a personal blog called The Mandelbear's Musings on dreamwidth which might be of interest.
Travel Blog: Naomi and I are working on a travel blog called Going Sideways. The tagline is "Travelers With Chronic Health Baggage".

Licensing

Except as noted (e.g. for third-party software, traditional songs, etc.) everything here is copyright by Stephen R. Savitzky and published by Stephen Savitzky doing business as HyperSpace Express.

License for Lyrics and Music:: This is filk. Basically, you can do whatever you like with my music except make money off it, and you can do that by paying the usual license fees. The basic license for the music and lyrics is the Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license, but if you record your own lyrics and only use my music, you'll only owe me half the usual royalties; permission for mechanical licensing of music only will automatically be granted (but you'll still have to contact me first because that's the way the law works).

License for Audio Files:: Audio files for all songs both written and performed by me (when I get around to posting them) are posted under the Creative Commons Music Sharing License. (I'll try to get permission from other people to license their performances of my songs, and my covers of other peoples' songs, the same way. Trying to license my occasional covers and filks of songs by people outside the filk community promises to be something of a nightmare, so for now I'm simply not going to post any. If you're a songwriter whose songs I cover, and you don't mind my posting them, please let me know. If you're a listener, you'll just have to wait for the CD.)


License for Software:: Unless otherwise noted, programs and their documentation are licensed under the MIT License

Naming Conventions

Collections/: Collections (also called "directories" or "folders") have capitalized, single-word (usually plural) names. Being capitalized, they sort at the front of directory listings, which is where most people expect to see them. In a few cases lowercase alternatives are provided for historical reasons (e.g., src and doc). Albums, which are collections of songs, are named by their title.
individual_item/: Individual items have lowercase, usually multiword names with words separated by underscores. With lowercase titles one doesn't have to worry about such arcana as why the word "of" is capitalized in "Of Mice and Men" but not in "Lord of the Rings". Initial "The", "A", and "An" are omitted. If the title contains a name that is supposed to be capitalized, both capitalized and lowercase versions will (sometimes) be provided (e.g. for_Amy and for_amy/). Note that in most cases an item will be stored in a directory; that allows them to be accessed without a ".html" extension, keeps them together with any other resources they need, and lets them include sub-pages. (See this article for more details.)

The slightly unusual capitalization convention is one I've been using for a long time now; among other things, it makes collections sort first in a listing, keeping them separate from "items" (documents) even if, as in this case, they're both represented by directories. It also vastly simplifies the problem of error correction -- simply force everything to lowercase rather than trying all 2ⁿ combinations or making a linear, case-insensitive search.

Note: If you still have links into the old tree, especially /people/steve/Doc/Songs/*, you should change them; they will continue to work as redirects, but the new paths are better.

Steve Savitzky's Collected Works