Harmonic Resonance

Alex Mueller spends her days at Hellmuth & Johnson handling business and intellectual property matters for those in the entertainment industry. If she knows exactly what it takes to represent creative types, it’s because she is one herself. Mueller has composed the musical scores for more than a dozen mostly independent features and shorts. She even has her own IMDb page.

Her passion feeds her profession—in both directions.

“I’m lucky in that my hobbies are also my jobs,” says Mueller, 35. “I have the firm, I have a string quartet, and I play in a couple of orchestras.”

Mueller’s dual career in music and law came about organically. Watching Star Wars at the age of 4, some of the story went over her head, but she became enamored of John Williams’ famed score, kicking off a lifelong appreciation for the great film composers. Growing up in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, she started learning piano in elementary school, soon moving on to violin before settling on viola as her primary instrument in seventh grade. 

With encouragement from her teachers—one of whom gave her a college-level textbook on music theory, which she quickly devoured—Mueller soon set her sights on composing and arranging. She wrote some pieces that were performed at a summer orchestra camp. Soon she was doing everything from arranging music from Star Wars for string quartet to helping to get an orchestral performance on its feet at age 14.

“Our church put on a musical, but they only had a piano book,” Mueller recalls. “I ended up arranging the piano music into something that worked for an ad hoc ensemble. It was a beginning fifth-grade violin player up through a high school tuba player. Just a hodgepodge of instruments. … I conducted it with a baton I made myself. It’s kind of funny to look back on.”

As much as she loved working on music, Mueller knew it would be a good idea to diversify her studies. When a young musician asks her about the path to a music career, she advises, “It’s not enough to study the craft of music. You need to know business, and no one is going to do that for you. You can’t just think, I’m going to be really good and someone will discover me.” Once enrolled at UW–Stevens Point, she majored in music but was required to have a non-music minor, so she chose business administration—the curriculum of which included a law class.

Meanwhile, she entered some of her compositions in a competition, and won a prize in the form of a publishing deal. When she brought the contract she was given to a business law professor, he encouraged her to research its details herself. That led to a crash course on intellectual property law, copyrights and licensing.

“He was teaching me how to do legal research without me even really realizing it was happening,” Mueller says. “The deeper I went into it, the more I realized I didn’t know. I eventually said, ‘I think I should go to law school.’ At that point he literally started pulling out law school brochures.”

After graduating cum laude from Mitchell Hamline School of Law, Mueller set about fusing her two professions. She consulted on IP licensing at Minnesota Public Radio, taught entertainment law at the Institute of Production and Recording in Minneapolis, and opened a solo practice before joining Hellmuth.

“A lot of my first clients were my classmates from music school,” she says. “Because I had experience as a film composer, I knew about production stages, so I also represented some people I’d worked on films with.”

Now, Mueller works with filmmakers, event vendors, musicians, composers, artists, authors, and game and software developers—always with an eye on managing their rights and maximizing their market potential. She offers expertise in transactional matters, including structuring a business, drafting and negotiating independent contractor agreements, licenses and IP registration and enforcement. 

“Sometimes there are things people need during preproduction, so they’ll get lawyers involved early,” Mueller explains. “Particularly with films, they usually need help with distribution agreements and other necessary paperwork. With musicians, it’s basically a matter of making sure they feel good about a contract before signing it.” 

A recent highlight from the musical side was performing with the St. Paul Civic Symphony in collaboration with the orchestra from St. Paul’s sister city, Nagasaki, Japan. Another was arranging a string quartet to play an adaptation of the theme for the TPT program Minnesota Bound. 

“They asked me to do an arrangement of their theme song for string quartet last year for their 30th anniversary,” Mueller says. “We took the quartet to the [University of Minnesota] Landscape Arboretum at dawn, and they recorded us on video playing the theme music. That was pretty special.”