CD 'accompaniment' at Mass

[musicus]

To respond to TT's closing question, yes, it can work. I have heard some very good primary school choirs sing in concerts to a CD accompaniment. It is not easy to do - you have to get the levels just right, and foldback speakers really help - but a professionally produced track can be very effective. Nonetheless, I'd always prefer live music. Now, and I repeat, that's in concert. I don't think the practice has any place in the liturgy. (We've discussed the authenticity issues here before.)

[Deke]

Not quite off topic - last year while practising Exsultet in Church using MP3 player my PP decided he could use the original CD to play at the Vigil in the 2nd parish he covers rather than sing himself. Even worse a PP in a neighbouring parish with a permanent deacon who has a good singing voice has always used a CD of the Easter Proclamation and regularly uses CDs he picks up on his travels.

[FrGareth]

I've also pointed out the legal minefield of playing CDs at public worship...

I am no advocate of CDs for liturgy but my understanding is that the PRS chooses not to assert its rights for music played entirely within the context of worship.

See http://www.prsformusic.com/users/businessesandliveevents/musicforbusinesses/Pages/doineedalicence.aspx#6 - paragraph 6

FrGareth

[Southern Comfort]

I am no advocate of CDs for liturgy but my understanding is that the PRS chooses not to assert its rights for music played entirely within the context of worship.

This is only true for live music performed during an act of worship. For recorded music played during an act of worship, the situation is different — or has been up to now. You need a PRS Church Licence. However, the law is currently in a state of flux so the situation is a little unclear.

[Deke]

BBC has an interesting news report today http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-13012849 where organists are given an award for their service by the Archbishop of Wales. At the end of the report one of the recipients says that fewer young people are coming forward to play and that when she is not at church, they use tapes. Not just us then.

[FrGareth]

my understanding is that the PRS chooses not to assert its rights for music played entirely within the context of worship...

This is only true for live music performed during an act of worship. For recorded music played during an act of worship, the situation is different...

Are you sure, SC? The page I have linked to begins by stating

Currently PRS for Music has charging policies affecting the following:

1. Medical Music Therapy
2. Healthcare premises
3. Residential homes
4. Shops
5. Workplaces
6. Music used in divine worship
7. Music used in wedding ceremonies, civil wedding ceremonies and civil partnership ceremonies
8. Police Stations
9. Crematoria, chapels of rest and funeral parlours
10. Private family events
11. Small bed & breakfast establishments & single self-catering units
12. Universities and other institutes of higher education
13. Small community events (such as street parties) celebrating the 2011 Royal Wedding

I am struggling to imagine interpret the applications to music therapy, small offices, surgery waiting rooms, investigative suites in police stations and B&Bs if I am to assume the licenses refer to live performance only...!

[Southern Comfort]

Are you sure, SC?

No, I'm not. But until recently the position was that the PRS did not ask for performing right payments on live performances during worship, but if you wanted to play recorded music through the church PA system you needed an MCPS licence (not the same as the MCPS licence as for recording wedding videos). It was a great excuse for telling brides and others that they couldn't have all kinds of awful things, because the church did not have a licence.

Since MCPS merged with PRS and the law apparently changed (or was going to change) in January this year, everything is confused. That, plus the page from the PRS website that you quoted — http://www.prsformusic.com/users/businessesandliveevents/musicforbusinesses/Pages/doineedalicence.aspx#6, paragraph 6, is why I don't trust CCLI, who are the agents for the PRS Church Licence and who will tell you that you definitely need a licence to play recorded music in church. I think they are just out to make a fast buck.

[FrGareth]

No ambiguity here! CCLI states clearly http://www.ccli.co.uk/licences/churches_playing-music.cfm

Exclusions:
* PRS for Music chooses not to license music played during acts of divine worship. This includes CDs/DVDs and live performances.
* CCLI is not able to license all churches. Generally, those excluded are Cathedrals, Abbeys and large Minsters.
* Any church premises which PRS for Music deems to be a concert venue may also be excluded. As a guide, if more than 6 concerts are held per year, that church will be deemed a concert venue. Please contact us if you have any doubt.

[gwyn]

No ambiguity here! CCLI states clearly http://www.ccli.co.uk/licences/churches ... -music.cfm

Exclusions:
* PRS for Music chooses not to license music played during acts of divine worship. This includes CDs/DVDs and live performances.
* CCLI is not able to license all churches. Generally, those excluded are Cathedrals, Abbeys and large Minsters.
* Any church premises which PRS for Music deems to be a concert venue may also be excluded. As a guide, if more than 6 concerts are held per year, that church will be deemed a concert venue. Please contact us if you have any doubt.

A light of revelation indeed.

Diolch.

[St Wilfrid]

Oh, if only it were that straightforward.

The performing rights society (PRS) only represent the interests of the composers and publishers, who own the copyright of the notes on the page as it were. Thus they have an interest in both live and recorded music. There's another body, the PPL (Phonographic Performance Limited) who represent the interests of the performers on the CD, and the record companies who manufacture the CD, who have an interest in recorded music only. The PPL have an annoying habit of turning up on your doorstep, after you've paid off the PRS people, explaining that you now have to pay them for the same thing.

So do you need a PPL licence to play a CD at mass? - depends, according the PPL people. Their website is contradictory and vague (the "church" link gives accounts of the rules for hairdressers and bingo halls). A call to the PPL head office resulted in the following very categoric advice:

it's unlikely that performers on music-for-the-mass CDs are registered with the PPL artist/repertoire database for royalties

if however the artists are registered, then licence fees are payable - irrespective of the fact that the CD is played in a service of divine worship

the onus is on whoever's responsible for playing the CD to check the PPL database beforehand to avoid copyright infringement.

Now this is completely at variance with at least one page on their website, which suggests a blanket exemption for church services. The confusion might be the source of CCLI's alleged claim that you need a licence to play music in a church service - though the CCLI site is also less than clear as to whether it's acting as a collection agent for PPL, which you'd expect it to if it were appropriate.

I've asked the PPL people for written clarification/confirmation - there should be no "flux in the law" any more as the law was changed with regard to not-for-profit organisations (inc. churches)in January 2011, presumably to settle things once and for all.

Incidentally, artists who are registered for royalties include one Pope John Paul II, Sal Solo (whose Mass of the Millenium is very popular here, at mass), and virtually everyone in history who's recorded Amazing Grace.

[festivaltrumpet]

Can singing with CDs ever work? I'd have preferred to have sung unaccompanied.

Perhaps a more pertinent question relates to whether this practice is licit. The Sacred Congregation of Rites specified that it was not as long ago as 1958:

The use of automatic instruments and machines, such as the automatic organ, phonograph, radio, tape or wire recorders, and other similar machines, is absolutely forbidden in liturgical functions and private devotions, whether they are held inside or outside the church, even if these machines be used only to transmit sermons or sacred music, or to substitute for the singing of the choir or faithful, or even just to support it.

The practice of transmiting recorded episcopal letters was therefore abrogated long before it became common practice.

The same document also states that in choirs

The men should be separated from the women or girls so that anything unbecoming may be avoided.

This instruction is also widely ignored, however one doubts that this lack of separation has resulted in widespread 'unbecoming' activity taking place during the Sacred Mysteries.

[gwyn]

I think that one of the biggest downsides to singing regularly and frequently with CD backing [to the relative exclusion of the opportunity for "live" song with "live" instument(s)] is that once one has learned to sing along to the rigid, infelxible usually digitally created electronic, impersonal beat of a CD (or other alternative), one might then be renedred less capable of coping with the natural, subtle fluctuations that occur when singing with a "real" accompaniment. That symbiotic give-and-take that many of us 50+ dodderers take for granted. I have in mind those with younger, less developed senses of rhythm.

Just a thought, maybe I'm over-reacting.

[JW]

I think that one of the biggest downsides to singing regularly and frequently with CD backing [to the relative exclusion of the opportunity for "live" song with "live" instument(s)] is that once one has learned to sing along to the rigid, infelxible usually digitally created electronic, impersonal beat of a CD (or other alternative), one might then be renedred less capable of coping with the natural, subtle fluctuations that occur when singing with a "real" accompaniment. That symbiotic give-and-take that many of us 50+ dodderers take for granted. I have in mind those with younger, less developed senses of rhythm.

Live musicians will also use different speeds for the same piece of music on different occasions, e.g. at a faster pace for a wedding than funeral, quicker in Eastertide than Lent. Such flexibility is not available on CD. Even in a theatre, the music always seems better when it is live than when performers are accompanied electronically.

If secular or religious music is live there's a real sense that this performance is for this one time only (on a bad day some might be grateful for that - but on the whole it's a good thing!).

[gwyn]

Live musicians will also use different speeds for the same piece of music on different occasions, e.g. at a faster pace for a wedding than funeral, quicker in Eastertide than Lent. Such flexibility is not available on CD. Even in a theatre, the music always seems better when it is live than when performers are accompanied electronically.

Exactly that.

[VML]

There is CD accompaniment, and CD music played as it was today at our parish/ school Mass for SS P+P.
The four hymns on the hymn sheet are not in any current Catholic hymn book I have been able to refer to. 'Jesus bids us shine with a pure clear light.'
American 19th C Sunday school. 'Hide me now' Hillsong, 'I will make you fishers of men' a jolly 1920s ditty, and 'Stand up, stand up for Jesus', also 19th C. Another song whose origins I cannot trace is on the sheet but they had not learnt it, so a CD was put on at the Preparation of the Gifts, a solo voice singing 'Be thou my vision,' no words available.

The school has recently donated their copies of CFE to the parish, as, I have been told, they are going to use OHP in school. But as long as the head of RE, (responsible for today's choices, with no sung parts of the Mass,) is choosing what is sung at assemblies, I fear the whole repertoire will be Evangelical or obsolete. This teacher is nominally Catholic, but considers 'her' church to be the 'worship group down the road.'

And I am continually told that the rationale for using the Clapping G.in the parish is because the children know it!