Traditional or Contemporary?

[HallamPhil]

.... and only then if churches report usage!

[musicus]

I was told this week that 45% of Calamus licence holders do submit returns (and that CCLI is 10%). Quite good if true.

[JW]

Do Calamus and CCLI publish league tables? I don't think so? And there are many churches who do not belong to these schemes.

There are lots of composers and publishers who don't belong to either the Calamus and CCLI schemes. A good example of this would be the 'Sing a New Psalm' project by Patrick Killeen. Some of Mike Anderson's music is covered under CCLI, but there is a lot of stuff freely available on his website which does not have to be reported. I sometimes use music with permission that individual composers have sent me.

Even when churches submit reports, I suspect many don't keep a record Sunday by Sunday. Instead, they might hazard a guess!

[Nick Baty]

Individual composers/publishers know what's going we'll from the annual statements they receive from Calamus or from theor own sales figures. But, surely, the most important thing is what works well in your community.

[alan29]

This assumes that all parishes are using published settings.
I wonder how many use home-grown stuff, as we do.

[Southern Comfort]

I think information from league tables would be totally misleading because

(1) Calamus file returns to individual composers and publishers based in this country, but they also
(2) file returns to American publishers such as OCP and GIA for sales of products controlled by them/imported from them.
(3) There is no way of quantifying who uses what from hymnals such as Celebration Hymnal for Everyone or Laudate.

Unless you could see the combined returns, plus have X-ray vision into what parishes use from their hymn books, any data would be meaningless.

It also implies that a musical judgement is being made, which is, I gather from this board, incorrect.

Not incorrect at all. The panel is still making musical judgements in addition to verifying for textual accuracy. Until it stops doing that, the bevy of composers who are boycotting the process will not be submitting anything to it. I think that is tragic for the life of the Church in this country. Bishop Hopes, nice man though he is, appears to be in a state of denial over the whole thing, and deputations from the SSG and elsewhere have made no headway at all.

[Nick Baty]

It grieves me to disagree with SC as he rarely makes a comment which doesn't raise a cheer from this part of my living room. But – and I can only speak from personal experience – the PPP does not appear to be making musical judgements. I've had some serious tripe approved. And I've seen much more which is almost as bad.

[JW]

Dangerous thing musical judgement and it covers many areas. Who would you have as a final arbiter of what constitutes good music in the contemporary English-speaking Catholic Church? There would never be agreement!

I suspect a panel of musicians will never entirely be able to refrain from musical judgement but should try to do so as much as possible, in accordance with their remit. What is 'good' music? After all, the simplest form of music is one repeated chanted (reciting) note, hardly great music but commonly used throughout the musical world. Rather than attempt to judge the musical worth of a setting, it seems to me that the panel has set standards for the way in which words are set to music and I wonder if this is where SC's problem lies.

How can we get a system going to resolve issues between the panel and composers? This still seems to be a problem. As for boycotting, as I've said elsewhere, I'm not sure what this solves. Non-approved Mass settings will be at a disadvantage compared with those on the approved list. There is now a huge range of approved music so parishes have plenty to choose from. OK, it includes people who aren't really composers (including myself) but it also includes settings by some very well known church composers. It is nothing new for the freedom of church composers to be limited by the church authorities. Whilst we may not like it, the Church isn't a democracy; even if collegiality becomes reality this would still mean that the Church remains an oligarchy and thus would continue to impose its teaching on its membership.

[Southern Comfort]

It grieves me to disagree with SC as he rarely makes a comment which doesn't raise a cheer from this part of my living room. But – and I can only speak from personal experience – the PPP does not appear to be making musical judgements. I've had some serious tripe approved. And I've seen much more which is almost as bad.

It grieves me almost as much to disagree with Nick, but I have seen some comments just a few months ago where the composer was accused of fitting the words to pre-existing music (involving some repetition), and thus approval would not be given. The composer may well have been doing just that — we have all had that problem when it comes to adapting existing settings to fit the new texts, and in cases where there was already some repetition in the original setting what is the difference now? — but one would think that, as long as textual fidelity is OK, what the composer does or does not do musically is none of the Panel's business. That's the publisher's problem.