Paul Inwood
Music & Liturgy 50.1 (March 2024)
There has been a lot of conversation in recent times about the use of recorded music in church services. I’m thinking particularly of funerals, and to a lesser extent weddings, where families or couples frequently request that a popular music track be played, often at the closing of the ceremony. In a recent incident, despite the printed order of service saying ‘organ music’ at the end of the Requiem Mass as the coffin was to be carried out, a family member yelled at the organist several times, ‘Stop the organ!’, whereupon the first cooing notes of Whitney Houston’s song I will always love you were heard coming across the church PA system. Apparently the family had at the last minute provided the priest with a CD to play, but no one had thought to inform the organist.
I myself have been asked to play for funerals in churches where a CD player is in the organ loft, connected to the PA system, and part of my role has been to play a CD track at the beginning and/or end of the wedding or funeral in place of live music. In some cases, the recorded music was actually something that I could easily have played live.
It’s important to be aware that in many cases a church is not actually licensed to play such recordings. Commercial recordings may normally only be played in church if the service is not streamed. If the service
is streamed or videoed, as so many are these days, you need the explicit permission of the publisher or
owner of the recording for each individual usage, even if this is in the context of an act of worship. You need to apply direct to the publisher or owner since this sort of usage is not covered by either OneLicense or CCLI streaming licences which only relate to live performances and recordings of copyright works that you make yourself with your local musicians and not to commercially-produced recordings. Yes, the wording on the OneLicense, CCLI, PRS and other websites is confusing and potentially misleading! Commercially-produced recordings include YouTube, Vimeo and Spotify versions of recordings actually produced by a publisher—for example, on a CD or some other medium. Infringements can result in hefty penalties if you are caught, and the chances of being caught are rather high when the service is streamed online for all to see and hear. As a parish is not a civil legal entity, it’s the diocese who would be sued, and because people think dioceses have lots of money the fines can be very large indeed. The ‘principals’ involved in an infringement (priest, the person playing the recording, the wedding couple themselves) may also be personally held liable and fined.
There are other aspects to this issue, too. This year sees the 65th anniversary of the instruction De musica sacra et sacra liturgia, published on September 3 (the feast of Saint Gregory the Great) in 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.” (n.71) This legislation is still in force.
Of course, those drafting this law could never have foreseen the developments in technology which we have to a certain extent embraced since then, nor envisaged situations such as a pandemic where all live music was effectively banned and recordings by virtual choirs came into being. Nor would they have imagined the kind of situation where, in the context of a prayer reflection with a group of children in the hall, a CD of a religious song might be played and the children encouraged to sing along with it. That last case is obviously not the same as playing a recording of a pop song at a funeral, and I think we need to be open to making evaluations based on individual cases rather than trying to have a blanket one-size-fits-all policy.
Here’s another extract from the same legislation: “played by a performer are to be used in the sacred liturgy, not those which are played mechanically or automatically” (n.60c). Once again, we have ignored this provision and have merrily embraced pre-recorded hymn accompaniments, etc, on machines such as the famous Synthia. We have also made use of electronic keyboards and organs with a recording facility to produce our own pre-recorded accompaniments, to be played back in our absence.
The question for us is: What sort of values does the Church’s legislation expect of us? I think the key word
is authenticity. Are we being true to ourselves, to the resources of the local community, even though it might
be possible to import other things into our midst? It could be very nice to have, for example, the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, at our disposal, but in fact they are not part of our community. We are in effect adding an alien presence, a cuckoo in the nest, to what we do, as well as (in the case of commercial recordings) quite possibly breaking the law. People will complain that taking away recordings deprives people of what they want or even need, and that we have a pastoral duty to accede to all requests that we receive.
The problem with that view is that most of the people making the requests are, if not totally unchurched, at least lacking in a basic knowledge and understanding of what is required for liturgy. The Church’s rites are not about a person’s individual likes but about how the Church expects us to conduct ourselves, and so the Church regulates what we do when we worship together. What we sing and play needs to reflect the actual capabilities of the community, not some imaginary ‘ideal’ church.
Those whose communities rely on pre-packaged hymn accompaniments that take no account of the actual
circumstances of the setting in which they will be used complain that a useful support for the community’s
song is being removed. And yet unaccompanied singing is where the Church began, and in fact congregations are perfectly capable of singing strongly without accompaniment if encouraged to do so. One might argue that this is a better course of action than pretending that we have resources which we simply do not. One could also argue that using synthetic accompaniment may deter those who could provide live accompaniment from offering their services.
It also calls us to think about the role of cantors in our communities. A number of years ago I found myself
working in a parish where there was just me (the cantor) and the assembly. There was no one to play. For six
months everything we sang was unaccompanied, ranging from call-response Mass settings to psalms to litanies
and other musical forms including, eventually, hymns. It went very well, and the people sang their hearts out as
the repertoire expanded. At the end of those six months, a piano teacher emerged from the woodwork and asked if she could help, so I gave her some basic organ lessons and off she went. It meant we could have accompanied carols at Christmas, among other things, but the ‘singing ground’ had been sown much earlier in the year.
Returning to the Whitney Houston song with which I began, there’s also the question of how appropriate the material is in the recordings that we are asked to play. Her version (it was actually originally written by Dolly Parton) of the song I will always love you is totally secular, with no religious connotations at all. Not so long ago, Wind beneath my wings was a popular request for funerals. The entire song is likewise completely non-religious, even the final line which includes the words ‘Thank God for you’. A more egregious example is Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, notoriously popularised when an Irish priest sang it at a wedding. The video went viral. People who ask for it fail to look beyond the Hallelujah refrain to the rest of the lyrics which are entirely inappropriate, even including a graphic description of sexual intercourse and orgasm.
It’s never too late to take a fresh look at what we’re doing and ask ourselves if this is the best we can do.