Copyright & Public Performance - church licences

It's a pity that the editors of modern church hymnals and books of worship don't give as much attention to the quality of editing as they do to the copyright of their typography, and the intellectual property rights of their songwriters.

I have two copies of the SATB version of Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New, published by Kevin Mayhew Limited. The second version (and I am being very careful to avoid words with very precise meanings in the publishing world for the moment) contains quite a lot of corrections in the texts of hymns and in their musical notation compared with the first, but nowhere is there any acknowledgement of that fact. But it gets worse. In one hymn there's a different number of verses, and in the melody-only edition yet another. Topping up the collection of church hymnals because of wear and tear (the bindings are decidedly unstrong) means that the choir and congregation are singing from incompatible versions of the same hymn book.

To an ex-bibliographer and library cataloguer this hymnal is a nightmare, for it poses the question: when does a reprint become a new edition? The publishers evidently consider SATB version 2 to be a reprint, because it is given the same ISBN number as the first, and you have to look hard to be able to tell the two versions apart. It is, to put it mildly, a little bit naughty.

I have drawn attention to some of the most glaring mistakes in musical notation in this hymnal elsewhere in this blog, for example

http://choirstalls.blogspot.com/2008/12/orange-brick-revised.html

but now that copyright holders are becoming more aggressive in their assertion of their rights, let's just look at some of the difficulties that even those of us who want to stay on the right side of the law and not see ourselves and our fellow PCC members or our incumbent fined or banged up in chokey for the rest of their natural face.

The Music Reproduction Licence (MRL) from Church Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) allows a PCC to reproduce the in-copyright music of some hymns for use in, say, special orders of service, provided a copyright notice is given in a prescribed form. I have no problem with that.  But what if that music contains glaring errors? Is resetting it in a music notation program such as Sibelius, Finale, or Noteworthy and then including it in a special booklet ("for use in acts of divine worship, including weddings and funerals" - we have to say that, so that there is no misunderstanding) a breach of copyright?  If the music is actually out of copyright, no. But what if it is still in copyright? I imagine it would be no defence to say "but, your Honour, they'd put an A-flat when it should have been a G-sharp, so we just put it right."

In our churches nobody sets out with the deliberate intention to steal, but the presence of a photocopier in the church office is all too great a temptation for those ignorant of the law. In essence running off a dozen copies of a anthem from a borrowed volume from the RSCM is just as much theft as running a pirate DVD copying operation from the vicar's vestry: the only difference is scale - shoplifting v. armed robbery.

In a small rural parish the legal obligations of PCCs are fast outrunning the abilities of officers to cope, and diocese doesn't help when its officers put out circular letters suggesting that when a church buys a set of hymnals it acquires copyright in those hymnals. So to put the record straight I was to give a brief report to our Deanery Synod tomorrow, backed up by a fact-sheet giving brief details of and contact numbers for CCLI, CCL, MRL, CVL, PPL, PRS, Licensing Act 2003 permissions, Bodies of People Approvals, Grand Rights, and oh, a few other things, and what to do about them. All in one neat, brief document, using words gleaned from official publications and websites.

I sent a copy to CCLI, more out of courtesy than anything. A day before Synod I received an e-mail from CCLI saying that my fact-sheet had been referred to Upstairs, and I couldn't 'use' it until I'd been given clearance.

I think that's one for the Human Rights Court, me.

And while I'm at it, I'm going to write to the Bishops, and ask if they could please arrange for my pension  to be increased to £26,000 after tax - just to poverty level, I'm not greedy. I'm on about half that, and I'm working harder and for longer hours than ever I was when I was in paid employment.

Perhaps I should write a book of worship songs...

Pange Lingua (again)

The copper who inadvertently allowed press photographers to snap a top secret document in a transparent wallet had the grace to fall upon his own sword today, only hours after his carelessness jeopardised a major anti-terrorist operation.

Would that the text editor in the Kevin Mayhew empire who changed "man" to "we" in this line:

Man, in wine, Christ's blood partaketh

for the sake of some potty notion of inclusiveness had the grace to do the same thing, for what he (or she) left us with is the all-too-familiar schoolboy (or schoolgirl) howler

We, in wine, Christ's blood partaketh

The truly dispiriting thing is that this setting of the Pange Lingua is copyright 1996, Kevin Mayhew Ltd.  It's been around for 13 years, dammit.  Is the state of education in the English language really so dismally awful in this country that in all that time nobody noticed, or did anything about it?

Oh - and sorry to nitpick - but shouldn't line 2 of v3 read "circled by his chosen band", and not "hand"?

The Orange Brick - revised???

In an article in our parish mag earlier this year I listed a few of the glaring errors in the settings of the music of some of the hymns in the orange brick - or, to give it its proper title, Complete Anglican Hymns Old & New, from the Kevin Mayhew stable.

This is what I said then:

The peculiarities of the Orange Hymnal are not only to be found in the texts of hymns, but also in the music they're set to. Have a look, for example, at No 190, Forty days and forty nights ... in the fourth bar of the tenor line there is an A-flat. But it shouldn't be an A-flat, it should be a G-sharp. True, it sounds the same, but it jumps off the page because it is a musical illiteracy...

Or No 4, A great and mighty wonder, where not only is Michael Praetorius's well-known setting so simplified as to lose all its character, but there is also another blunder - the alto in the last chord of the first line should be a C, not a D.

Or in No 638, The day thou gavest, there is a misprint in the bass in bar 4: D instead of E.

Or in 184, For the beauty of the earth, where Geoffrey Shaw's tune England's Lane has suddenly acquired a B-natural in the melody (bar 6) instead of a B-flat.

This is what he wrote:

but this is how it appears in the Orange Brick:

You can just about understand how somebody with a little musical knowledge might have spotted the consecutive fifths in that bar and tried to disguise them (and produced notational nonsense), but nobody can justify changing Shaw's B-flat to a B-natural.

So when I read on the Kevin Mayhew website that the orange brick had now been completely revised and reset, and that it was now a fiver cheaper, I thought I'd better order a copy and check.

This is what the website promised:

This latest edition – Complete New Anglican Hymns Old & New is entirely revised and reset, and foreshadows the development of liturgy in the years to come...

Complete Anglican Hymns Old & New is beautifully produced – a clear typeface, excellent printing and strong binding. In this new edition, the music has been set in a slightly larger page format, and bound in such a way that it falls open beautifully in the hand, or to set on the organ/piano music stand.

Let me say at the outset that this is not a new edition - it is a reprint with a few errors corrected.

It has the same ISBN as the original (although it is now presented in full on the verso of the title page, so the check digit has changed) and the same publication date (2000). Only if you knew where all the errors were would you be able to compare the original and the reprint. The only discernible differences between the old and the new is the weight (1.76kg the old, 1.72kg the new) and the little KM logo on the spine. I can't detect a "slightly larger page format", whatever that's supposed to mean, but certainly some pages are printed a couple of millimetres higher.

So - "entirely revised and reset?"

I don't think so.

Certainly some errors - though by no means all - have been corrected. The first three I cited above have: others, including the Geoffrey Shaw, haven't. Indeed, while one setting of Aus der Tiefe (Heinlein) in hymn 190 has been corrected, the more elaborate (and musically much superior) original version hasn't, and it's on the facing page. For heaven's sake, who's doing the proof-reading at Kevin's publishing kibbutz - monkeys?

Other errors, which I didn't list in the original article for reasons of space, remain - for example in No 188, last line, first bar, the D in the bass should be an F.

There are other errors, no, howlers, in the music, and misprints in the texts, but I'm blowed if I'm going to tell Kevin where they are, because my church has already spent a small fortune buying his Product, and those of us who can actually read music long to go back to EH or A&M, which, although they didn't include Graham Kendrick's inspiring ditties, weren't riddled with gaffes.