Good Friday, the pagan festival

Just a quick en passant.


The ITV early evening programme which purports to keep us informed of what's going on - ITV national news and Granada Reports - regard Good Friday as a day for interminable reports about people who kick, throw or hit balls for a living.

But that Granada Reports should completely overlook Preston Guild and the Passion, or the significance of Good Friday for Christians, is utterly inexcusable. Perhaps there was an item, but it had to be dropped because they had visuals of smoke rising from a fighter jet crash in Virginia.

Granada Reports. What the eye can't feast itself on didn't happen. And they pretend it's a news programme.

April 1 Stainer

Radio 3 used to be worth listening to when it was the Third Programme, and later the Music Programme, but with Classic Eff 'Em snapping at its heels it had to go downmarket, which is why its schedules are now mainly full of trailers for forthcoming goodies uttered breathlessly by females with exaggerated vocal inflections, in the style of those deliciously OTT Eurotrash voice-overs from Maria McErlane, Davina McCall and Kate Robbins,  or tweets from the sort of twits who tweet and telephone conversations with astoundingly uninteresting people with adenoids living in Essex who are only too happy to relate their experiences in their infant school choir in 1927.

I've very nearly given up on Radio 3, though last week was very educational. It confirmed what I had always suspected - Schubert wrote far more music than it's decent to, and it shows.  A handful of songs which aren't all that bad, but more than 500 which mostly are; chamber music that's more chamber-pot than chamber music, a few masses that sound like Dvorak on syrup and the symphonies, not very well scored. He couldn't even be bothered to finish the last one. The only half-decent stuff he wrote was fugues, in which he is very nearly as accomplished as Max Reger, whose spiritual father also was JSB.

But yesterday, Palm Sunday, R3 put the clock back and pulled material from the European Broadcasting Union, and wow! They are doing wonderful things across the Channel, as well as in Japan, but you wouldn't know it if you listened to R3 regularly.

But the masterstroke, after a day of utterly breathtaking baroque and Bach, was the April Fool spoof - a performance of Stainer's Crucifixion in the Victorian style that had to be heard to be believed. The tenor had picked up the tremolo-on-one-note that Michael Ball relinquished for Sweeney Todd, and the baritone did a La Scala. I think they'd chucked rugs over the organ pipes, because they just sort of rumbled away below the threshold of hearing, and the chorus!  They must have spent weeks boning up on Victorian elocutionary practices, because I've never heard the word 'royal' sung with such a rich variety of mutating 'phthongs. Absolutely brilliant. We had to turn it off after twenty minutes, tears of mirth streaming down our faces, but it's there on iPlayer for a few days if you missed it.

You have to hand it to the Beeb - when they do do 1 April, they pull out all the stops.

Pronunciation of church Latin

Groan, groan. It happened again this evening. Somebody with a smattering of the Latin learned 50 years ago in school felt qualified to lecture an ad-hoc group of church choristers about how to pronounce the Latin in Ave Verum - the Elgar, actually, not the Mozart - absurdly the choir will be singing the Elgar in Latin, and the Mozart in its usual weak English translation (at the same service, I might add, as O sacred head, sore wounded is being sung in an appallingly cack-handed translation).

Don't these self-appointed didacts realise the extent of their own ignorance? In the age of instant Googling choir people and didacts need no longer remain in ignorance. There are millions of sites that explain the pronunciation of church Latin, so there's no excuse.

Here's a quick resumé.

Church Latin is not classical Latin, the language that some of us were lucky enough to get a couple of years  of in grammar schools (remember them?) Church Latin is a language created by the Church in about the 4thC AD. Its structure and its basic vocabulary is taken from classical Latin, but there the resemblance ends. How classical Latin might have been pronounced is irrelevant: Pope Pius X decreed (at the turn of the 19th/20thC) that henceforth church Latin would be pronounced as it was pronounced in Rome.

So, to cut a long story short, church Latin should be pronounced as though it were the Italian spoken in Rome (and not the Italian spoken in the south of Italy.) Choristers who know what they're doing make slight changes in pronunciation if they are singing a Latin text by a German composer, or an early French composer, and, if they are very, very clever, a Russian or Finnish composer, but the Italian of Rome is the default pronunciation.

The problem is that people who vaguely remember their schooldays Latin probably don't know any Italian, which is why they still think Ave Verum is pronounced Ah Way Way Rum and Virgine Weir-ghin-ay.

So - quis custodiet ipsos custodes? You might well ask.

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To read Pius X's words, and the reasoning, go here:

http://choirstalls.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/parish-mag-february-2009.html 

One body, one vote?

Someone chucked into the proceedings at PCC last night that there might be a ban on husbands and wives both being members (she’d read it or heard it somewhere. It’s great fun when people chuck in things like this, which they’re never able to give chapter or verse for – it wastes time wonderfully, generates heated argument, and saves everybody the trouble of having to worry about things like parish share, the leaky roof and requests for exhumations.) I can just about accept that somewhere, once, probably in the US of A*, some bright Herbert thought it would be a wizard wheeze to ban one of a married couple in case they started a domestic during a meeting. But let us for a moment suppose that this potty idea is true, and that diocese has decreed it.

For a start, in our household there would immediately be only one person working for the church, not two. Next there would be a legal challenge on one of two grounds – discrimination against married couples, and/or infringement of human rights and individual liberties, and that would go right up to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.

And why just ban one of a married couple?  Would the ban extend to one of a cohabiting couple? Or one of a gay couple? Would a candidate have to declare the nature of his or her relationship with somebody, even a putative one, a sort of twinkle in the eye, in case that somebody had to be blacklisted?

And what would be the idea behind such a ban anyway? An assumption that husband and wife, or partners, think and vote in exactly the same way? Or that somehow a married couple is denying a place on PCC to somebody more worthy – a sort of National Church Service  bed-blocking? After all, worthy and well-qualified candidates are queuing up for the opportunity to serve, aren’t they?

My wife and I are different in many interesting ways, she being a woman and I not, and so we have come to an understanding.  I don’t run the Mother’s Union, and she doesn’t sing bass in the choir. But she is a member of PCC because she is secretary to deanery synod, and I am a member because I was elected to sit on deanery synod. We have full speaking and voting rights on PCC, although that might be because our PCC doesn’t actually have Standing Orders to say that we can't, and the rules of conduct are made [or made up] by the people with the longest memories – ‘we’ve always done it like that here.’

But try getting advice or even model standing orders out of diocese! Diocese people are very canny – they know very well that if PCC members were made fully aware of their legal responsibilities as trustees of a charity, and their possible personal liability if something went badly wrong, like sacking an organist who then goes to an employment tribunal and wins [case reports available on request] the PCC chairs would be empty.

But what I really, really want to know is this – which one of us in our household would fall victim to such a ban: me or my very independent and differently skilled wife? Because if PCC was minded to take this nonsense seriously, it wouldn’t see one of us for dust. Until the court case came up, that is.

*’A small Kentucky church finds itself at the epicenter of a battle over racism and the gospel. Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church, a small, 40-person congregation located in Pike County, Kentucky, is catching widespread grief over its recent decision to target interracial couples. The church has decided to forbid these couples from partaking in worship activities and will not allow them to become members...’

Read the full report here

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/kentucky-church-bans-interracial-couples-from-becoming-members-leading-worship/

April 2012 Choirstalls column, n't

Another sacrifice to the spike. This should have appeared in the April 2012 parish mag, but didn't.

Quite apart from the bling proudly displayed as choristers clink and clank their way back to their stalls after prizegiving, the annual RSCM festival service at Blackburn Cathedral has many other things to commend it, not least the fact that you don’t have to fork out a small fortune to be allowed in.

On a holiday last year we wanted to see the new font in Salisbury Cathedral, and in Annie marched, confident and unchallenged. I hesitated, and was lost. “Get in the queue, Sir,” a voice barked from the Box Office, meaning “Hand over your six quid or hop it.” I hopped it, I’m afraid, and waited without while Annie hobnobbed with vergers within, and it was while I was waiting and seething not a little that another brilliant idea landed - attendance cards! It is quite simple, and it works like this.

Every time you attend a service in your local parish church a sidesperson stamps your card. The idea is that you produce that card at the box office of any cathedral in the land, and if you’ve got enough points you’ll be whisked past the lady flogging tickets to sightseers asking what time the bar opens and straight into the VIP lounge for a small sherry with the Bishop, followed by a guided tour by the Dean himself. It won’t affect cathedral takings all that much, judging by the decline in regular church attendance. And choir persons are particularly privileged, ho-ho, being under a three-line-whip on every Sunday in the year – we can practically fill our cards in Holy Week alone.

I was ticked off last month by the Editor-in-Chief for being longwinded (as if!) so this month’s column is correspondingly short. But I couldn’t let this snippet pass without a mention.

A new Methodist hymnal, Singing the Faith, was published earlier this year, and was reviewed in Church Times by Dr J R Watson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Durham.

The review is a masterpiece of the art of damning with faint praise, or so I read it. Dr Watson enumerates one or two good points, notes pointedly that the number of hymns by the Wesleys has been virtually halved, and concludes thus:

“It is to be hoped...that the music, and the best of the contemporary texts, will help to make this book successful with a new generation of Methodists, who will never know how much they have lost.”

Quite.

Copyright & Public Performance - church licences, PS

And while I’m on the subject.

Older hymn books use the convention of a double bar marking in the music to indicate line endings in the text, and that is designed to help choir persons navigate between the words and the music, which are sometimes widely separated. Now it often happens that a line ending occurs in the middle of a bar of music, so this helpful marking isn’t a real bar line at all, and as such it isn’t catered for by notation software. Sorry to be technical, but it has to be added as a graphic, and that takes time and care and prior consideration of the needs of singers.

It is a measure of the contempt that the editors of modern hymnals have for traditional church choirs that they don’t bother with such detail – indeed the editors of Complete Anglican Hymns Old And New go so far as to suggest that if choirs can’t cope with their music settings they should sing in unison.

Isn’t it time for a backlash against the twin forces of textual and musical rewritings, renewed copyrights and the implicit threat of legal action unless expensive licences are taken out?

With very few exceptions the best hymns and musical settings are long out of copyright, and (as Cathy of the Cathy Thinks blog linked below has suggested) with word processors and notation software easily available there is no reason why a church can’t create its own service sheets or even complete hymnals. with the advantage of getting back to original words, not the questionable rewritings that are now ubiquitous.

Against the cost of creating such local resources we can offset the cost of reproduction licences, and I note that in 2011 my church reprinted, under licence, the words of only two hymns. The cost of the licence that allowed us to do it?  Inclusive of VAT - £162.46.

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...