Do churches need to license CCM to sing in worship?

[MarkRohfrietsch]

It‘s been happening for the past 2,000 years. Consider that the entire Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrian, and traditional Western (Latin liturgies of the Roman Rite according to various uses such as that of Sarum, Rome, the Dominicans, Lyons, Braga, the Carthusians, York, the Norbertine, and likewise the Gallican Rite liturgy and the closely related Mozarabic Rite, and its other relatives like the Ambrosian Rite and Beneventan Rite) are, like the more recent Lutheran and Anglican liturgies, composed almost entirely from hymns, antiphons, litanies, canticles, psalms and so on whose words are taken from the Bible (for example, 93% of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom consists of direct quotes from the Bible, not counting the proper Psalms, Prokeimenon, Epistle and Gospel, which are also straight from the Bible, and almost the entire liturgy is sung.

Likewise the other Eastern Orthodox liturgies are almost entirely taken from the Bible and almost entirely or entirely sung (for example, the Coptic Divine Liturgy, Raising of Incense and Psalmody is sung), and this was true of the Roman Rite until around 900 AD, when priests stopped chanting the Low Mass in monotone and began praying it silently).

Some high church Anglican parishes, chapels and cathedrals have sung entire services, most frequently Choral Evensong. I have a recording of it sung and chanted entirely, including both the Old Testament and New Testament lesson, at York Minster in 1979, and more recently at King’s College in Cambridge during Advent conducted by Stephen Cleobury.

There is also the famous Lutheran Singmesse composed from hymns by Dr. Martin Luther around 1525 AD, and other examples of entirely sung Lutheran services, such as Vespers and Compline in the LCMS/LCC, as my friend @MarkRohfrietsch can confirm.

For my part, one of my pet peeves concerning most CCM music is that it doesn’t quote or paraphrase scripture as much as the ancient hymnody, and when it does quote scripture, the quotes are usually of particularly popular verses and tend to be short and repeated frequently.

Compare this with the Psalms, the Evangelical Canticles (Benedictus and the Magnificat from Luke 1 ch. 1, Nunc Dimitis from Luke ch. 2) and other Scriptural Canticles like Benedicite Omni Opera from Daniel and the Song of the Suffering Servant from Isaiah, and ancient hymns like the Phos Hilarion and Ho Monogenes.

The hymns of Luther, Charles Wesley, Isaac Watts, Sir Arthur Sullivan, etc, in the style known as chorales, which dominated Protestant music from the 18th through 20th century, but which sadly since the 1990s have been displaced from a large number of churches in North America, mainline churches and conservative confessing churches, even some parishes in denominations like the LCMS and ACNA, and have completely taken over some denominations like the Christian and Missionary Alliance and the Non-Denominational churches, which is so sad given the historic importance and beauty of these hymns (for example, they have always been integral to Lutheran, Moravian and Methodist music) are frequently paraphrases of scripture relevant to the liturgical function or date of the hymn, and fairly sophisticated paraphrases at that. And in some cases, for example the Christmas hymn and carol Angels We Have Heard on High, feature a direct quote from Scripture and from the Latin liturgy of the Western Church (the extended Gloria in Excelsis Deo, which is how “Glory to God in the Highest” is translated in the ancient Vetus Latina Bible, which dates from the second century, and which remained in use as a source of liturgical phrases even after the Vulgate displaced it as the Bible read during church services, for during the decline of the Roman Empire the Vulgate, with its Vulgar Latin, was simpler and easier to understand for the different people even as Vulgar Latin divided into the Romance Languages (some of which, like Italian, Castillian, Catalan, Sicillian and especially Sardinian are closer to Latin than others, like French, Portuguese and Romanian (although Romanian vowells are probably the closest to how Latin was pronounced in ancient Rome, where the m and s on words like Imperium and Germanicus not pronounced, compare Romanian last names like Ionescu).

Indeed. It is interesting to note that there are quite a few Lutherans that complain that when the service of the sacrament is fully sung, that it is "too Catholic"; nothing could be further from the truth. In Luther's time the Catholic rite conducted the service of the sacrament with silent and whispered prayers, often out of sight behind a rood screen. Luther implemented the clear and audible chanting of the service of the Sacrament as he rightly felt that all Christians need to hear the Words of our Lord. Here is a video of the sung portions of Divine Service 3 from Lutheran Service book as used in many of our Churchs; my own included... It never gets old.
The service of the Sacrament begins with the offeratory at minute 7:32 in the linked video.

 

[Techo]

Well... Liturgist... the music your referring to is a little before my time. My record collection only goes back to around the time that the Scripture In Song group produced the 'Thou Art Worthy' album and then I also bought the 'Prepare Ye the Way' album. Besides... I'm not really much for a lot of that liturgical stuff... I mean... it's ok, some of those chants and so forth... but it's largely Greek (or maybe Latin) to me and I'm really lousy when it comes to languages... I've even had trouble with with English... my native tongue... on occasions.

My main point is... what are we doing with the music we sing in Church... whether it be CCM stuff, Scripture verses set to music or liturgical presentations? Why are we singing? Who are we singing for and who is receiving something from it? In my understanding of Scripture it should be for ' teaching and admonishing one another'... not to just make us feel good... or have fun. When we are standing on the sea of glass, with a multitude that nobody can number, our reason to sing will be different.

I am not real happy about CCM licensing music and charging a fee for it to be used in congregational singing. Consider! If someone is 'given' a song from the Holy Spirit to be sung to the 'body of Christ' then who owns that song... the person to who it is 'given' or the Holy Spirit? Do we pay copyright to the Holy Spirit? If it is merely the work of man then perhaps all that should happen is that they record the song and then sell that as entertainment for Christians. A trading of merchandise as is normal anywhere within the world. If people want to buy a copy of the score... another trade. Copyright will prevent others from reproducing it as their own creation.

I do not understand why a fee should be paid every time a congregation sings a song. Displaying a purchased copy of a song should not carry an ongoing copyright fee since it is not reproducing a permanent copy. It does strike me as being a devilish system where some ungodly group (even if they claim to be Christian) holds copyrights for Christian songs and then charges Christians for every time they are sung. What will they be doing with all the money that is received? I suspect that... somewhere in the background... those fees are being used to undermine the Church and all that we stand for... but... lets not go into conspiracy theory... it's not worth speculating about... we know that, in the end, we win!

 

[Deegie]

But this system is what allows for people to make a living writing and performing music. If everything was free, then talented people would never go into the business and we'd have far less good music to work with. Same with Bible translations. I assume you don't believe those should be copyrighted either?

 

[The Liturgist]

Well... Liturgist... the music your referring to is a little before my time.

That surprises me, because most churches aside from non-denominational churches and megachurches use at least some of the repertoire I mentioned. You’ve never heard, say, Christ Our Lord Has Risen Today! on Easter?

 

[Techo]

Well... when I was a boy...

Back when I was fairly new in the Charismatic Revival we started getting all this music coming out of the Jesus Revolution. Singers like Barry Mcguire, Keith Green etc got saved and wanted to share the love of God with everybody else. They were not thinking "Hey! I can make the Top 40 with this song!" They would just sing for anyone who would listen. Perhaps, at some churches, there would be a 'love offering' to help pay the expenses of coming there to perform. It was only a little while later that labels would record them so that what they were singer could reach a wider community. Copyright was less of an issue back then.

What I'm trying to get at is why do people write Christian music? If it is for profit or as a business then perhaps the motivations are inadequate... or even worldly. If God has placed the gift of music upon an individual then writing songs is just what they'll do... even if they never get paid for them. There could be a stack of talented people out there writing songs... or even people with no talent doing it from some sort of formula or pattern... and some of them might generate a real emotional high or teach a profound truth from scripture... and some of them might be absolute rubbish... but it always comes back to why are they writing them? If the Lord puts a song on my heart that nobody, apart from me, ever hears sung what does it matter... that song is for me... and the Lord.

After the Jesus People started recording albums other Church people wanted to make a name for themselves and get on a Christian album. They, often, did not have God's anointing upon their 'ministry'. Perhaps this originated the idea of getting paid to write and perform Christian music.

I can see the necessity to Copyright music after music written within my fellowship has stolen and passed off as belonging to someone else... but I do have issue with how Copyright is now used. As I understand it, a church has to pay for every time a song is displayed to be sung by a congregation. I would prefer that Copyright would only apply once to purchase a licensed copy of a song that could then be displayed as many times as was required... but then the greedy would probably charge an exorbitant ammount for that one copy.

 

[The Liturgist]

But this system is what allows for people to make a living writing and performing music. If everything was free, then talented people would never go into the business and we'd have far less good music to work with. Same with Bible translations. I assume you don't believe those should be copyrighted either?

If your argument were valid, then the Open Source movement, which has produced impressive amounts of cultural content since widespread desktop adoption of GNU/Linux and FreeBSD began in the late 2000s, not to mention Wikipedia and the entire Creative Commons community, would not work.

Realistically, the music you have to pay expensive licensing fees for is mostly of inferior quality, produced by the major record labels in Nashville and Los Angeles, and is not suitable for public worship. Now, Anglicanism does have a handful of recently deceased, and at least two still living composers whose work is good, and worth licensing, among the recently deceased I would cite Herbert Howells and Sir Francis Jackson, who reposed last year. Would I pay to license Sir Francis Jackson, memory eternal? Absolutely. Would I pay to license Hillsong?

Not a chance, and indeed the policy is that churches which use contemporary music like Hillsong cannot enter into communion or any form of ecumenical relations with mine, and I am proud of the lay leadership for adopting this. This is not an anathema, but it is a restriction to ensure that only sacred music is used.

And in addition to my parishes I am also a member of LiturgyWorks, which is producing public domain and open source liturgical material including music. This is not a foreign concept to the Episcopal Church considering that every edition of the BCP yet published since 1786 has been in the public domain (and given what I am hearing about the proposed replacement for the 1979 BCP, which is a nightmarish prospect that earlier in the previous decade the Episcopal Church had decided against, before changing their mind, if they do not release the new BCP into the public domain, no harm done).

I do regret the ACNA had to do their own BCP, which is only partially under the public domain, using a copyright New Coverdale Psalter (whatever that is supposed to mean; it is either the Coverdale Psalter or it is not in my opinion) and is in many respects inferior to the 1979 BCP.

 

[Deegie]

If your argument were valid, then the Open Source movement, which has produced impressive amounts of cultural content since widespread desktop adoption of GNU/Linux and FreeBSD began in the late 2000s, not to mention Wikipedia and the entire Creative Commons community, would not work.

Realistically, the music you have to pay expensive licensing fees for is mostly of inferior quality, produced by the major record labels in Nashville and Los Angeles, and is not suitable for public worship. Now, Anglicanism does have a handful of recently deceased, and at least two still living composers whose work is good, and worth licensing, among the recently deceased I would cite Herbert Howells and Sir Francis Jackson, who reposed last year. Would I pay to license Sir Francis Jackson, memory eternal? Absolutely. Would I pay to license Hillsong?

Not a chance, and indeed the policy is that churches which use contemporary music like Hillsong cannot enter into communion or any form of ecumenical relations with mine, and I am proud of the lay leadership for adopting this. This is not an anathema, but it is a restriction to ensure that only sacred music is used.

And in addition to my parishes I am also a member of LiturgyWorks, which is producing public domain and open source liturgical material including music. This is not a foreign concept to the Episcopal Church considering that every edition of the BCP yet published since 1786 has been in the public domain (and given what I am hearing about the proposed replacement for the 1979 BCP, which is a nightmarish prospect that earlier in the previous decade the Episcopal Church had decided against, before changing their mind, if they do not release the new BCP into the public domain, no harm done).

I do regret the ACNA had to do their own BCP, which is only partially under the public domain, using a copyright New Coverdale Psalter (whatever that is supposed to mean; it is either the Coverdale Psalter or it is not in my opinion) and is in many respects inferior to the 1979 BCP.

And if your argument were valid, Microsoft would be out of business. Open source resources are not usually as good as the stuff you have to pay for.

We don't use any CCM at my church. I'm talking about composers like Richard Proulx, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Callahan, and John Rutter. People who wrote the (still copyrighted) stuff in our hymnals. We pay for licenses to reproduce their work in our bulletins and to broadcast it over livestream. None of that is very expensive but it allows those people to eek out a living and remain dedicated to their craft.

 

[The Liturgist]

And if your argument were valid, Microsoft would be out of business. Open source resources are not usually as good as the stuff you have to pay for.

Nonsense. What keeps Microsoft in business is compatibility in desktop software, although this has become less relevant due to competition from Apple and the Linux-based Android OS. It should be noted that Android is open source, and Apple iOS uses significant amounts of open source code in the kernel and system software, from the XNU/Mach microkernel that has been refined by Apple and before them, NeXT, over the years, to the FreeBSD-derived system software. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Windows Phone have crashed and burned.

Server-side, Windows Server now has only a small percentage of the installed base of Linux, as Linux is the OS of choice for the large server farms, despite many attempts by Microsoft to be more competitive in cloud computing, such as Windows Azure (which probably runs more Linux instances than Windows instances, so ironically Windows on the server, like IBM z/VM on mainframes, increasingly exists to run virtualized Windows servers via HyperV). I will give Microsoft credit where credit is due, for example, Office goes a long way to keeping them afloat, but they are increasingly irrelevant in an increasing number of markets.

We don't use any CCM at my church. I'm talking about composers like Richard Proulx, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Callahan, and John Rutter. People who wrote the (still copyrighted) stuff in our hymnals. We pay for licenses to reproduce their work in our bulletins and to broadcast it over livestream. None of that is very expensive but it allows those people to eek out a living and remain dedicated to their craft.

Indeed, I have no qualms about paying for the copyright on that music, and John Rutter is one of the handful of living Anglican composers keeping the tradition alive. It doesn’t help that in the US, only St. Thomas Fifth Ave. has a choral school for boys, no such choirs remain in Canada to sing the compositions of the great Canadian Anglican composer Healey Willan, as far as I am aware, and in the UK, only a handful of parishes and most of the cathedrals maintain the tradition, but several former centers of musical excellence like Gloucester Cathedral have withered due to mismanagement. And the National Musicians’ Church, St. Sepulcher without Newgate, was last I heard still trying to get funding to repair their organ (nonetheless they released a very good a capella recording, which I of course have).

Unfortunately ACNA has not set a reversal of these musical trends as a priority and indeed several of its largest congregations are fully invested in CCM. And the superb Anglo Catholic continuing jurisdictions do not have the resources yet, despite in several cases outperforming the Episcopal churches in their catchment area in terms of attendance.

 

[Deegie]

Nonsense. What keeps Microsoft in business is compatibility in desktop software, although this has become less relevant due to competition from Apple and the Linux-based Android OS. It should be noted that Android is open source, and Apple iOS uses significant amounts of open source code in the kernel and system software, from the XNU/Mach microkernel that has been refined by Apple and before them, NeXT, over the years, to the FreeBSD-derived system software. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Windows Phone have crashed and burned.

Server-side, Windows Server now has only a small percentage of the installed base of Linux, as Linux is the OS of choice for the large server farms, despite many attempts by Microsoft to be more competitive in cloud computing, such as Windows Azure (which probably runs more Linux instances than Windows instances, so ironically Windows on the server, like IBM z/VM on mainframes, increasingly exists to run virtualized Windows servers via HyperV). I will give Microsoft credit where credit is due, for example, Office goes a long way to keeping them afloat, but they are increasingly irrelevant in an increasing number of markets.

I will gladly defer to your knowledge on this subject (which is, I admit, fairly off-topic). All I know is that I've tried the open-source versions of word processing, spreadsheets, Bible study, financial management, photo editing, and other software, and found them all significantly lacking behind the brand-name products.

Indeed, I have no qualms about paying for the copyright on that music, and John Rutter is one of the handful of living Anglican composers keeping the tradition alive. It doesn’t help that in the US, only St. Thomas Fifth Ave. has a choral school for boys, no such choirs remain in Canada to sing the compositions of the great Canadian Anglican composer Healey Willan, as far as I am aware, and in the UK, only a handful of parishes and most of the cathedrals maintain the tradition, but several former centers of musical excellence like Gloucester Cathedral have withered due to mismanagement. And the National Musicians’ Church, St. Sepulcher without Newgate, was last I heard still trying to get funding to repair their organ (nonetheless they released a very good a capella recording, which I of course have).

I should have mentioned Willan as well. Most of his work remains under copyright for another few decades.

 

[The Liturgist]

I will gladly defer to your knowledge on this subject (which is, I admit, fairly off-topic). All I know is that I've tried the open-source versions of word processing, spreadsheets, Bible study, financial management, photo editing, and other software, and found them all significantly lacking behind the brand-name products.

This is the kind of legacy software where compatibility with marginally superior products keeps Windows and MacOS viable.

I should have mentioned Willan as well. Most of his work remains under copyright for another few decades.

Indeed, and I would be happy to license Willan if I had a boys choir and a pipe organ at my disposal. However even a composer as great as Willan would by their own admission likely not claim equality with, say, St. Romanos the Melodist, St. Gregory the Great, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Jacob of Sarugh and St. Ephrem the Syrian (whose hymns earned him the title the Harp of the Spirit; St. Jacob contested with the Assyrian Mar Narsai for the honor of being reckoned the Flute of the Spirit, but I personally side with St. Jacob given that Mar Narsai was rather explicitly doctrinally Nestorian in several of his best known hymns, stressing a division or separation between the deity and humanity in Christ which is the main reason why the Council of Ephesus anathematized Nestorius).