The Recovering Choir Director

Jeffrey Tucker has chronicled his exchange with ICEL regarding his question of posting musical settings of the new English translation of the Ordinary of the Mass:

I know of 10 composers who have already worked on new settings of the new Mass text. In doing this, they are responding to Cardinal Arinze’s hope that having the texts available will “facilitate the devising of musical settings for the parts of the Mass.”

They would like to post these compositions online for free download for everyone. Your copyright notice does not seem to specify whether they are permitted to do this without paying ICEL. Can you please provide me a public and clear answer to this question?

After receiving from ICEL a request for clarification, which was provided, his question was “kicked upstairs.” Peter Finn of ICEL supplied a lengthy response to the initial question, which NLM has made public. While the response does give the procedures and history of ICEL, and even a cursory glance at the flow of royalties received, it doesn’t seem answer the question…other than to say, “It depends.”

This highlight, which comes closest to answering the initial question, seems most ominous:

“For most non-commercial uses of ICEL material, no fee is usually charged by ICEL.”

To which I ask: “What do you mean by usually? Can you give an example of a where ICEL charged a fee for non-commercial use of their texts? Is there a formula to this determination, or is it purely arbitrary?”

Another gem:

As you may know, the ecumenical ICET texts (Gloria in excelsis, Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, Preface Dialogue, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) were not under copyright, which partially explains changes made by individual composers to these texts.

The desire to avoid ICEL’s royalties would seem to be another partial explanation for composers to set the ICET texts, change or no change.