The Recovering Choir Director

Bernard Brandt, who long-time readers will recall fled the worship wars of the Roman Church for the calmer liturgical waters of Russian Catholicism, makes a number of pointed observations about the custodians of the official English translations of the ordinary form Latin liturgy (my emphases in bold) - specifically, their transparency:

[T]ry finding any online texts for ICEL. Good luck. Or perhaps I should say, fat chance. Some good people have attempted to put ICEL texts online so that people could actually see what they said (or more to the point, did not say.) In each case, the minions of ICEL acted to make them take those texts off the internet. How transparent. How communicative. How helpful.

their royalties:

I took the opportunity to access the ICEL’s statement on copyright, which includes their sample contract, which they impose on anyone so foolish to attempt to use their texts in a liturgical setting. Basically, if you were to use ICEL texts exclusively for a musical setting, ICEL charges between 10% and 11% of the price of the text as their share of royalties.

I will beg to point out that the standard in which most choral music publishers give to composers is 10 percent. In other words, if a composer were so foolish as to use an ICEL text for his or her work, all of the royalties would go to ICEL, instead of the composer. Is it any wonder why composers are somewhat less than willing to use ICEL texts?

And the consequences of breaching contract for composer and publisher alike:

But wait: it gets even better. The Sample Contract (which is on and after page 20 of the PDF text) states in Section 7 of the Contract that if anyone fails to pay royalties on the disputed text, that they forfeit all rights under the contract. In short, that means that all rights to their work goes to ICEL. How Christian. How generous of them.

But wait, there’s more: Under section 9 of the Sample Contract, in the event that the Publisher fails to keep the publication in print, the contract is void, and ICEL gets all rights in the work. Oh, yes, and under section 16 of the Sample Contract, in the event that the publisher becomes insolvent or bankrupt, all rights revert to ICEL as well.

Which leads to his final analysis:

I don’t know about you, but it looks as though ICEL’s prophetic leadership strongly resembles the Gospel according to Geffen.

And I don’t know about you, but it would appear to me that any composer of choral music with an IQ above room temperature is likely to tell ICEL where they can pound sand. I would not blame them.

Nor would I. And yet…

Not having composed anything using ICEL Translation v1.0, should musical compositions based on those texts go out of print or if a publisher goes belly-up, I wouldn’t mind if ICEL sequestered all of that material and squirreled it away, never to see the light of day again.

Not that they could if they tried, of course.