(Modern) Roman Catholic Music: Now Sucks Two-Thirds Less

For those who have read my previous post, Why (Modern) Roman Catholic Music Sucks So Much, I am happy to inform you that two of the three causes for its sucking so much have now been removed.

To summarize that post, I said that the three reasons were (1) That ICEL had had a policy of prohibiting people from posting its translations online; (2) That ICEL had had a policy of preventing people from using ICEL texts without paying royalties; and (3) That ICEL's contractual and royalty requirements were so onerous as to prevent any composer from thinking seriously about using those texts for any music which he or she should wish to publish for pay.

It appears that the first two reasons have been recently eliminated by ICEL. The New Liturgical Movement has recently reported that ICEL has graciously decided to change its internet policy to permit web sites to have copies of ICEL texts online. It has further decided to allow people to publish musical settings of ICEL texts without restrictions, as long as they do not charge for those texts. I believe that the members of ICEL are to be commended for these forward-thinking policies.

Now, if only ICEL would make provision to reduce its royalty requirements from ten to eleven percent to five percent or less for those wishing to make for-purchase musical compositions, and would eliminate the expropriative restrictions from its sample contract for such composers, Modern Roman Catholic Music would be likely not to suck at all.

And, to put a plug in for three Roman Catholic Musical and Liturgical websites which definitely DO NOT suck, may I recommend MusicaSacra, The New Liturgical Movement, and Confessions of a Recovering Choir Director. Between the three of them, they give materials whereby RC choir directors, singers and priests can provide RC churches with decent (as in "fitting") music for liturgy. They give me hope that someday, modern Roman Catholic music may not suck at all.

The Bandarlog Political Convention

Not to rain on your parade, chaps, but as Jerry Pournelle has just remarked, the first most liberal U.S. Senator has just nominated the third most liberal Senator as his V.P. running-mate. My uncle Joe taught me a long time ago that in choosing U.S. presidents, the American people have routinely picked those who appear to be more of the center. Is it just me, or are you guyz smoking something that you rolled yourselves? Or is it just that you are not collectively old enough to remember McGovern?

Further, that supposed presidential candidate has just alienated between one-third and one-half of his own electoral base by not choosing the second most liberal Senator as his running mate. While it is to be admitted that while The Chosen Child was wise enough not to turn the White House into a ménage à trois, with Bill and Hillary as the other points on that particular triangle, The Child so far has not shown himself wise enough to provide some sort of sop sufficient to overcome the problems raised thereby. Have you guyz ever heard the phrase, "Hell hath no fury. . ."?

And maybe it is just me, but I just heard on the Democratic propaganda machine, er, the nightly news that The Child has made the political promise to provide each and every American child with a "world-class education" from kindergarden to graduate school. Have you crunched the numbers for that one yet? Have you any idea how much that will cost? Or who will pay for it?

I have come to the conclusion that this must be the political convention of the Banderlog, those amiable, brainless critters from Kipling's classic, The Jungle Book, who will forever sing:

Here we sit in a branchy row,
Thinking of beautiful things we know;
Dreaming of deeds that we mean to do,
All complete, in a minute or two--
Something noble and wise and good,
Done by merely wishing we could.

To paraphrase Monty Python & the Holy Grail: "I puke in your general direction."

The only problem is that I am terribly afraid that the Eeyore, er, Republican Convention will be even more ludicrous.

A Few Languages among Friends

My friend and fellow weblogista Darwin has put out a request for information as regards suggestions for learning languages such as Greek, Arabic, Russian/Slavonic, and Persian. I started to write this as a comment for his entry, but the answer got sufficiently large that I decided to put it on my weblog, and to put a link on his comments page. Here is what came up:

Golly, gee, guyz: I kinda thought that what Darwin was asking for in the above entry was input as regards what textbooks to buy or obtain that would help him to learn Greek, Arabic, Russian and Persian, rather than a lot of gassing about peoples' favorite languages, numbers of genders, etc.

Silly me.

Of course, going on the assumption that that was what he was asking help with, I may have some answers.

Greek:

Why buy Pharr's Homeric Greek, when you can get it as a free pdf from www.textkit.com? In fact, why buy the Reading Course in Homeric Greek when you can get free pdf files of Seymour's Introduction to the Language and Verse of Homer, Minckwitz' Book Twelve of the Odyssey in Greek, Clapp's The Iliad, books XIX-XXIV, and Perrin's The Odyssey, books V-VIII? You can find those, and a whole lot more, here.

Just as an aside, you can get whole loads of free pdfs of Latin texts by going here.

One additional thing: I have noted that consummate classics scholars (of the caliber of Prof. Peter Green or Bishop Kallistos Ware) can shift effortlessly from quoting Classical Greek in the pronunciations handed down by Erasmus and by the 20th century Cambridge scholars, to speaking flawlessly in modern Greek. If you want to go the extra mile, a good (and free) course of Modern Greek can be found here. Basically, it is the three volume set put out by the Foreign Service Institute. www.fsi-language-courses.com has ripped the pdf and mp3 files of that, and a whole lot of other languages as well.

Of course, when you get your Latin and Greek tuned up and out of the body shop, and have driven it around the block a few times, you might want to take it out on the open road. To do that on the cheap, may I recommend visiting Mischa Hooker's Classics website? Prof. Hooker has done the immense kindness of putting links up to Google Books' vast collection of public domain works on Latin Literature, Greek Literature, Bible-Judaism-Christianity, and Classical Scholarship. With just a few clicks, you can have access to most if not all of the Latin and Greek literary corpus, as well as whole bunches of texts in Judeo-Christian scholarship. For me, the pick of the litter of the latter is most of Migne's Patrilogia Latine et Graecae. All free of charge.

Arabic:

You can find online one of the most simply presented and informative precis of the Arabic language here. In addition to providing access to a number of free online courses, it also provides links to a large number of textbooks which one can purchase. Of the bunch, I have found David Cowan's Introduction to Modern Literary Arabic to be the simplest, most straight forward, and most effective introduction to both the classical and the modern literary languages. If you work your way through that, you will have the foundation and structure for Classical and Modern Arabic. If you then go on to Wright's Grammar of the Arabic Language, there will be little to throw you as regards the written Arabic language, classical or modern.

An important point though, which www.al-bab.com above makes, is that Arabic is both a unified literary language, and a set of fourteen or so almost mutually unintelligible dialects. Of the bunch, the Egyptian, Levantine, and Saudi dialects can usually be understood by most Arab speakers, particularly the Hijazi dialect of Saudi Arabia. Hijazi has the advantage that it is the language spoken in Jidda, Mecca and Medina, is spoken by most Saudi government officials, and has many borrowings from the Egyptian, Jordanian and Levantine dialects.

Fortunately for you, FSI-Language-Courses has a free online FSI text and audio for Hijazi Arabic and for Levantine Arabic pronunciation, as well as texts on the differences between Levantine and Egyptian dialects, and between Egyptian and Western African Arabic dialects, together with a text on the Classical Arabic writing system. With the lot of them, you would have the foundation for speaking with most modern arab speakers. You might also want to listen to the various online Arabic radio and television programs, starting with the infamous www.al-jazeera.com (or however it actually appears when you google it). You can find all of the above-mentioned texts and sound files here.

Russian/Slavonic

I would like to point out that the two languages above are considerably different from one another, say like the difference between Old Norse and Modern English. Nonetheless, as at least one commenter to your entry has noted, there is a lot of interconnect between various Slavic languages. I'd suggest starting with Russian, and then going on to Slavonic.

Russian:

Alas, www.fsi-language-courses.com has only a textbook and no sound files yet for its Russian course. Pity, but they've been known to find and put them up if and when they've found free versions.

On the other hand, www.freelanguagecourses.com has a free text and sound files for the Princeton University Russian course. It may be found here.

Slavonic:

There used to be an awful lot more available for learning Slavonic on the internet. www.justin.zamora.com was particularly replete with online grammars and lexicons. Alas, no more. The nearest I can now find is this website. There are some "notes" which are almost worthy of being called a grammar. I'll keep looking, however, and if I find more, I shall certainly let you know.

Persian/Farsi:

I'm terribly afraid that you're on your own on this one. However, four out of five is not bad, you must admit.

I hope this will be of some help to you.

Why (Modern) Roman Catholic Music Sucks so Much

Now that I have got your attention, I will attempt to answer the question posed above.

At first, I simply thought that it was simply because the texts which have been translated into English were so poorly translated. After all, our Lord said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into heaven. And it was Mark Twain who said that a camel was a horse created by a committee. It is an obvious conclusion (at least to those who have drunk enough) that it is easier for a text written by committee to express the will of the Holy Spirit (other, of course, than an ecumenical counsel which specifically requested the aid of that Spirit) than it is for a rich person to enter into heaven. Or something like that.

Since the ICEL is one of the most uninspired and uninspiring committees that I have observed in the existence of recorded history, I thought that that was sufficient to explain the phenomenon. When both the eminent Fathers Zuhlsdorf and O'Leary are agreed on something, it must be beyond dispute.

Nonetheless, it would appear that other than some of the lamest translation into English that I have ever seen since the Norton Anthology of English Literature, there may be another reason besides the ICEL translations why Modern Roman Catholic Music sucks so much.

I mean to say, after all, we do have a number of good composers of liturgical music up and about these days. Henrik Gorecki is doing a capable job, as are Arvo Part, Ivan Moody, Sergei Glagolev, and even Sir John Tavener. The point is that all of them are Orthodox, and not Roman Catholic, composers.

However, all of these composers have two things going for them. The first is that they have decent translations to work with. Gorecki is working with Latin, Part is working with Slavonic, and the others are working with decent translations into English, Spanish and Portuguese. Even Sir John Tavener is working with the mock Elizabethan of the late Isobel Hapgood, which is better by far than anything that ICEL could muster.

But there is another factor. Everyone except ICEL puts their texts online, and allows you to use their texts without a hefty demand for royalties. Try googling liturgical texts for the Book of Common Prayer, or the Orthodox Church in America, or the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America. Hell, try accessing the Southern Baptists or the Presbyterians. No difficulty, and no problem.

Then try 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.

But the real killer is what the ICEL charges in 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?

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.

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.

And for the author of the estimable blog, Do Geese See God, I would have to tell him that, for the foregoing reasons, I doubt that he will see good musical settings of the propers of the English Novus Ordo anytime soon. I am terribly sorry about that.