Copyright Permission

[Psalm Project]

I am about to publish a full three year cycle (Music) of the Psalms.
(ever wonder why my pen name is Psalm Project? - it's been my project since 2003!!!)
All of the typesetting is done this week and it is to be printed in Cambridge by Piggott-Blackbear Press - the same people who print Laudate - Veni Emmanuel etc...

As the Psalm texts are Grail, they are technically copyright. As for obtaining permission to use these texts I am running into brick walls at every turn. (I have the correct copyright reference as a footnote on each page)
The problem is that I am being ignored. Emails / contacts are not responded to - I understand it is Harper-Collins are the copyright holders. Attempts to contact the relevant dept. have failed.
I have phoned colleagues and none can shed any light. This book IS going to press soon! I can't wait around while some office bod procrastinates.

Can anyone shed any light? Anyone out there had a similar experience, particularly with Grail?

Thanks in anticipation!

[Nick Baty]

Yes, I had a very similar experience.
When I eventually had contact it was "No. No. No" as I was using the psalms as laid out in the Lectionary and they wanted them using in full, uncut.
Contact Martin Foster, either via this board or at the Liturgy Office.
He knows who to contact.

[Psalm Project]

Thank you for this - I've spoken briefly to Martin and he was very helpful and I did follow through on leads.
What I am beginning to discover, however, is that this area seems to be shrouded in some uncertainty about procedures. It should not be so.
However, there is a stony silence from Harper Collins.
Out of curiosity, when you had this problem, how did you resolve it? My text settings are 'word for word' lectionary versions. No paraphrasing of any kind.
Assuming you got over the 'issues', were you charged a fee?
I am planning on having 500 B5 hard-back copies printed with a further smaller 'cantor-friendly' A5 later (with recordings and CD-ROM graphics for parish bulletin inserts - more copyright!). As I will be anxious to maintain as low a price as practically possible, I don't wish to be presented with a nasty 'royalty fee' surprise further down the road.

It comes as no surprise that so many composers now do 'arrangements' - or 'based on psalm...' jobs! Who needs the hassle! Life's too short!

[Nick Baty]

In the end I gave up and those particular settings remain unpublished. With the coming of Grail IV, which will be administered by GIA, I thought I'd wait for those.

I have all the emails on my old Mac – will try to get to them later so I can quote word for word.

My text settings are 'word for word' lectionary versions.

That is what HarperCollins objected to: they said the psalms should appear as they do in the paperback edition, not as in the Lectionary.

Just a thought: Aren't the responses in the copyright of someone else (ICEL)?

[Southern Comfort]

Out of curiosity, when you had this problem, how did you resolve it? My text settings are 'word for word' lectionary versions. No paraphrasing of any kind.

It may be that the way you asked prompted the response you got. If you ask HarperCollins for a certain number of psalms, this is the sort of answer they may come up with. If, on the other hand, you ask them for a certain number of psalm verses, the problem goes away (or should do).

Assuming you got over the 'issues', were you charged a fee?
I am planning on having 500 B5 hard-back copies printed with a further smaller 'cantor-friendly' A5 later (with recordings and CD-ROM graphics for parish bulletin inserts - more copyright!). As I will be anxious to maintain as low a price as practically possible, I don't wish to be presented with a nasty 'royalty fee' surprise further down the road.

How much information did you give them? Did you tell them what proportion of the project would be represented by the Grail text? Did you tell them what your retail selling price would be? Did you tell them that you're thinking of doing further publications down the road?

On a one-off such as just 500 B5 copies, they'd normally ask you for a fee. If they know that this is part of a larger project, when reprinting might be a possibility, then a royalty might be considered more normal.

One standard way of working out the royalty division is as follows:
The royalty element payable totals 10% of the retail selling price.
For lectionary psalms, the royalties are typically divided into 50% music, 40% psalm text, 10% response. The responses are in 99% of cases taken from the Grail text (and see below), as edited by the lectionary editors, whose compilation copyright is also administered by HarperCollins.
So your basic payment to the Grail is going to be 4% + 1% of the retail selling price, = 5%. A flat fee might be calculated on the same sort of basis.

Having said all this, you may want to think seriously about whether to delay publishing. This is because (as Nick has just pointed out while I was typing this) Grail IV is on the horizon now. It is only waiting for Rome to give a recognitio to the US bishops (the Kenyan bishops already have it), at which point the text will be released to the English-speaking world. This version could therefore be approved and in use in less than two years, and you might want to incorporate the changes into your settings (this may depend on whether you have used psalm-tones or "psalm-tunes"). It is estimated that between 60 and 70% of the Grail text that we have now will remain intact, which is another way of saying that between 30 and 40% will have differences. What is not clear is what the position will be on the responses. In the Lectionary we now have, the responses always use the wording of the psalm itself (where the response comes from the psalm ─ see above). If the wording of the psalm is going to change, this may affect the wording of the responses too, in order to retain the same consistency (unlike the Americans, who have NAB psalms and ICEL responses which are completely independent of any psalter, which means that you'll often sing a verse one way in the response and then in a completely different translation in the body of the psalm ─ which is obviously completely bonkers).

In other words, in order to give your project the longest possible life, you might want to hold back for a little while. I understand that it's been 6 years in the making, and that you want to bring it to birth, but in the broad scheme of things..... It's rather like the fact that no one has been writing (unless they have had their head in the sand) ─or publishing ─ new Mass settings for several years now, because it is known that the texts will be different.

One thing I certainly wouldn't advocate is going ahead and printing anyway, whether or not you resolve the copyright issue. That could be building up trouble down the road.

[Gwyn]

It's interesting stuff, I had a load of responsorial psalms on the Sibelius Scorch site, they were well used frequently accessed and free to download. I hadn't thought about copyright, so after some though felt that I should legitimise myself. I wrote to the company who administer The Grail who said pretty much that if I'm making them available for free then permission is not granted.

Cut to the chase - I've since pull them from the website. Shame really since many of them were downloaded/printed in their hundreds. Ah well...

This is a fascinating thread, very enlightening.

[Psalm Project]

SC,
Thank you for your comments - very much appreciated.
The argument about waiting for Grail IV, while valid, is going to get wasted on me! (This is not the translation which has the gender changes? is it?) The 'waters have already broken' and 'birth' is imminent
I cannot see that the work currently on hand will get shafted overnight just because of a few changes to words - no, I am not being naive about it - just practical! It is a bit like the mass settings... the current ones are not going to disappear overnight in a puff of wind. The general consensus concerning the 'older' settings is that 'they 'aint broke' so, why fix 'em - I know this area has already been discussed on this forum and I fully aware of the reasons why new translations are on the doorstep. I cannot accept that what we are currently using will be invalidated - if affirmative, then why are we doing it this way now? It's a bit silly really. I see it as an 'Either/And' situation practically.
Concerning mass settings... I have published 12 of these over the past 10 years and I am holding off any further ventures into this area until the new translations are officially available. However, having seen some drafts, I doubt I'll be doing any future work in this area - I'm not inspired by what I see. I am very happy with what I have already done and will not appreciate anyone taking a dogmatic approach to the exclusion of such from liturgy further down the road. The day anyone insists I do so is the day I will retaliate with a stronger argument to ban inappropriate pop songs from all liturgies. However, I sense that there will be some enthusiastic bods who will go 'all out' to promote the 'New' translations... Ho Hum... remember the early days of Vatican II and the 'new' liturgies...
I digress!!

The amount of information volunteered about the publication was minimal - It simply stated that it was a limited project and that my requirement was for permission to incorporate the texts of the psalms (which were sourced in the Sunday Missal - same as the lectionary), which I have set to music.
I use Gelineau style tones (all original) for all my psalms so there is flexibility in that area.
As for the responses - I don't see a problem if a new version arrives - they are all spontaneous efforts from my congregation so a text reference is not always needed. They usually sing back what the cantor initiates.
If a reprint is warranted later, I can easily modify the original files and plonk them onto disc for the printer. They would use my PDF disc for printing anyway so that issue would not be problematic.

Oh, Nick... I notice you're a 'Mac' man... One of my younger choir members said to me recently (knowing that I am of Mac parentage!!!) that if Apple made bikes I'd be cycling one... my response was... wait for it... 'Well, at least I'd be guaranteed that they would not crash, even if my cycling skills were not great'

[Psalm Project]

Just a follow through...
If the psalms were going to have a 'best-before-date', I doubt that Kevin Mayhew would have published his 'Easy to sing Responsorial Psalms' only last year?
Just a thought

[Nick Baty]

The argument about waiting for Grail IV, while valid, is going to get wasted on me! (This is not the translation which has the gender changes? is it?)

No, that's another one. But the advantage about waiting for Grail IV is that GIA are likely to be much more practical than HarperCollins when it comes to permissions – at least they understand why we do what we do.

Oh, Nick... I notice you're a 'Mac' man

Anyone sensible is. In truth, I've never managed to even switch on a PC and on the occasions that one of my students has booted up one of the beasts for me, I've been scared by what I've seen. I work in four classrooms which each have 18 Macs in them (and we're being fully re-equipped in September). Why go out for a burger when you can have steak at home!

[Nick Baty]

If the psalms were going to have a 'best-before-date', I doubt that Kevin Mayhew would have published his 'Easy to sing Responsorial Psalms' only last year?

That particular company has never really worried about using about official translations: have a flick through some of the Mass settings included in various collections.

[Southern Comfort]

SC,
Thank you for your comments - very much appreciated.
The argument about waiting for Grail IV, while valid, is going to get wasted on me! (This is not the translation which has the gender changes? is it?)

As Nick as already confirmed, no, it isn't. There have already been two gender-modified Grail versions, but this is not specifically one of them.

I cannot see that the work currently on hand will get shafted overnight just because of a few changes to words - no, I am not being naive about it - just practical! It is a bit like the mass settings... the current ones are not going to disappear overnight in a puff of wind. The general consensus concerning the 'older' settings is that 'they 'aint broke' so, why fix 'em - I know this area has already been discussed on this forum and I fully aware of the reasons why new translations are on the doorstep. I cannot accept that what we are currently using will be invalidated - if affirmative, then why are we doing it this way now? It's a bit silly really. I see it as an 'Either/And' situation practically.

I don't think the argument is quite so clear-cut. It's important to differentiate between the new Mass texts that are on the horizon, and the new psalm version ─ not the same thing at all.

(a) The last time our Mass texts changed (1973), the existing settings died out very quickly as people moved to the new texts. The only survivor that I can remember is the Timothy Baxter Sanctus, which endured for a couple of years. Then it too vanished. Admittedly, the existing settings at that time had only been in place for a comparatively short time (6-7 years) compared with the ones we have now, some of which have now been around for as long as 35 years, so that might have made it easier to change. But I feel that human nature may mean that if indeed the Mass texts do change in the next couple of years, and if indeed the clergy do go along with introducing them, people will generally follow them. Yes, existing settings may continue in parallel for a while, but I suspect for only a few years, if that.

(b) As far as psalm settings are concerned, the changes we are talking about are far from "a few changes to words". 30-40% of lines with changes, if that estimate is correct, will be quite significant. The new version has, however, been produced with the original Grail/Gelineau principles in mind - i.e. regular stresses in the lines - so it will fit with pulsed tones (Gelineau type) as well as with reciting tones (Bévenot type). One criterion employed in producing the new version was that as much as possible of the 1966 Grail text should be preserved, which is rather different from the principles guiding the new translation of the Mass texts, which are effectively saying two-fingers to the existing texts and more particularly to the body that produced them.

(c) Yes, if it ain't broke..... but the new psalm version will incorporate the benefits of the past forty years of biblical scholarship, and will also incorporate a limited amount of horizontal inclusiveness except in cases where the Vatican mandarins deem that the psalm text is acting as an archetype of Christ, where they will continue to say "man", etc. I think both those things will be improvements, since they are not driven by the kind of ideological agenda that has produced the new Mass texts. The desire throughout has been to have something better, not something different.

[Psalm Project]

Interesting comments - thank you.

The desire throughout has been to have something better, not something different.

I am not entirely convinced that what we presently have is 'un-better' than whatever is brewing on the horizon.
There is a very large corpus of opinion - from both clerics and laypersons - that these changes are not entirely necessary... hold fire please!
On a very practical level... what is essentially wrong with the psalms as they are right now? Realistically? What real difference will it make at the end of the day?
Some may indeed appreciate the virtues of the 'better' but I am not convinced that most will appreciate the virtues of the 'different'... see where I'm coming from?
A lot of this change is going to give (to use your term) the two fingers to the people who have invested so much time over the past 30 years in composing and promoting what we now have.
I suspect there are strong arguments on both sides of the fence
Anyone want to get tangled in the area of translation vs. transliteration relative to what we are discussing?
Keep the thread going!

[Nick Baty]

The desire throughout has been to have something better, not something different.

No I didn't. Southern Comfort did.

[Psalm Project]

Don't know how that happened!
I selected the text while in the SC window and pressed the 'Quote' button... hmmm
Is that a translation, transliteration... or... a MISTAKE!

[Southern Comfort]

On a very practical level... what is essentially wrong with the psalms as they are right now?

No one's saying that there's anything wrong, simply that the new version may be better. It's rather like saying that there was nothing actually wrong with a 1950s Ford Anglia, but that a 2000s Ford Fiesta is probably going to be an improvement.

On the other hand, looking at the government/parliament meltdown currently in progress, maybe we don't need so much of a new model as a complete rehash..... (Please, Lord, please )