In the Gift to be Simple thread, Jon Freeman questioned why Sydney Carter would want to collect royalties for a hymn like "Lord of the Dance."
I'm an amateur church musician and I'll stay an amateur because I like the freedom of being a volunteer; but I'm very happy to be working under the direction of paid professionals, and singing music that was written by people who were paid for their work.
The issue of copyrights and church music is a sticky one. I suppose most musicians, and particularly church musicians, violate copyright laws more flagrantly than drivers violate speed limits. It's very hard to drive without breaking one law or another, and it's very hard to do music without breaking copyright law. Our pastor is deathly afraid of the copyright cops, and rightly so. Last night, I had to clean out all the photocopied music from our choir music cabinet. It broke my heart to do it, because this is much of the repertoire our choir has built up over the last 20 years - but our previous choir director relied almost completely on sheet music that he had illegally photocopied.
Now I'm going to try to sort out the best of that photocopied stuff, and see if we can get performance rights to it. It would have been much easier if we had done this sort of thing right in the first place. On the other hand, there is a lot of church music that just doesn't "work." It may look good on paper or on a recording - but once a choir has learned a piece and performed it a couple of times, they find it has no long-term value. Why should we have to pay as much for a flop, as we pay for a song we do a dozen times a year for a dozen years?
There is one big advantage to destroying all that photocopied stuff. Catholic churches are supposed to encourage congregational singing. For some reason, choir directors never seem to be interested in getting the people to sing - it's much more fulfilling to work with trained singers and turn out beautiful performances. Without photocopies, our choir directors will have to rely more on the hymnals that the people have out in the pews. If the people have the words to the songs, they may be more likely to sing.
Hey, you church musicians out there, what do you do about this? Do you prefer to use traditional material that's beyond copyright? Do you know of cheap and easy ways to get rights to materials. What about getting rights to old stuff that's no longer in print?
-Joe Offer-