I wonder how many parishes are going to forego renewing their OCP missal/hymnal subscriptions this year because of Covid-19 restrictions or budget constraints. OCP is vulnerable to suffering a significant decline in revenue, and once parishes have taken a break from the OCP musical ecosystem how many will realize they don't need OCP's disposable resources after all?

I'm somewhat similar. I took a parish off of a Breaking Bread subscription, instead replacing it with a small number of OCP's Glory & Praise, Third Edition hymnals, which has a good number of traditional hymns in it and enough of the post 1980s standard good stuff to satisfy people as I steer the ship away from the contemporary-style music that isn't suitable for worship. I'm now projecting almost all the music on our large screens, which means we don't need anywhere near a 1:1 hymnal:person ratio, and I'm also thereby not limited by the contents of a hymnal; I'm leveraging the parish's ONE LICENSE subscription quite a lot and taking advantage of public domain resources. I worry that ONE LICENSE is going to price gouge its customers eventually.

We're practically at the point where hymnals/missals aren't needed anymore because parishioners have their own Magnificat subscriptions or phone apps to follow the readings, if they want, and relatively cheap reprint licenses or public domain materials combined with desktop publishing software or projection technology allows parishes to create their own music participation aids each week.

I'm interested to see whether Source and Summit is going to be worthwhile.

Just curious, but what hymnal are you going to? Are you getting a durable, permanent one or using a better disposable option (something like St. Ignatius Pew Missal)?

@Nathan_the_Organist,

I don’t think the pastor or music director picked a new hymnal or missal. I’m under the impression that a weekly worship aid is the end goal. We’ve had a One License subscription for a while, now, so I believe that’s what will be used whenever we can put worship aids in the pews, again.

I think OCP is worried about parishes canceling their subscriptions. By now they've received a fair number of responses to the renewal notices that they sent out about a month ago, and they can extrapolate to a likely trend or see the writing on the wall. Today OCP posted an "exciting and new program" for parishioners to purchase their own individual missals.

https://www.ocp.org/en-us/ppmp2021

It amounts to nothing more than parishes continuing to purchase missal subscriptions, then reselling individual missals to their parishioners for personal ownership and use instead of pew use.

We did the math last year and figured it would still cost substantially less to print worship aids than to buy the missalettes (and we even get the thin ones that don't have a "hymnal" section in the back!). We also calculated that if we stopped buying them we could purchase new hard-bound hymnals or 3yr permanent missals in 2.5 years time if we simply shifted the funds from OCP to the book of choice. This would get us a better quality book and no more waste. My main issue with OCP is that you pay for the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. I SHUDDER to think of how much we have paid Owen Alstott in royalties for the use of his psalms. He must have a private island by now. Our parish has used his psalms (and the annual batch of psalm books for the choir) every year for about 20 years. The choir practically knows them by heart and we just sight read them through once at the end of rehearsals on Wednesdays. At one point my predecessor stopped ordering the books and just kept a few batches of old ones and swapped them out each year.

To do the math you have to figure how you design your worship aids and what your per-print fee is (if you rent a machine) and how many reams of paper you'd use.

Ultimately, there's no love lost for us to part with our missalettes and the hymnals which, while not terrible, are feeling long in the tooth.

That said, it IS a lot of work each week to design them and you have to have someone who is good at it and who likes the work. In my case, I enjoy that type of graphic design and I love music engraving, so it isn't an issue for me to do it. I enjoy it and I like to make them look beautiful. I use Dorico to engrave the music and Affinity Publisher to put it all together.

In our case, we've experimented with a few different formats. Our pastor isn't interested in reprinting the text of the readings since they are meant to be proclaimed anyway. So we've settled on a letter-sheet front and back (sometimes two stapled together at the spine but this takes a lot more time to prepare) folded in half with just the music and proper texts if there is room. A friend of mine prints larger worship aids with ordinaries in them; he does an 11x17 trifold. Mind you, his budget is much larger than mine and 11x17 is more expensive to order. I've also considered legal bifolds just to get a bit more width but we haven't really tried that yet.

During Advent/Lent we sing Missa XVII and I've designed this pew card which has been laminated and we used to keep it in the pew backs. We alternate with another so we have two copies, one with each Marian antiphon. We have been transitioning to Michael Olbash's Mass in Honor of Our Lady, Star of the Sea and so I made a worship aid for that too but unfortunately that all fizzled out around the time of Covid. I'll probably have to make some larger worship aids with the ordinary in them once we are permitted to sing again.

If you want to do weekly worship aids in lieu of hymnals, you might also check with your bulletin publisher if you use one about either printing the worship aid within the bulletin or printing the worship aids separately and shipping them with the bulletins. It may be worth the extra cost if it means freeing up time from doing the printing, folding, etc. yourself as well as wear and tear on your machines.

I think having the music along with the text is a must. Even if people don't read music, they can at least tell by looking at it when to move up and down in pitch (even if not hitting it correctly). Maybe one can get away with text only for extremely well-known hymns (think "Holy God, We Praise Thy Name"-common), but that would be an exception. I would strongly recommend printing the Mass ordinary in your bulletin/worship aid or have it in print somewhere, again both text and music (a card in the rack is a good idea as someone suggested above) for those who might be visiting or otherwise unfamiliar with the respective setting being used that day/season.

ServianScores,

Thanks for the insight on making worship aids. I had always wondered what the cost savings were to do them as opposed to normal hymnals. Ithink the time to make them would be the most prohibitive to do something similar at my church. Most of the staff is part time, and the ones that are full time have plenty of other things to do.

We have been using the St Ignatius Pew Missal. It is cheaper than Breaking Bread and most of the material that is missing from Breaking Bread, we would not have sung anyways. We do makes cards with the mass setting that we put in the pews with the hymnal. We print these on cardstock so they can be used for multiple years. We just switch them out with the changes in liturgical season.

If you haven't been able to change his mind, then it's up to parishioners. If those fighting against us are able to be loud and obnoxious enough to effect change, then those on our side being loud (but hopefully not obnoxious) is what we should be doing as well.

@MarkB,

Who cues the slides for you?