I am a composer. I am unpublished as of now. I still don't know that I'd be interested in this - because like it or not, being published creates some legitimacy that merely posting music on a communal site does not.

Also - I had to sound capitalistic, but I'd love to get paid for my compositions if at all possible.

This would be useful just so every summer every music director in the country doesn't have to sit down with the Graduale and search the CPDL for every Offertory and Communion. Providing links to Communios, chant-based psalm settings, etc. would also be helpful not only to music directors, but also to choir members and cantors. Whether the aim should be to put publishers out of business, or whether the site should offer only free materials is a different matter. None of the current commercial sites offers a service that is actually based on chant, polyphony, and propers. I certainly wouldn't mind a link to a publisher's site if it helped me to obtain a setting of a proper that I wouldn't have been able to find otherwise.

"because like it or not, being published creates some legitimacy that merely posting music on a communal site does not."

This seems to be less and less so, due to some of the inferior compositions that come from publishing companies nowadays. I also don't see any reason why a site like this couldn't be a "testing ground" of sorts. If you put something up and it's super-popular, then you can take it down and get it published . . . no harm done.

I have been considering a project like this for a few years now and am very interested in helping make it happen.

Someone's apparently starting a site specifically for Catholic sacred music at www.caecilia-project.org , but the site doesn't seem to have any content yet.

... and a lot of bandwidth.

Actually, more than welcoming suggestions and contributions, I would very much welcome handing this off to someone who has the time, resources and desire to maintain it! So whoever wants at it, let me know.

(Disclaimer - I'm not a software developer, but am an unabashedly lofty dreamer... perhaps a few "geeks" can offer some feedback on how these thoughts might mesh with reality. Also, I apologize in advance for the long-windedness of this comment!)

Here are a few of my thoughts:

I don't think that we're talking about a wiki platform, nor do I think that we're necessarily talking about an html website or some other content management system install. I really think that we're talking about a software project that can grow, change and adapt organically as the sacred music movement grows. I tend to think "pie in the sky" because I've been a part of some pretty esoteric development projects before, but I also want to say that given my experience with development, not everything has to be done at once.

Firstly, I see a platform that communicates with existing resources. CPDL and Chabanel are sites that have individual compositions posted individually on unique url's--I could see a software component developed that communicates with these url's, informing admins of updates, dead links, etc. I could see this software piece pulling these resources into the site and making them available to the liturgical planning tools. Resources like the scanned Gregorian chant books, Communio, Simple Choral Gradual, Fr. Weber, Fr. Kelly, Bruce Ford, etc., are currently arranged in a more static fashion and would need to be re-hosted in more non-static fashion. What I could see here is to have the composers, or other willing parties "re-publish" the work as individual graphics files, tightly trimmed, each a unique content item (e.g. an antiphon, a kyrie, etc.), given a unique, database friendly i.d., and then drop them on a web host (perhaps within the central system, perhaps on the CMAA site or elsewhere). I then see this unique url/file indexed in the system with all of the appropriate categorizations. I could see all kinds of programming possibilities in making this task as "hands-off" as possible. The end manual labor might involve a webform with the needed fields and category check boxes (title, url, composer, liturgical celebration, liturgical genre [introit, kyrie, etc.], etc., etc.). To reiterate, it seems that the described software piece would keep the most updated version in the system and inform admins when urls go bad.

Next, once the unique content items are indexed on the system, the real fun begins!

The critical component is the liturgical planning feature. This might be somewhat similar to the tools at Cantica Nova, or OCP's liturgy.com, (but surely better!) but now the music is actually accessible right from the planning interface. As a quick sidenote, I've given quite a bit of thought to how user-login-based aspects might be incorporated--One thought is to allow users to select which resources they would like to include in their use of the site, perhaps from a user preferences pane, which might be helpful if there are 50 different options for the 1Advent Introit! But the key feature is that users could view all of the elements of a liturgical celebration and choose from all of the best (free) options that are available to them.

The next step is to decide what the user can walk away with when they plan a liturgy. Liturgy.com provides you with list and an archive of your music usage. What I think SMPDL (for lack of a better term) offers is a printable music packet for a schola/choir, or a printable booklet for a congregation (whether notated music, texts/translations, etc.), or a seasonal resource that could be printed by a professional "on-demand" service, or possibly even a complete resource (custom hymnal?, missalette?) for a choir or congregation, or... if you're taking this far enough, a completely non-static sacred music library on your digital handheld device (this is something I have literally been waiting for 3 years, ask my friends!) But to keep us in the current reality, a software component would need to work with the graphics images and place them appropriately in booklets or packets which would be ready for print or PDF storage.

I could go on with this, but I think I just described the most important and beneficial features that would make such a project worthwhile. Not to mention that such a platform might be appropriately called an "OCP/GIA-killer". Because I really think that a lot of music directors really would be open to using sacred music in liturgy, but it has to be spoon-fed to them, and this project could easily supplant the spoon-feeding that is currently happening with the publishers.

To conclude this section, it seems that most of what would be needed to make the above happen would be done in the realm of software development and pre-development. This could be potentially costly if it were given to professional developers. But, if the efforts of the online "geek" community could be harnessed for an open source project, perhaps a less costly option could be pursued. Again, I'm not a programmer, so I really don't know what would be required for the above. But after reflecting on the problem for a few years this is my conclusion on how I would proceed with such a project.

Lastly, to the aforementioned concerns:

* logins. Someone would have to be available to help with those and watch for spam. Sad to say, you have to be ready to ban too. Just keeping users straight is a big job.

-I don't think that building this sort of platform would necessarily be best suited to a completely open community. I could see a limited "admin" permission granted to 20 or so users/developers, all of which are tracked and who work together.

* wiki code. This stuff is not HTML; it is quite different and requires a learning curve. How many of us can do this or are willing to learn? How many are willing to fix others' bad code? It is relentless. Wikipedia has bots working 24/7. Everyone I know who has started a wiki on a topic ends up regretting it: the time commitment is incredible.

-Again, I don't think that we're talking about a wiki here. I think that the end user experience would be something like a facebook experience (sort of...), mouse-clickable and completely wysiwyg.

* tools. Let's say we post an English version of a chant, cut and pasted from some larger document, pumped into a new pdf file or jpg. How many can do that? It requires tools like full acrobat and photoshop, and the ability to resize and maintain resolution and provide quality print.

-I don't think that it would be too much to ask for composers to publish their work in individual graphics formats. Tackling the musicasacra.com resources could be a big job, but I can bet that there are hundreds of willing and able candidates right on this forum who, with a set of guidelines/requirements could easily do this. I remember reading in a thread once that someone "has taken up chant typesetting as a hobby"... and that doing it gave him consolation that there is actually better music than that which he heard every Sunday! I think that many volunteers would line up with their laptops and Photoshop to take up this task.

* version control. What happens if a composer changes his mind? There will be bits and pieces of the piece with errors strewn everywhere. This happens constantly. Several times per week, I'm replacing files on the site from some setting somewhere. There is no way these can be fully fixed once split up.

-I think that the beautiful thing here is that the website becomes the "living document", the most recent "version". When errors appear they are corrected, and an entire "edition" doesn't have to be updated, just that piece. Just tonight I read that there is a very big error in the "Communio" book... not much of a problem for the online edition, but very tough luck for those with the hard-bound book! In the above scenario there is no need to re-download the Communion "pdf resource", the edits are simply made to the site and most will never notice.

* broken links. The life of a link is shorter than you imagine. People have a right to revise URLs but I can see that just extant link fixing is a massive job in its own right.

-Again, I think that a software "bot" takes care of this. Admins are informed of broken links, but we trust that CPDL, et al will not be making significant changes to already-existing urls--It seems to have been pretty stable in its history.

* Why? Right now it is a fairly small learning curve to find the material we need. Here and there, this and that. what actually is the point of centralizing everything if it only hems us in and weds us to a fixed model?

-I think that the current learning curve and effort required is relatively "small" for passionate sacred music devotees, but still too large for the average parish that is latched on to what the publishers feed them. I also don't think that this would create a "fixed model" or a "centralized" solution. It would play nicely with everything that already exists--It would not necessarily replace any pre-existing resources. I think that the largest benefit here is to give to the Church effortless access the the treasury of sacred music, in a user-friendly (dare I say cutting edge?) fashion. This kind of resource could pave a way for the broad center of the liturgical culture to migrate toward the sacred.

* Change. If there is anything we've learned over the last ten years, it is that nothing is stable. New resources are coming online daily, in no fixed pattern. 8 months ago, there was not a single set of sung English propers online. Now there are 6 full sets! What will happen in the next 8 months? Moreover, no one yet knows precisely what the best form of delivery is. Why spend 100s of hours in programming only to find that it serves no real purpose and is not comprehensive?

-I think I've explained my thoughts on the benefits of this kind of platform. I think such an infrastructure could accommodate and even stimulate more development in the sacred music world. I have to say that the list on the right sidebar of musicsacra.com/home is getting pretty thick, and the disk image of it on my hard drive is beginning to get pretty difficult to wade through, and I also have to say that navigating through a 500 page PDF is not the most user-friendly experience either. Even planning with these resources can pose serious difficulties to even the most devout in the sacred music cadre. Let me also say this--Some who are sitting on the periphery might say "What's the big deal? Just open the Gregorian Missal and print off a few polyphonic propers from CPDL and you are realizing the Vatican ideal! Right?" Well, the reality is that most music directors (myself included) have the incredible burden of having to introduce sacred music gradually into a culture of "Glory and Praise", "Gather", and "Praise and Worship". This means that we're really having to build from the ground up at our parishes. We long for the day when we will have our skillfully trained scholas with Graduale in hand, and a polyphonic setting or two stuck in the back of the book. The reality, though, is that this will take a very, very long time for many of us to accomplish, and having a rich and comprehensive tool for liturgy planning will help us through the tumultuous years of change that lie ahead.

Very lastly... My original thoughts were to try to make this happen at sacredmusicproject.com, a site that I'm currently using to post Fr. Columba Kelly's English chant propers. I'm not stuck on using this domain for the above project, but it is certainly available for it.

Adam, I have two things to say:

(1) Your site is amazing.

(2) That is the longest post I've ever seen !!! LOL

Carl, I didn't mean to imply that online resources aren't used. Our current downloads are through the roof -- more than a million ranking points higher than the above mentioned sites. The problem is not so much technology but a bad model.

I just wrote a thoughtful and time consuming response, but somehow was logged out of the forum and I lost my entire comment... so frustrating! I guess the Lord vetoed it. For now I have to go to bed and will try again later.

To hit a few important points:

Francis: We cannot use CPDL for vernacular liturgical texts. CPDL requires that texts be "public domain", hence the name, and vernacular liturgical texts do not meet this criteria. Latin texts would be no problem, but these are the only liturgical texts that could be posted there.

Jeffrey: I don't want to compare this project to the publishers' liturgy planning websites. These are done poorly and are limited by the publishers' paralysis due to fear of the digital domain. They are print media companies, and they must be in order to survive. We are an open source movement and believe that sacred music belongs to the Church and to all of humanity. We are talking about putting all of the best sacred music that is available directly into the hands (and filing cabinets) of music directors all across the English speaking world, instantly and effortlessly so. I think that this model is very different and very worthwhile.

In one sentence I will summarize what I just wrote in 5 paragraphs (and then lost): An open source software development project brought to life by a community of devoted and self-sacrificing "sacred music geeks" seems to be a viable way to make this project a reality.

francis: "Take advantage of CPDL. [...] All you have to do is add the right categories."

http://www.cpdl.org
look for heading "Browse CPDL"
click "Score subcategories"
scroll down to heading "Sacred music by season (incomplete)"

It seems that a category is just a way of indexing the stored scores.
Many categories are already there.
For completeness, both Extraordinary Form (EF) and Ordinary Form (OF)
calendar components should be represented. Noticeably missing is "Ordinary Time".
With a single page so named, a lot of the liturgical year could be presented.
The OF Sunday cycle designations (A, B, C) also cause questions for me.

Is differentiation required for propers for Roman Catholic vs ... ?

Since eft94530 posted in March 2009, CPDL has improved the Sacred Music by Season pages quite a bit.

Although geared to the traditional (EF) calendar, It includes references to the OF. Links given on individual pages are by no means exhaustive, but coupled with Aristotle Esguerra's lists of polyphonic propers, there's a lot to choose from.