Someone not associated with Corpu$ Chri$ti Water$hed contacted me Thursday to notify me that all of my posts (approximately 70,000 words) had been deleted from the site. Nice. I was blocked from their Facebook page months ago but only one of my posts (the last one) had been deleted from the website. Fortunately they are all archived, as are many of the PDF resources from the "St. Jean de Lalande Library of Rare Books."

@wspinnen I agree completely. Also the articles started to become less and less academic and more and more a space to vent about things they didn't like. I think that's what started to turn me away generally speaking, I was tired of reading complaining all the time. In a world where there is already so much negativity one would hope that in Catholic Spaces we could bring a half full perspective... although at times it is good and necessary to bring up problems and issues--but when you make it your whole existence one certainly questions where the Spirit of Christian Joy is.

The good news is that most of what we used from them is also on Musica Sacra.

@FSSPmusic did not realize that was you. Those were some of my favorite articles.

Prayers for JO…

Classic 2026 to have to pay $5 to read one article or pay $60 for access to a few. Of course, I've become less and less impressed with their work for years, and this is just the nail in the coffin lid.

The gist of what I read in the email was they’re $2000 in debt because someone got busy and dropped the ball on planning and implementing their annual fundraiser, so now rather than take accountability and plan and implement a fundraiser, everyone has to pay to have access. The fund development side of me shakes my head at this. I think this will do more harm to their mission than good.

He is probably taking a gamble on making people pay for something that has been free for many years. But the success of platforms like Substack in recent years suggest that he might succeed.

I'm sorry so many of you feel the blog has gone downhill. I think my articles are pretty good, although I don't post very often and have been more focused on Sacred Music lately. And I liked our series with Patrick very much. But anyway, I feel like I owe Jeff a lot, even though I disagree with him on the history of the Vatican edition and Solesmes. I have also found him personally very warm and friendly, and I have seen firsthand the good work he has done in two successive parishes. I think the site has been very, very important to the quality of sacred music for many years, and I wish him all the best in this venture and will continue to pray for him.

Let's not forget that we also have a subscriber model here at the CMAA, and we are always looking to increase membership!

And who is on the board? Aren't non-profits required to disclose that information?

I also noticed that the blog gradually offered fewer and fewer interesting articles. In particular, the claim that the only correct way of performing Gregorian chant is that of the 1908 Editio Vaticana became rather tiresome.

well as Patrick notes now that debate is gone.

It's one thing for Jeff to put the books from his own personal collection behind a paywall, it's another to do the same with books contributed by those who were making a personal sacrifice for the benefit of the sacred music community

Jeff definitely didn’t scan every edition or contribute only books that he purchased. But what he did do, and what would lead me to use words that should get me banned, is he would replace the scan sometimes with an inferior version. Thé Potiron benediction accompaniments from 1934 are in a decent scan that I have on my computer. But if the organist forgets something, the only available version is a different scan with very different recto-verso page lighting with a comb binding visible. That is wicked. And he also inserts his own stuff into the scan to make it not as useful and to advertise.

It should be noted that Jeff says the decision was taken by the board, and that he is not himself a member of the board.

It’s not something that anyone would pay for in no small part because Jeff is a difficult person to work with.

Substack works because you have a lot of free posts. Someone with that will have more subscribers and therefore a bigger general reach. Only people who really care will pay. And that’s fine.

A subscription model does not work with anything open-source or anti-copyright in its general ethos with community contributions.

The board of directors recently made a decision. It came to their attention that a handful of loyal, generous donors have been funding everything for all these years—while the rest of the community consumes what’s offered without extending support. The argument was made that it was unjust for the burden to fall on the shoulders of only a few donors, since we receive millions of visits.

Like, yeah. Even people with subscriber content offer tiers including free stuff. One popular model is posting in advance on a site like Patreon, then to the general public. The transit and urbanist creator NotJustBikes does this.

I’m considering writing to the abbot of Triors to get the license for those recordings revoked. The list being available freely on the Kyriale page is the only way to access the Vimeo links since Jeff clogged the channel.

That resource was invaluable for many groups particularly my own since we are deeply in the Fontgombault part of the Solesmes tradition. Now it’s gone? That’s not the deal, and I think that revoking the deal to use the recordings is only just.

The gist of what I read in the email was they’re $2000 in debt because someone got busy and dropped the ball on planning and implementing their annual fundraiser, so now rather than take accountability and plan and implement a fundraiser, everyone has to pay to have access. The fund development side of me shakes my head at this. I think this will do more harm to their mission than good.

Who is on their board and where is their tax info?

I would be happy to help take this on if it was a matter of “no more Corpus Christi Watershed or we have to charge” and it would be a massive undertaking since the site is structurally messed up (lots of redirects and 404s and things missing context) and you simply cannot have the nasty arguments going down. Everyone here knows that I’m a homer for Mocquereau but as someone elsewhere put it: my defenses are reasonable (in no small part thanks to Dr. Weaver). Anyway, it’s a real loss that now everything is behind a hard paywall.

@MatthewRoth Maybe Musica Sacra can just get those permissions instead, and we beef up the resource page like CCWatershed had... Ie.... if CCwatershed is no more, lets take the stuff we like and put it here. Maybe this is a make lemonade if you have lemons situation?

Many moons ago I found CC Watershed really useful and sent in money as I could.
No thanks now.

CCW has filed Form 990-Ns (<$50K in annual income) with the IRS for years from 2025 going back several years.

I was once told that the French had a meeting to figure out how to get people to pay for something that was already free, and in this meeting they invented bottled water. I presume this story, as it relates to bottled water, is apocryphal. But for $5 a month you can now access CC Watershed.

When I volunteered to lead a parish chant group last autumn, CCW was my first discovery after "Let's Sing with the Pope" from PIMS. I was happy to donate small amounts a couple of times and learn a lot about the Kyriales and the Propers. Since then I have found this forum and then other sources like Source & Summit, Neumz, Square Notes app, gregorian-chant-hymns.com, gregobase, YouTube, etc, and have learnt GABC. $5 a month isn't much, I pay €5/mth to use the Cantamus.app; but I don't think an ongoing subscription model fits what I need now which is fairly selective searching. My thanks to Jeff anyway.

There's a lot going on. But certainly, part of the mix is the recent death of Jeff's bishop supporter., Bishop Gracida.

It seems to me to be a time for personal outreach, if anyone here knows Jeff on that level.

I tend to doubt that fussing about CCW's board is worthwhile. Small non-profit corporations that are founded to support one person's projects tend to have small boards that are sympathetic to the founder.

Chonak you say this but also point out that the Chabanel psalms contributors (and others) now have work behind a paywall. Jeff needs to take accountability, or he should tell us whom we can contact, because there are massive legal implications here. I don’t think that anyone has suggested that there Is a scheme of getting rich here, we’re just angry that there has been a complete change in their operation without warning.

But if Jeff is the only named person and is the one making the announcement, then he deserves the blame.

It also means schola members won’t have easy access to the chant propers for practicing without paying for a monthly subscription.

And so many other things where it’s easier to send links to the post itself containing a link to some file: video, sound, PDF.

I suspect it triggers people as well because it reinforces the cumulative experience of how much of their work is subject to arbitrary decisions that are announced as fait accompli - this is just from an unexpected rather than the usual quarter.

The Triors videos and Jeff’s supplemental recordings and all sorts of other materials are not! We have been over this!

He said that removing PDFs from the site would require a vote from the Board of Directors.

That’s ridiculous. It might not be worth the effort to get a lawyer, but they’re not his: they’re your settings, with a licensed text. He doesn’t get to distribute them indefinitely if you don’t allow it.

Chonak, I don’t understand why you are trying to chart the course you are trying to chart and to what end. Jeff blames the board for all of these decisions. Who is on the board then, Jeff? It is not a dead end or an immaterial question. I’m furious that the easiest way to find the licensed Triors videos is now paywalled: surely that was not part of the deal.

The only positive thing is that now hardly anyone will read his rants where he borrows from various blogs and forums such as this one, Facebook, etc. to comment without giving the right of reply to people such as myself.

But there was a lot of good stuff there, and I don’t blame people who feel burned or otherwise mistreated.

@SponsaChristi I have to confess my mental model of how it would work is that the director pays one sub and distributes the material privately to the members. In my case, we only use public domain material such as one gets on gregobase. I hope that any copyrighted material would be clearly labelled as such with information on licensing terms, eg a price for 10 copies.

What license you used matters. However, not all contributors had a license displayed, and it’s certainly bad form to not withdraw a work at someone’s request.

So folks need to figure out what license was used.

If you did not license the work in a way that allows CCW to always use the work under the same license, then I would secure the copyright via registration (you already own it but need registration for damages) and then go that way to get it removed.

Their 2012 board is listed on p. 8 of Form 990 here: James Ridley, Kevin Allen, John Ostrowski, Linda Sims, and secretary Claire Ridley. That's not helpful for 2026. This site shows Corpus Christi Watershed c/o Charles Coulombe.

[I have edited out an irrelevant remark here.--admin]

If you were to see a list of the current board members, you could express your thoughts to them on this policy change by CCW, as you have every right to do. But I don't think they would have any formal obligation to respond. So I doubt you'd get any benefit from it.

Well, that's just, IDK, goofy.

They might not have a formal obligation to respond, but that's not the dang point, although I think that some of you should hire an IP attorney to resolve your claims, and I think that in justice Jeff should make sure that anyone who donated material to him, or time, or whatever, gets to host it wherever they want, since the rug was pulled out from all of us.

I repeat:

Jeff blames the board for all of these decisions. Who is on the board then, Jeff? It is not a dead end or an immaterial question

Those people need to hold themselves accountable, or I'm going to keep blaming Jeff.

Yeah, Dr. Weaver's articles were the only ones that I would read, but I would recommend them often.

But sorry, we have no right to Free Stuff, even if I like and even need Free Stuff as much as the next guy.

I don't think that I agree. We have a right for stuff offered for free with the expectation that it would be free to remain free.

People with rights issues involved in this will work it out in court, or not.

At no small cost, which is also distressing.

I wouldn't want anyone to use the Forum as a site for conducting some kind of campaign against CCW's decisions, even though I think that paywalling their site will likely reduce the good influence that they have.

I think that you're not getting something: there's no real good way through to Jeff (since he unilaterally burned bridges), there's no good way to anyone other than him who might be talked out of this, and Jeff used his own site to badger us while most of us sat silently just taking it, because we thought that there was some value in his other offerings. There also aren't many places online to talk about this stuff. I'm perfectly happy to keep it concentrated in one thread.

[ All this talk about how people should contact lawyers is misplaced. (1) I doubt that offering material to the public for free download on the internet creates a permanent obligation. (2) In the case of psalm composers wanting to claim a share of the subscription revenue, it would probably not be enough to justify the effort and cost of pursuing it. The most a composer could ask for, in practice, is to get works removed from the site -- if the previous permission is revocable or had a "no commercial use" proviso. Creative Commons licenses in particular are not revocable. --admin ]

I think that I have used resources from that site enough times over the years for free that I would like to sign up as a subscriber even if i never look at an article (i rarely ever did to begin with).

Some of the rhetoric in this thread is getting personal, and that doesn't serve our purposes here.

Now, please chill for a few hours, folks; I have to go to a rehearsal. :-)

In principle, I agree with @Francis: to build out the infrastructure for a stable body of English chant, y'all should be turning a profit from your initial releases and investing those profits to make more and better music.

There is a weird anti-capitalism bias on this board. I am tired of seeing people promoting as a virtue that chant resources are available for free. The cost of English chant resources being free is that you will never have the marketing, delivery, and editing prowess of the traditional publishers. And like the central planners in communist countries, you will not have prices to help signal where you need more or less production.

If you want to do the folk Mass, you can just buy the Gather hymnal, or Glory & Praise, and either option will have most of what you want, and you can be confident that 99%+ of the songs will be notated accurately, have sensible accompaniments, etc.

If you want to do an English chant Mass, is there a single well curated resource that you can just buy and be ready to go? (Please don't say the Saint Jean de Brebeuf Hymnal...)

I would suggest that proponents of the English chant Mass should put their resources together and make OCP an offer they can't refuse.

And while I think that in principle people should be paying for quality resources, putting formerly free resources submitted by other people behind a pay wall seems very grifty to me. Additionally, while I am not a lawyer, in my amateur opinion this sounds like breach of contract. To my understanding, implicit contracts are legally enforceable, and this source might be useful.