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.

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

I can’t speak for the US, but in Canada all legally registered non-profits and charities has their tax filing information, including their executive board members listed on the Revenue Canada wed site for the general public. I would imagine the US has something similar. If not, one should be able to go through the proper disclosure of information process and obtain it.

Well, that’s also fine with me. I just fundamentally object to the revocation that happened essentially without warning overnight.

Also yes the board composition is public. It is on form 990, but CCW’s last available form 990 is from 2012.

The State of Texas lives down to its reputation of chiseling at the state level (Texas may profess a love of federalism, but historically that's intended for the state to refuse the federal AND it constituent municipal gummints): if you want to pay $1 per search, you can do an online business entity search for this non-profit corporation. (Something that is free in other jurisdictions).

https://www.sos.state.tx.us/corp/sosda/index.shtml

Normally, non-profits in many states have annual report filings confirming the membership of the board and chief officers, et cet., and if filings are not made for a few years, a corporation can be dissolved passively (without notice) for non-compliance. It's a problem for small non-profit corporations that don't have a governance process for this kind of thing.

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

OK, so they're on the IRS site

Great

but the state of TX lists their address as being in CA, not in TX, which is what the IRS has, as of this year, Jeff O doesn't live in either place, and he's the principal officer, but not on the board—so who made this decision?

He's blaming someone other than himself…but the board's composition is private? This is insulting.

The composers who contributed to the Chabanel Psalms project may be surprised if their work becomes hidden behind a paywall.

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.

The short-form IRS filings indicate that the organization takes in under $50,000 a year, so you can conclude that nobody connected with the organization is getting a big salary out of it.

I wonder how much USCCB psalm royalties figure into CCW’s operating costs

$5 a month isn't much,

That’s $5 USD. It’s $6.80 CAD/month. It all adds up. You’d be amazed at how much you can trim a budget by saving $0.10 here and $0.25 there. The door swings both ways. I’m not cheap, but my Latin Mass community’s music budget couldn’t even afford to buy a music stand that worked properly.

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

The chant propers are available from several sites.

Windsor Latin Mass:
http://www.windsorlatinmass.org/latin/chant.htm

The Institute of Chrost the King:
https://institute-christ-king.org/resources/sacred-music

and, of course, CMAA whose music eesource list includes the Liber Usualis and the Graduale Romanum 1961 and 1974:

https://churchmusicassociation.org/resources/resource-list-complete/

Went and downloaded his arrangement of the Pachelbel Canon before it got locked up. Glad I printed out the Dupre chant accompaniment PDF a couple months ago too.

I never used CCW that much, but the St. Lawrence Center used it often, perhaps in part that Jeff's brother was a deacon at the Center at the time.

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.

Let me add this: I offered my English Psalm settings at the very beginning, assuming they would always be accessible. I should have known better. I was never allowed access to edit my work, and when I created a new edition elsewhere was told I could not get them removed from the Chabanel site. I have never been contacted by the organization with any offer of compensation. I'm glad I never followed up on JO's offer of a dedicated page on their site. It all makes money-grubbing OCP, et al., and copyright-obsessed USCCB look positively benevolent.

MatthewRoth asks:

Chonak, I don’t understand why you are trying to chart the course you are trying to chart and to what end.

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.

Moreover, CMAA is grateful to Jeff and CCW for the collaborations we've had, such as their production of a wonderful TV documentary about our Sacred Music Colloquium, and Jeff's production of demo videos for our book Simple English Propers. 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 my articles are pretty good

Actually, Charlie, yours were the articles I was most likely to read. I used the books quite a bit, particularly for organ accompaniments. And the chant recordings were a go-to for my schola.

For years, Jeff has been an Energizer Bunny of Sacred Music. But his writings (and the willfulness of the hymns in the Campion Missal, 1st ed...part of my working environment) have struck me as neuroatypical. I don't think this will be a good decision business-wise. But sorry, we have no right to Free Stuff, even if I like and even need Free Stuff as much as the next guy. The free market will sort this all out. Valuable resources that CCW doesn't own will be concatenated. People with rights issues involved in this will work it out in court, or not. It's a better use of my time to pray about this than to fuss about it.

If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well. 41 Should anyone press you into service for one mile,[z] go with him for two miles. 42 Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow.