I’ve never pursued an unpaid funeral fee, except possibly when I think it might have been an undertaker’s mistake.  But if you have a payment routine as described in the previous post, this problem will rarely happen.

Unpaid wedding fees are different.  I wait a fortnight for them to come back from honeymoon, then pounce.  Usually it transpires that the best man had all the envelopes and forgot about them, or they were left in someone’s sporran and only found by the kilt-hire shop the following week.

Only once was I let down completely over a wedding fee, and in that case it turned out that the middle-aged couple involved had also left church fees unpaid, entire reception bill unpaid, and skipped off abroad on honeymoon.  They never came back.

Here is the link again to the salaries page of the Scottish Federation of Organists:  www.scotsorgan.org.uk/sfo-04.htm

The SFO minimum recommended fee for a funeral is currently £50.  This came into effect in January 2009 and will last for two years from that date.  If you look at other details on the salaries page, you’ll see that they are quite complex, and relate chiefly to the Church of Scotland, which pays its organists a salary as a matter of course, wedding and funeral fees being additional.  For the Catholic organist, apart from some few in cathedrals and major churches, the world of contracts, deputy fees and second-job tax forms is very far away indeed.

Best not to take the controversial salary subject any further just now (maybe I will in a later post), but the fact is that ‘the wee lady who plays the organ’ (unpaid) at the RC church is frequently viewed by priest and parish as being in a different class from the ‘real’ organist (salaried) at the C of S up the road.  She is not.  When it comes to weddings and funerals, she is just as much a professional, and should be eligible for a professional fee.

Now I do know that some Catholic organists don’t want ever to be paid for a parish funeral.  That is laudable, but it should be seen to be their own choice.  It doesn’t mean that the fees are not merited, just that they have been waived.  This post, however, is directed at organists who are either not paid at all for funerals, or paid very little, and who would appreciate an appropriate recompense for their professional services. The best way forward here is to try to work with the local undertaker.

Until fairly recently, a priest would usually handle this whole area himself, agreeing the fee with the family, receiving the payment and passing it on to the organist.  A much more satisfactory method for priest, organist and family is to give this job to the undertaker, who does it for every other Christian denomination.  The Liturgy Commission recommends this, and it is being adopted more and more in Catholic parishes.  Some different ways of organising it:

• The undertaker may have the same organist fee for all the local churches and, with the priest’s agreement, will include the RC church in this arrangement.

OR

• Priest and undertaker can agree on a rate for priest’s church, which the undertaker then applies each time.  Here the organist should keep an eye on the market, and give the occasional nudge if needed.

OR

• The undertaker can negotiate the fee on a one-off basis with the organist.  This usually happens when undertaker and/or organist is not local.

Regarding payment amounts, undertakers’ rates can vary, but are usually around the current SFO figure, sometimes exceeding it.  Priests, however, can have wildly-varying ideas of what the parish organist should be paid for a funeral, including zero.  Of course, a family can be in poor circumstances and the priest aware of it; in such a case, most organists wouldn’t want a fee at all.  But in the normal course of things, a priest may just simply not know what should be charged, and would be grateful to be put in the picture.

So the moral is, get your priest to have a word with the local undertaker, and keep your own eye on the SFO rates.  You are performing a professional service, and you deserve to be offered a suitable fee.  And my experience is that in most cases the bereaved family actually want to show their appreciation for your comforting music at their difficult time.

Huh!  A few days after the previous post I found myself respectfully standing to attention beside the organ in an old and beautiful Church of Scotland as the coffin went out to a CD of one of the most inappropriate pieces of pop music I have ever heard.  Obviously, this music meant something to the bereaved, and comforted them, and that was good.  But, oh dear.

Forth in Praise has had one or two queries about funeral organist fees.  This can be a tricky subject, which the next post will look at.  The SFO website at www.scotsorgan.org.uk/sfo-04.htm gives a table of recommended fees, which is worth consulting.

In the meantime, I’m off for a few days to the other end of life.  I’m  going south to see my newly born grandson for the first time.

A church organist is unlikely to hear that phrase, but in my job down at the funeral parlour, I’m told this when I’m asked to play at a Humanist funeral, as I did this morning.

This experience is quite different from playing for people who just don’t go to church.  The non-churchgoers feel they need a minister on such an occasion, and find Classic FM Christian favourites like Jesu joy of man’s desiring and Sheep may safely graze very comforting.

A Humanist funeral, however, is strictly secular, and Christian favourites are out.  Today, because there were (naturally) no hymns, I was asked to play non-religious music before and after, and also during a brief period of reflection in the middle.

For an organist, this can be quite tricky to plan.  As well as throwing out Jesu joy and Sheep, you have to be careful about music which was originally secular, but has become inextricably linked in people’s minds with church services.  Handel’s Largo, for example, started off as an ode to a tree, but who remembers that?  Dvorak’s New World Largo and Holst’s Jupiter have gone so far as to have hymn words written to them.  Even Nimrod conjures up Remembrance Day associations, and is therefore a bit suspect.

So last night I went through my dog-eared collection and made a list of ‘safe’ ones, which, if you’re interested, included To a Wild Rose, Schubert’s Serenade and Chopin’s Tristesse (remember I’m playing an electronic piano here).  Then I topped the lot off with a few Scottish melodies – Ca’ the yowes, the Eriskay love lilt, and suchlike – and sent them on their way with The Dark Island.   They seemed happy enough with that.  Or as happy as one can be at a funeral.

In another post, it might be worth exploring the reverse side of the coin – when is secular music OK in church services?

Last Wednesday I returned to the funeral parlour after several months’ absence. I had been hoping against hope, but in vain. They still have their electronic piano. It struck me yet again how amazing it is that so many churches and undertakers buy one of these things without consulting the organist or organists who are to play it.

Electronic pianos are the most difficult instruments to play in a church or service context. OK, they have their uses. As pianos, they can work well with guitar groups or with children, while their portability means they can be carried into the hall for a knees-up (none of this applies to our undertaker, of course).

But they are pianos, not organs, and for mainstream services, they are hopeless. If you are lucky, you might find two or three separate organ ‘voices’, but usually there is only one, which has to be used for absolutely everything. In the funeral parlour, half an hour of quiet music is expected before the service starts, and the sheer monotony of one organ sound for that length of time has reduced me to using this particular piano as a piano, serenading the mourners with chunks of Classic FM while trying to revitalise my own long-gone piano touch. This just about works in the cosy parlour, but Chopin, Rachmaninov and the Moonlight Sonata definitely do not sound right in church.

If you are accompanying congregational hymns on an electronic piano, you can’t add or remove stops, mixing and matching tones as you can with a real organ, pipe or electronic. You can’t build up hymn sounds verse by verse until you reach that tremendous Songs of Praise-style last verse. The only way you can vary the volume is by taking a hand off to operate the slider control, while the only way you can vary the tone is by using either the built-in touch sensitivity, so ridiculously alien to any organ, or – wait for it! – the sustaining pedal!

These instruments are lethal to congregational singing, and they are not cheap. They frequently incorporate ‘voices’ and gadgets which will never be used. For a thousand pounds less one could probably purchase a small, simple electronic organ that would sound far better and be a lot easier to play. And which would probably have an optional ‘piano’ voice if you wanted one for groups, children or a knees-up.

Suggestions for coping with a church electronic piano (other than taking an axe to it) are planned for a future post. In the meantime if anyone actually gets on with one of these things in church, please comment and tell us your secret.