Organ matters - Organs matter!

Quote from: AnOrganCornucopia on February 18, 2012, 06:36:32 PM
This isn't my mum's school but it's in a similar position - there are two pipe organs (one small, recently-acquired Peter Collins, one unplayable 1930s Rushworth & Dreaper, which the school want rid of) but there's just nowhere to put what they actually need. They've recently spent several million on a new hall commemorating the school's 450th anniversary (though none of the buildings extant predate the 1930s).

That's absolutely bizarre. My old school (MGS) has a small Peter Collins, an unplayable 1930s Rushworth and Dreaper (that probably very few people even know exists since the pipework is hidden behind a wooden screen at the front of the hall, and the console was dismantled by my father and me to make way for the Peter Collins). The buildings date from the 1930s, acquired a new hall recently and might have been the same school except mine is 497 years old this year. Where are you?

Do check out the BIOS link, some absolute gems there. High on my list would be the 3 man Lewis currently in St Marks Battersea Rise in south London - I am surprised to see it listed there but an abolute gem and easier to make a decision when the instrument is still in situ and working. Also BIOS lists a 3 man Harrison and Harrison from the peak of their romantic reign. Obviously there will be significant transport and re-erection costs involved but you can't go wrong with either instrument. Admittedly neither has the 16 foot pedal reed you mentioned but not the end of the world and as a last resort can always be added subsequently though there would have been tonal reaons for not including from the outset. Happy hunting!

I live in a Victorian terraced house so keep volume low. The Tannoys don't reproduce the organ they deceive you into thinking it's there in front of you. And vocals if blindfolded you'd not know it was a recording!

Ouch I can't believe I missed seeing those! I have to say, since starting the whole Hauptwerk melarky, the Tannoy DC2000 speakers I picked up for the cost of a couple of tanks of petrol are totally epic. I gather the latest 8 inch dual concentric Tannoy speakers of similar size retail for around 4 grand, but the price of the old 1980s Tannoy DCs on Ebay has started to climb, maybe David has begun a trend!

I opted for a pair of modest bookshelf speakers for my rear surround on the grounds that I didn't need anything so clear or loud as the front speakers. But the Tannoys absolutely shame the competition. Hopefully I'll find a smaller Tannoy dual concentric bookshelf speaker to replace them in due course - I suspect that suspending two more large floorstanding speakers high up in the corner of the room would raise eyebrows, notwithstanding that hidden in the case of my Hauptwerk organ I've already mounted two DC2000 just shy of the ceiling.

I'm playing them through an equally antique Yamaha TAN55ES amplifier which I'm assured is a classic in its own right, and a sub that goes down to 18 Hz for the big stuff. Absolutely incredible sound. Now I just need to figure out how to tame the bass stops and get around the various nodes that the room displays at certain notes.

This is a most interesting thread. However, the audio buff websites tell me that you should budget around half or less of your budget on the speakers, as much again on the amplifiers and anything that's left over goes on the speaker cable (some of which I saw recently for a mere £5000 a metre....) So in addition to what hifi speakers are good for organ music (on the face of it, I'd say dual concentrics plus a decent subwoofer if your space or budget doesn't extend to full range Lowthers...) - what sort of amplifiers come particularly recommended for listening tio the organ through hifi speakers?

I must say I do find even after a century that George Ashdown Audsley's Art of Organbuilding never fails to reveal interesting nuggets of information. He actually decries electric action on the grounds that at the time of writing it was simply too unreliable - which doubtless contributed to Hope-Jones chequered career. But I was fascinated to read recently (though cannot recall if it was in AoOB or elsewhere) that the earliest attempts at electric action were pioneered in the 1860s by none other than Charles Spackman Barker, who perfected the Barker lever and thereafter seems to have abandoned further research into electrics. One cannot help wondering, had electricity been better understood in the 1860s, whether tubular pneumatic action organs would ever had seen the light of day.

I must say it never ceases to amaze me how the grand organ at Birmingham Town Hall made a cameo appearance in the final Harry Potter film, on the gallery of the dining room at Malfoy Manor:

Quote from: David Pinnegar on November 03, 2011, 08:12:40 PM
Of various speakers, although Tannoy DC2000 and Sixes 611 speakers may sound excellent to varying extents on continuous tones, the DC2000 sounding clinically sterile and the 611 exciting on trumpets.....

Among the speakers above, there was one which would have a chance of passing a blind test between the live performer playing the piano and his recording and the others simply did not come close . . .

So having had the privilege of listening to both types, and in addition some Lowthers (which I have to say were vastly better than anything I've ever heard before in my life), and in addition having just come from buying a secondhand pair of Tannoys (on your personal advice), which speakers did you think stand a chance of being confused with a live piano performance David?

Ever paranoid  ;)

Contrabombarde

I'm confused.

Genesis 6:19 says two of every kind of animal. Presumably one pair.

Genesis 7:2 says seven of every clean animal (or should that be seven pairs) and a pair of every unclean animal.

But wasn't the definition of clean and unclean animals first given rather a long time later, by the Lord to Moses in in Leviticus chapter 11?

Plenty to salivate about on that site - and the prices of the instruments vary hugely too. For €130,000 you could have a small two manual - or perhaps a four manual mechanical neobaroque monster! I can't recall such an array of mutations as that Schmid (http://www.pipeorgans.eu/en/pipeorgans/Schmid-57-IV-P/pix/2563):

Prinzipal 4' 
Nasat 2 2/3' 
Blockflöte 2' 
Terz 1 3/5' 
Septime 8/7' 
Oktave 1' 
None 8/9' 
Undezime 8/11' 
Tredezime 8/13'  not to mention those on other divisions viz

Großquinte 5 1/3' 
Spitzquinte 2 2/3' 
Sifflöte 1 1/3' 

A sound for sore ears! But oh oh oh the Walcker ::)

David P very kindly mentioned my work earlier - I have been a bit tied up in central Africa recently but am back on Briterra firma now (though wondering what on earth I came back to!)

Just to clarify, I didn't actually look for or observe a relationship between running or stopping school orchestras and teenagers getting pregnant, though I did observe that the under-18s who got pregnant tended to conceive in the period after they had left school and already taken (though maybe not passed) their GCSEs. I rest my case that that if you inspire young people with music, art, crafts, sport and other generally useful things that give them a sense of achievement, they will be more likely to use a rather better form of contraception than they are currently using (none!), namely aspiration.

I'm weighing in here having seen both a very interesting Hauptwerk console mentioned earlier in the thread and a discussion about how stopheads might have changable text for a virtual organ. I suspect most organists would prefer a console with drawstops to any other method of changing registration (unless they are a theatre organist). Personally I could cope in a digital organ having illuminated drawstops (similar to some of Compton's organs) but they tend to only be found in higher end digital organs, and I've never even seen them used in real pipe organs.

The problem with any conventional console with labelled drawstops that is linked to a virtual organ is that you are pretty much forced to play the organ that corresponds to the labels. And the beauty of virtual organs like Hauptwerk is that you can experiment, add ranks and stops sampled from some of the world's finest pipe organs, and generally configure your organ to a limitless degree. That said, there are a number of ways in which this could be overcome. For example, a very simple method would be to have interchangable, slide-outable strips above the otherwise blank knobs so that the specification of whatever virtual organ you are playing corresponds to the knobs:

http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/8117/2ml8.jpg
http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/7647/mg2117fc5.jpg

The Novation Launchpad has an 8 by 8 matrix of square buttons that light up when pressed and a number of Hauptwerk users are using this to control stops, perhaps you could put a swapable clear plastic overlay depending on the organ specification:

http://cdn1.ableton.com/resource/599fec9fc8232063fd8d637816b66b21/launchpad-ableton-main-image.png

With Hauptwerk you don't get a lot of choice about the default graphics that come with each commercial sample set, though if you don't mind losing some functionality you can design your own user interface, though it is supposedly rather complicated to do so. A number of Hauptwerk users are using j-organ for stop controls since j-organ is easier to customise the user interface, such as the photo previously illustrated (notice that when "on", the stops "jump out" at you), and the thread alluded to in Hauptwerk suggested that the current crop of 23 inch monitors are pretty similar in dimensions to a three or four manual stopjamb:

http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/8862/salisburyo.jpg

THe advantage of a touchscreen over any other technology is that it avoids redundant knobs - with physical knobs or buttons, you are limited to however many you have in your console and if you have fewer stops, some will be unused. With j-organ you only need as many knobs as there are stops in your organ, and a larger organ can be controlled by smaller stops.

But the ultimate solution is perhaps a variation on this:
http://www.gizmag.com/go/7308/
http://xsreviews.co.uk/reviews/other-products/optimus-mini-three/

Just imagine, each stopknob would have the name of the stop appear in a 1 inch or smaller OLED screen on the stop head; and this would change depending on which virtual organ was selected. Undoubtedly very expensive, but crying out for someone to try. I even read that small (1inch diamter) circular OLED screens are now available which would be perfect for such an application.

There was a company starting up in Gloucester that was building bespoke Hauptwerk consoles and DHM on the Hauptwerk forum is the UK contact for Hoffricher.

Being a school, would it not be an enterprising challenge to design and construct a Hauptwerk console, doing the necessary computer installation etc? Better still, find a redundant pipe organ in decent condition and relocate that, again as an exercise in design and technology or whatever woodworking is called these days. A few schools have gained organs that way.

The Shrewsbury organ is absolutely magnificent, I think particularly the reeds. The church is very "open", as in open through the week and proud of its medieval stained glass windows. But it's been decommissioned or deconsecrated or whatever one does to old Anglican churches and so has maybe a couple of services maximum per year so is thus virtually a museum to its windows and organ.

No idea who maintains it - doesn't look like it's had any significant work for decades and is creaking at the seams. But Binns built things to last and all things considered it's not doing too badly, most notes and most stops work and there aren't any ciphers. They have a weekly lunchtime recital in the summer and are very happy to let organists to play it during the week whilst the tourists are walking around.

It is quite a thrilling experience to play it, as I have done on a number of occasions, though it isn't the easiest organ in the world to play - one doesn't dare meddle with the Binns adjustable combination system (thankfully some useful combinations have been set up) and the pedalboard is a whole 33 inches from the Choir so you need to wear stilts. I hope (but doubt) that would be addressed if ever it was restored.