Organ matters - Organs matter!

pcnd's reply has been added on to my posting. I concluded with the NPOR reference and pcnd commenced with 'I realise that....'

I would, in some cases, agree with you regarding the Swell strings.  Walker's strings could be gorgeous (and these were a good pair), but here I don't think any colour has been lost.  The Swell Open has more than a touch of velvet to it and the box is effective, so you have a warm, quiet voice there.  Since by a lucky chance, the half-draw on the Open produces an excellent celeste (a ploy which doesn't work on all organs - I tried it on the 1905 Forster & Andrews on Fogo Island here in Newfoundland last year without success), an effect which should have been lost has in fact been saved.  If the organ had been a little older, it might not have had the strings in the first place (cf Romsey Abbey), so the result is arguably more 'old Walker' than the original!  I don't know of another similar-sized Walker where the Swell consists solely of 8' stops plus octave coupler.

The pipework for the Gemshorn and Mixture came from an organ in Manchester and are thought to be by Hardy of Stockport.  They are, however, very well suited to the organ and excellently finished, as Arnold, Williamson & Hyatt's work always as.  Although it might have been preferable for the Mixture to commence at 15.19.22, they had to work with what was available, and possibly existing space on the soundboard.  The octave coupler is still there, and useful within the limits of a 56 note compass.  A three rank mixture on a Walker of this date would have broken back to 8.12.15 at middle C anyway, so the only difference would have been in the bass and tenor.

Although we all know that altering old organs can be a risky business,  I am convinced that in this case nothing has been lost and a good deal gained.  I was invited back a few years ago to give a recital celebrating the organ's 125th birthday and I didn't feel constrained by its small size.  Incidentally, in 1885, it was opened by T. Tertius Noble, who was at the time organist at All Saints, Colchester, where they had a very similar but larger Walker installed the previous year (now at St. Andrew's, Greenstead, Colchester), so I played a couple of his pieces in 2010.  I would have expected to miss the 4' Flute on the Great, but I didn't.

It was always a good organ.  I think it's even better now.

I know of a few examples where the flute has been transposed, in my opinion, not to the instrument's advantage - the wonderful Binns at Old Independent, Haverhill, Suffolk was one - but sometimes the gain definitely outweighs the loss.  Wivenhoe Parish Church, Essex comes to mind, somewhat surprisingly because this is a fairly bold old Walker and one would imagine that the 4' flute would be missed.  In fact, this is not the case (I've known this organ for over forty-five years, having played for a lot of weddings in my early teens so that the organist could play cricket with my father - he's still the organist today).  If the specification is studied, it will be seen that there have been significant alterations, but the effect has been to make it sound more like an old Walker than it did originally!  Incidentally, one can get a lovely celeste by half-drawing the Swell Open with the Stopped Diapason, so even that wasn't a loss.

A lot of Twelfths tended to be flutey - Harrisons' were - and actually work rather well in chorus.

http://www.npor.org.uk/NPORView.html?RI=N08706

I realise that you have played this organ and I have not. However, I wonder if some brightness (and perhaps an enhanced ability to lead full congregations) has been gained - but at the expense of colour. With regard to the Swell, I should not willingly have parted with the Echo Gamba and the Céleste - particularly for a 12-15 Mixture (I should have preferred 15-19-22, even if it had to be one or two ranks only in the bass). In addition, with the Nazard effect on the G.O., i would not want another twelfth on the Swell, in an instrument of this size. I can appreciate how the Nazard has coloured the G.O., but I would be inclined to reverse the alterations to the Swell Organ. In preference, I might have opted for a 19-22 Mixture on the G.O., and kept the Swell strings; if they were old Walker ranks, they were probably gorgeous.

I am only too well aware of the pitfalls of commenting on an instrument which one has neither heard nor played; however, whilst I was still at school, I was organist at a church with an even smaller instrument, which had the following un-enterprising stop-list (and mechanical action to everything except the Pedal organ):

PEDAL ORGAN

Bourdon  16
Bass Flute  (Ext.)  8
Great to Pedal
Swell to Pedal

GREAT ORGAN

Open Diapason  8
Claribel Flute  8
Dulciana  8
Principal  4
Swell to Great

SWELL ORGAN

Violin Diapason  8
Salicional  8
Voix Céleste  (C13)  8
Gemshorn (parallel and slotted)  4
Oboe  8

In 1982, it became necessary to clean and restore the instrument, and so I had our organ builder reconstruct it to the following scheme:

PEDAL ORGAN

Bourdon  16
Flute  (Ext.)  8
Stopped Flute  (Ext.)  4
Great to Pedal
Swell to Pedal

GREAT ORGAN
Open Diapason  8
Stopped Diapason  8  (New)
Principal  4  (Revoiced)
Fifteenth  2  ()New - bright and strong)
Swell to Great

SWELL ORGAN

Open Diapason  8
Salicional  8
Voix Céleste  (C13)  8
Gemshorn  (Stronger)
Oboe  8  (Opened-up)

At the time, I vetoed a further suggestion to replace the Oboe with a small Trumpet, since it would have cost another £500, and I did not wish our congregation to have too great a cost to bear. In retrospect, I think that they wouuld have borne the extra cost gladly - and It would have made the instrument perfect for its size.

Broadbridge Heath - Reminds me somewhat of the nice little Mander extension organ that used to be in St. Anne & St. Agnes, Gresham Street, City of London, and now at Bruern Abbey School, Oxfordshire.  Very effective and exciting.

St. Serf - the trouble with adding a Great Mixture to a chorus not intended to carry one is that it may tend to upset the whole balance of the instrument.  The mixture at St. Serf's is in the Swell, from whence it can be coupled to the Great, and that is how the instrument was conceived.  You might find transposing the 4' flute to 2 2/3' worth trying.  I know of a number of instruments where this has been done, sometimes with considerable success.

Welcome indeed, and may you have many happy years with that fine Rushworth at Inverleith.

Yup - St. Magnus Cathedral has a 32' Sub Bass wired in this way, and very effective it is.  I didn't know it was standard Willis III, rather than IV, practice though.

pcnd is right - the bourdon at 32' pitch with the 'acoustic' effect in the bottom octave only is the most likely to be successful.  One can draw the Open Wood at 16' pitch to beef it up anyway.

Binns used to produce some pretty hefty 32' resultant basses, but his stuff tended to be hefty anyway.  The effect on a relatively small instrument with a pedal consisting of 32, 16,8, all taken from a beefy bourdon, must surely have put the fear of God into many a northern heart.

Extra rumble at Parkstone, I guess.  It had a reputation for producing a lot more than might be expected and was probably an ideal Anglo-Catholic organ, despite being all in one box.

The Resultant at Kilkhampton is certainly arresting, but I didn't feel it was a particularly convincing 32' - rather a very gripping big bass.  An exceptionally fine organ, all the same.

The worst resultant I know of is St. Patrick, Ballymacarrett, Belfast, which is an otherwise decent Evans & Barr 2m with the addition of a high-pressure reed at 16.8.4 to pulverise large congregations of shipyard workers into submission.  The open wood plays at 32' pitch as far as c12, but is quinted on itself for the whole compass.  It really doesn't work at all.  Even the aforesaid Mukkinese Battle Horn fails to disguise it.  The infuriating thing is that a little rewiring would make the whole effect palatable (as would wiring the Swell octave to work through the Swell to Great).

http://www.npor.org.uk/NPORView.html?RI=D01426

The real killer seems to be if the rank supplying the quint is too loud, although other considerations have to be made, such as placement and acoustic.  Although by the laws of physics it's wrong, a better effect can sometimes be had by wiring the fourth below (i.e. 21 1/3) for the top seven notes of the bottom octave and the fifth above for the remaining five.  I see no point, in nearly all cases, in providing a 10 2/3 quint all the way up the board.

Bingo! lol!

I used to be in awe of his technique, but not by his orchestration.  Recently, however,  listening to him on YouTube, I'm put off by the note fluffs in some performances.  Virgil Fox used to have masses of these sometimes, but.....

I bet I can think of a particular old Conacher to which pcnd is not referring - lol

IMHO, the old Compton Electrones were by far the finest electronic imitations of their period, and in some ways I would sooner play one today than some of the more advanced models.  They didn't sound tremendously like a real organ, although they were a good attempt for the time, but they had a certain class all of their own and you could register them like a pipe organ.  The consoles were the same as those made for Compton pipe organs - the small Electrone had the same console and specification as the Miniatura II.

I once played the ex-Free Trade Hall Compton, when it was privately owned and living in St. John's Wood.  It was quite a remarkable beast and showed great commitment and belief in the product.

If you can keep yours together, it would be vastly preferable to selling off the bits.

I agree - all that you mention seems odd.  But for the period I think it was a rather daring and forward-looking scheme.  In particular, the Solo had a lot of potential for interesting registration and the little cymbal could have been coupled and various pitches to increase the interest on any other manual.  I imagine Cocker specified a viole cornet there and Allan Wicks got it changed. Likewise, the overall Mixture scheme was, I believe, Wicks's and presumably had to fit in with what was already prepared in a scheme which was well-advanced when he took over.  The Great Nineteenth could have been quite useful in chorus building, particularly when one remembers that there were octave couplers on the Great.  I, too, don't care for principal-toned tierces (I had one at St. Magnus Cathedral).  Francis Jackson had a Larigot on the Great at York.  At one time, Holy Rude, Stirling had the Great twelfth transposed to make a nineteenth.  While I instinctively felt that it was wrong to alter Rushworth's masterpiece (other things happened, too), I also had a sneaking feeling that it was more useful (I often think a lot of twelfths are not much use, although now and again I come across one which is just right).

It was different, certainly, but I'd be interested to know in what ways you find it weird.  I don't think I would have wanted so much duplication of solo stops to different departments, although I can see where Cocker was coming from.  For the rest of it, I think it's a clever, forward-looking scheme.

It's rather big for a building that size (in the UK, anyway - in the States I suppose it would be small!).

Cocker originally planned for a complete screen division, but funds were not sufficient to include it.  In fact, he had visions of an enormous amount of organ, including electronic divisions, to serve various parts of the building and hoped to pipe sections would be built by Harrison and Compton as a joint effort.  That would have been interesting....

Nearly all British organ work after World War 2 consisted of recycling old material.  The Milton Organ at Tewkesbury has been quoted as an extreme example of the practice. Although it sounded remarkably well, its innards were a nightmare and gave varying amounts of trouble until Ken Jones built a new organ fairly recently.  Similarly, Nicholson's St. Edmundsbury Cathedral organ suffered from re-use of old soundboards and action.  One of the contributing factors to the huge success of Manders' work at St. Paul's was that everything mechanical and electrical was new, thus allowing the old pipes to speak their best.

For a lot of its life, at least, most of the Hill was off the screen, the only portion in the Scott case being a very powerful chorus to mixture plus big tuba.  The present organ thus perpetuates the previous layout.

I agree that Cocker's 1930s scheme was a masterly essay in pulling all the elements together (including the 'Father Smith' organ which had hitherto been a separate entity).  Cocker's essay on the subject in "The Organ" remains one of the best.

With Allan Wicks's modifications, I think the present scheme - on paper - is one of the best of the period.  It is more imaginative and versatile than St. John's College, Cambridge, which was always hailed as a forward-looking design.  In practice,  I make no judgement as I only heard the beast once.  I can well imagine that the 'works' may have given trouble from early on, bearing in mind that parts were already old and probably considerably shaken-up from the Blitz.  Then there would have been a whole army of top-note chests, etc.  I am firmly in favour of the extra notes at the top to accommodate the octave couplers (I think one has to live with an instrument so-equipped to realise how valuable this is), but they need to be there from the beginning (as they usually are in North America) and not grafted on later.

I didn't know until I read this correspondence that the big Tuba was horizontal on the screen.  By 'Eck!!

There were two tubas - an 'Orchestral Tuba' and a big one - "Norman Cocker's Tuba".  The latter, I believe, was removed a while ago and has been lying around at Harrisons' ever since.  Is it coming back, I wonder?

You could be right about Facebook. I'm not on it, but my wife keeps coming up with various bits of information.

Ah - thank-you!  Those changes would make the instrument more flexible and address a few weaknesses.  In particular, I remember one of the organ scholars when it was new stating definitely that the odd mixture in the Swell should be called "Taint" (sic).  Such things were popular in Germany and among a few enthusiasts here, Maurice Grant included, but they relied to some extent on a fuller foundation and a bigger acoustic.  It was very difficult to find repertoire which used the New college Teint.  Mixtures at York University were similarly straightened out many years ago.

Speaking for myself, I would miss the Messingregal and Rohrschalmei, but I don't have to play the thing every day and the new disposition will obviously be much more useful and not just a pandering to those of us who like renaissance rude noises....

I hadn't heard of any stop changes, although I did hear that some revoicing had been done.