Organ matters - Organs matter!

Hi!

A good looking Brindley and Foster instrument is being sold in bits for lack of a purchaser for the whole organ
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160422826832 is the Principal 4ft and the Diapason and display pipes and other things are on another auction by the same seller.

Best wishes

Forum Admin

Hi!

Lots of things are apparently going on in the US. Why not in England? www.organrecitals.com is brilliant but here in this space is an opportunity for player and audience _enthusiasts_ to post details of concerts most importantly with the reasons why they love the programme and why they love the instrument at the chosen venue enough to want a concert there.

Is there no-one in England, Scotland and Wales with enthusiasm?

Best wishes

Forum Admin

Hi!

On another forum, the Riga instrument has been posted as one of the most inspiring instruments in Europe - details are on
http://www.magle.dk/music-forums/801-walcker-organ-riga-cathedral.html

As a directory of specifically inspirational instruments it would be inappropriate not to mention it here.

Best wishes

Forum Admin

Hi!

I see on
http://www.organmatters.co.uk/index.php/topic,39.0.html
that the organ currently needing a new home started out life as a  . . . house organ!

So please can anyone give it a home?

Best wishes

Forum Admin

Dear All


An instrument similar in scale to the Convent instrument which was bulldozed is to be displaced by an electronic. RAPIDLY. Please do not electrocute the Church Warden for this - I already have - and he is only carrying out what he has been asked to do.


http://www.npor.org.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch.cgi?Fn=Rsearch&rec_index=D08096

Pedal				Key action TP  Stop action   Compass-low C  Compass-high f1  Keys 30
	1	Bourdon	16
Choir				Key action TP  Stop action   Compass-low C  Compass-high g3  Keys 56
	2	Lieblich   Gedact	8	originally from Swell
	3	Dulciana	8	originally from Great
	4	Harmonic   Flute	4	originally from Great
Great				Key action TP  Stop action   Compass-low C  Compass-high g3  Keys 56
	5	Open   Diapason	8
	6	Rohr Flute	8
	7	Principal	4	originally Harmonic Flute 4
	8	Fifteenth	2	originally Dulciana 8 TC
Swell				Key action TP  Stop action   Compass-low C  Compass-high g3  Keys 56
	9	Open   Diapason	8	originally Lieblich   Gedact 8
	10	Gamba	8
	11	Principal	4
	12	Oboe	8

I wish Church committees could be more flexible and would listen to people telling them how much better an investment a pipe organ is in the long term. Because this organ is clearly not appreciated where it is (you might substitute those words for expletives - I blame also the advertising of pedlars of electronic wares in their pages of pipe organs that their wires have displaced, like a safari trophy hunter's wall) a HOME IS URGENTLY REQUIRED FOR THIS INSTRUMENT.


Please telephone Michael Ward 01424 460727 and you might email
michael dot ward8 at homecall dot co dot uk

Hi!

Whenever I pop in to the forum to see what's going on, increasingly I see guests logged on at the same time . . . WELCOME!

But why not sign up and join in?

I hope that by focussing on the specific topics of this forum we might be able to concentrate on those very elements of the organ as an instrument that make it the exciting King of Instruments that it is so that more of the general public (how I hate that phrase) - specifically parents and children and schools and nightclub goers - can't turn their back on this wonderful instrument which will otherwise be lost. Similarly, a forum such as this is a wonderful opportunity for interchange of knowledge - among ourselves of common experience or for experts with great resources of experience behind them and young people asking questions - essentially a place for the transfer of knowledge which can die with passing years if not passed on . . .

So PLEASE JOIN IN!

Best wishes

Forum Admin

This topic has been moved to Electronic Organs.

It's good to know that this instrument is inspiring . . . and hopefully as a concert instrument it will be inspiring to the building of new pipe organs too . . . Electronic organs _should_ aspire to be inspiring, but by the very nature of electronics, we can't expect them to last longer than television sets or laptops, which is why they can be a valid research tool towards pipe organ building without necessarily being an end in themselves. For this reason I'm moving this topic to the Electronic section. http://www.organmatters.co.uk/index.php?topic=34.0

However, it should be noted that the instrument's success is on account of David Pinnegar's expertise, additions and work independant of the original manufacture. The instrument includes technology of four manufacturers, specific artifice in signal processing and unusual sound reproducers and is therefore no longer a "normal" electronic organ.

Hi!

I just popped into the forum to see what might have been going on . . . and the photos of the bulldozed organ at the bottom of the page grabbed me . . . and in particular the couplers. The instrument might not look very exciting to some . . . but another look brings a new perspective:


On Choir we have 8884
Great 88842
Swell 88884 plus II rank mixture

An organ with lots of tone colour . . . and I can hear classical purists saying that it's rubbish being unsuitable for Bach. But this instrument takes advantage of pneumatic technology that opened up an era of building despised today. We are so spoiled by the neo Classical Revival of the past 40 years that we forget how organists of the early 20th century "coped" and achieved valid performances. The result of this is that in new pipe organs we are satisfied with nothing less than a pipe for each stop of each key - and I'm not saying that this is a bad thing - but it makes modern pipe organs comparatively more expensive than small pipe organs were in the past. This was a justified reaction to the failings of "unit" instruments or "extension" instruments where arguably borrowing pipes at different pitches could give good tone colour but failed full organ. An example of this, if I am not mistaken, is
http://www.npor.org.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch.cgi?Fn=Rsearch&rec_index=D04826 at Tenterden (whilst in passing http://www.npor.org.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch.cgi?Fn=Rsearch&rec_index=D04820 must be the only example of a 9ft stop in existence  8) ;D ;D ;D ). But on the way to such decadence and poor results were instruments such as the one in issue here with the stops pictured above

Pedal
	1	Acoustic   Bass	32	A
	2	Bourdon	16	A
	3	Bass Flute	8	A
Choir
	4	Lieblich   Gedact	8
	5	Salicional	8
	6	Lieblich   Flute	4
	7	Clarinet	8
Great
	8	Open   Diapason	8
	9	Stopped   Diapason	8	ex Swell
	10	Dulciana	8
	11	Principal	4
	12	Harmonic   Flute	4
	13	Piccolo	2
	14	Tremulant
Swell
	15	Rohr Flute	8	ex Great
	16	Viol di   Gamba	8
	17	Voix   Celeste	8
	18	Gemshorn	4
	19	Dulcet   Mixture	II	2 2/3 & 2
	20	Oboe	8
	21	Tremulant

With 61 note manuals, when you use those Swell to Great Super and Sub octave couplers, you introduce to the Great a proper 16 ft and 4ft devloped chorus with Gross Nasard right through to 1ft excluding the Tierce, which arguably in equal temperament has to be used very judiciously in any event, and one still has the Choir stops with which to contrast if one wants. With Clarinet on Choir and Oboe on Swell one can play earlier repertoire requiring Cromorne on Positif and Cornet on Recit - and with the Oboe and mixture and Super Octave on Swell, one can get a feel of a bright Trumpet. So we see a valuably versatile instrument out of what looks like a boring specification and modest cost which would produce the "real thing" probably at little more than the commercial cost of a mediocre electronic sporting an apparently flashier stoplist.

So perhaps "Good" and "Bad" organs might be a little about what stops one uses, what one combines with which, and remembering to try pulling out the right couplers.

One also has to remember that organists of the interwar period had become perhaps a little more familiar with tone synthesis than we are today, in their familiarity with Hammonds and their drawbars, adding together flutes at different pitches to get Trumpets, Tubas and strings. This was a volte face from the time that a Pope decided that double reeds were the work of the devil so cunning pipe organ builders put together the Cornet mixture of flues to synthesise the Oboe. And that brings us back to how to play something requiring the Cornet on an instrument without the apparent stop nor pitches to do it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIl-LRafVO4

Just because we have forgotten how to play such instruments does not mean that such instruments are intrinsically bad. We just have to work out what the then "good" organ builders had in mind. One also has to beware alterations as Harrisons put a discordant Septieme into their "Harmonics" on the great to give piquancy to the bland Tromba, and in doing so turned it into a hair raising trumpet. In order to use the "Harmonics" as a Mixture for use with the flues, sometimes the Septieme is taken out, bringing blandness to the instrument . . .

So if an instrument has those intermanual super and sub octave couplers . . . they're there to be tried. Attempting to discover intended idioms is so much better than trying to have alterations done to force such instruments into a compromised version of what we consider now to be our ideals!

Best wishes

Forum Admin

Hi!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIK1mV2k49c shows how effective a house organ can be. This builder looks far from amateur.


It's an 8842 specification - Montre, Bourdon, Prestant and Doublette, with a 16ft on the pedals. Without the pedals and 16ft, this is the same specification as Sprague used for house organs with Diapason, Stopped Diapason, Principal and Fifteenth. It's very effective and bright without being overpowering.


Best wishes


Forum Admin

Hi!

http://www.salutemus.co.uk/summer_schools_music_courses_organists_pianist_classes.html

This course is aimed at:

   
• organists wishing to gain   confidence in playing for services (accompanying congregations and choirs)
• organists wishing to explore   repertoire and techniques for smaller instruments
• pianists who are interested in   learning techniques that will help them to transfer their keyboard   skills to the organ

In addition to organ classes there will be opportunities, for those   interested, to study harpsichord technique and basso continuo playing.

In addition to part of the course in the UK there is a visit to Rome and see and hear some of the city's early organs, and also   visit Rieti to see the remarkable Dom Bedos organ about which there are more detials on other threads on this forum.

The course is led, among others, by David Goode, a really brilliant performer and teacher. He was organist of the largest Church organ in the world in San Francisco and now teaches at the  foremost English public school. To watch him perform the Reger Passcaglia building up the crescendo registering entirely by hand is a feat to behold and all who go on this course will have a very fulfilling experience.

Best wishes

Forum Admin

Hi!

In talking to many people about temperament, many people including musicians think that it's a "high faluting" subject and that they would not be able to hear the difference.

What temperament is really about is that if you go up 7 octaves (from memory - I'm bound to get this wrong!) and if you go up 12 fifths, you arrive on the same note. Well you do on the piano . . . But you don't really if you tune your octaves properly and your fifths properly too. An octave note above another is a doubling of frequency. An interval of a fifth is one and a half times. So 2x2x2x2x2x2x2 = 128 and 1.5x1.5x1.5x1.5x1.5x1.5x1.5x1.5x1.5x1.5x1.5x1.5x = 129.7 - so this means that the two notes are very near but not the same. In order to make them the same on the piano we narrow the fifths a bit and at the top we stretch the octaves . . . And the result is far from being in tune.

In equal temperament, we squash the fifths equally. In Unequal Temperament we squash the fifths unequally and this resulted in each key having a different character.

Bach wrote his famous "48" not for the Equal Tempered Clavier but for the Well Tempered Clavier - a system where, unlike just tuning in which only one or two keys can be played comfortably, all the keys can be played happily - a system of equal temperament where some keys are more equal than others! Even some current music teachers continue to peddle the myth that Bach was composing for equal temperament. In addition, on the manuscript Bach drew a famous "squiggle", the loops of which can possibly give clues as to tuning. An American, Bradley Lehman, caused a lot of controversy turning the squiggle upside down to interpret whilst others have interpreted it the right way up. The result is that Lehman's resulting tuning achieves maximum deviation in keys of three accidentals, whilst others accord broadly with historical precedent - Kirnbirger and in the 1960s Kellner in the same spirit, bringing greatest piquancy to the remotest keys, which makes a lot of sense.

This whole issue is relevant to piano music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41xRupc3Hz8
and really opens one's ears
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXzSXWaQGmA
and is one component of the very striking sound
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSf7-4t_SWc
beyond mere voicing and tonal construction of a pipe organ

Meantone tuning gives 8 perfect thirds, reeds like a proper brass band playing on harmonics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8m2ok1Hlh0
and tierces sweet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C16HE2uw3_U
where they do not achieve the same effect on an equal tempered instrument trying to achieve the French sound
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAql0dfZQHY
merely sounding reedy rather than sweet.

It's actually in doing such experiments that I believe that electronics can be the CAD for pipe organs. Just as computers are so necessary in predicting in architecture how buildings will fit together, or in how a drug will behave or indeed what the weather will be like tomorrow, electronics should be more appreciated as a research tool:
Kellner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nP3cCQT14w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiHwSoBYQX8
Meantone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54mE1hxAvyY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbwXpBcGm6Y

I should add that many of the recordings above were made "off the cuff" with camera microphone and automatic volume control rather than with a seperate CD quality soundtrack and therefore are not representative of the proper sound of the experimental instrument in use. Some people listen to YouTube recordings through plastic speakers and then say that an instrument sounds plastic!

I hope that the examples above might inspire others to flirt with temperaments and see what can be performed and what repertoire is excluded by their use. Merely being "out of tune" is not necessarily "wrong" - it is simply that our ears are unaccustomed to some tonalities and that they really bring a refreshing change! I like the Bach Dorian Fugue in meantone and Couperin and other French Baroque composers deliberately sailed into "crisis points" which became lacking in comfortable equal temperament leading "modern composers" into foully ostentatious discords to get their effect . . .  ;D

Best wishes

Forum Admin

Hi!


An instrument I'm really looking forward to visit sometime is Matthew Copley's masterpiece at Edinburgh Cathedral
http://www.matthew-copley.co.uk/portfolio7.htm


A floating Solo division with a Septieme for real bite and a properly developed "Sieze Pieds" chorus on the Great with Grand Nazard and Gross Tierce . . . Oh how wonderful! And a dozen reeds - it should be capable of a real Grand Jeu


The Gross Tierce is a fantastically haunting combination
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1YcEjz8Xro


Best wishes


Forum Admin

Hi!


I have just discovered another instrument in this genre - built by Moucherel and rebuilt by Formentelli to the Dom Bedos formular at Mouzon in the Ardennes:


http://miagep5.free.fr/


Best wishes


Forum Admin

Hi!

Currently on the front page of this forum are photographs of
http://www.npor.org.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch.cgi?Fn=Rsearch&rec_index=D07966

These were taken on the last day of existence of that organ, possibly a Willis, and a delightful small organ arranged over three manuals.

Behind the convent chapel was an enormous pile of broken wood - roof timbers and joists, valuable on the second hand market, just heaped. Nothing was salvaged. The heap was as high as the chapel, and a private second hand fire engine was on hand along the drive to deal with the consequences.

The next day the bulldozers moved in. The chapel was bulldozed. The organ was bulldozed inside the chapel.

Noone cared.

If we are to be able to rebuild our civilisation and what we care for, we cannot just sit back. When you are sliding down a hill, you have to make even greater efforts to progress up the hill.

For that reason this forum exists. In order to reverse the decline, we have to be slightly more evnagelistic about why we think that the organ is worthy of a special place in people's hearts  and I hope that all who care about the organ as an instrument might take an active part in showing people why the organ is so amazing.

Best wishes

Forum Admin

Hi!


This thread is intended for pipe organs, for reasons of extremis and in view of the museum nature of the instrument, I hope that readers will excuse my posting here.


Many years ago I acquired a 1937 Boosey and Hawkes Hammond model E.


This instrument served in a subsidiary chapel of a major public school and was replaced by an extension unit pipe organ that is arguably "worse" than the Hammond it replaced. One of the first, it has typewriter style preset buttons, full 60 note manuals and a full 30 or 32 note pedalboard. Despite being a lifetime old, it still works, although I abandoned the amps and took the outputs to stereo mic amps and power amps with which it operates very effectively. It also has the infamouse second set of tonewheel generators to create the chorus effect, which is much more alive than the synthesised version that was developed for later instruments.


This was a legend of an instrument, probably of the nature of the type infamously installed in Canterbury Cathedral (by Percy Vickery himself), and about which many senior musicians (who had probably lost the upper frequencies of their hearing) were persuaded to give endorsements.


However, I have seen today a clutch of piles of dust from woodworm holes . . . and seeing also the first holes in a bourdon pipe of the pipe organ in the same room, and not having used it in a long time, it's clearly time for this instrument to go somewhere else for more loving care than I have time for . . . .


So if anyone is interested, please contact me.


Best wishes


Forum Admin

Hi!


http://www.organosandomenicorieti.it/Manifestazioni/2010_festival_organistico_europeo/Festival_europeo_2010_en.htm


should be a real ear opener . . .


Best wishes


Forum Admin

Hi!


I'm under attack!  :-[  I should have expected it of course . . .  ;)  Being really flamed . . .


One question. Why are the cinema organs grouped with fair organs? They are serious instruments in there own right, and tbh, they should be in there own catagory. More than half the theatre organ stuff ive listened to and played is far from light. Some of it is a complete orchestral score, arranged for one person. I know that theatre organists put in a hell of alot of effort into what they are playing, it isnt an easy thing to do properly, it gets very complicated, especially when second touch comes in and waterfalling!


Well actually sometimes tonally there are similarities, strong trems too, and the most complicated 110 key Gaviolis are complex in their own right with arrangements having to be complex and artful, very often with a solo/accompaniment structure in the same idiom with highly coloured solo stops pitted against a background of flutes even despite their differences with Tibias.


In terms of orchestral arrangements, Percy Vickery loved playing Orpheus in the Underworld, and on the straight organ, Jeremy Filsell is a master of the orchestral transcription. So there's great overlap across the board.


So putting them together is no disrespect to Wurlys and fairground organ sections don't hit me between the eyes on other forums.


There is, of course, a direct crossover point in the automatic playing instruments from the Aeolian Organ company for whom esteemed composers such as Moszkowski composed (Opus 90, the manuscript of which is in a friend's collection), demanding harps and other effects common to the cinema instrument and the Welte instrument at Saloman's House at Tunbridge Wells.


So the genres share commonalities of repertoire, style of arrangement, tonal structure and often mechanism which I have suggested therefore can be usefully explored together.


Perhaps "orchestral organs" or "unit orchestras" should actually be considered in the same category as French Baroque instruments which replicated the brass bands of their day. And of course the "unit orchestras" shared a common purpose in the theatre that orchestrions played in the dance halls . . .


So I hope to be forgiven for drawing together such similarities . . . and I'm really looking for that DYNAMITE that excites passions enough to start some discussion on this forum!

I note that NPOR does not include the Salomon Welte instrument, so in fact drawing automatically playing instruments into the genre might help towards recognition and preservation.

Best wishes


Forum Admin

Hi!

Perhaps to some the name Dom Bedos might merely be a name in the midst of time and far flung reaches of memory. But following his tradition leads to exciting instruments. . . If you haven't come across this genre before, try
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSf7-4t_SWc

Need one say more . . . other than "How does this sound so amazing . . . ."

So this thread is here to explore this heritage, the organs, their construction and registration . . .

Best wishes

Forum Admin

Hi!

Percy Vickery was a cinema organist from the '30s and very kindly did a recording of each stop of the Waltham Cross Christie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-D6B815ku4

Best wishes

Forum Admin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgnlDmVsumo