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Topics - Martin Renshaw

#1
5. An unusual and very protracted Reformation, initiated in 1533 by a musician-King Henry VIII, continued by his church-music loving daughter Elizabeth, but not really completed until towards the end of the 17th century, left the cathedrals, universities and some collegiate churches with their endowments and musical establishments virtually intact, initially at least, while also creating secularised cathedrals from dissolved monastic ones.  The court continued to enjoy Latin services and anthems, and their organists and composers included Tallis, Byrd and Gibbons - the first of these brought up in pre-Reformation Canterbury, the second a life-long Roman Catholic and the third a Protestant.  An attempt by the Commissioners of the youthful Edward VI to rob churches of all their valuable items (church plate and bells being particularly targeted) was only partly foiled by the accession of Mary in 1553, when Roman liturgies and their ornaments were restored.  During Elizabeth's long reign, though, many parish churches gradually lost their old furnishings and organs, having finally been deprived of their monastic support and being heavily taxed to support wars against continental Roman Catholic powers, principally Spain.  It is likely that organs from disbanded monasteries had already found their way into private houses, where both Anglican and Roman musical devotions and concerted music became common.  Two large organs were however made in London : at Westminster when the former abbey became a cathedral in 1540 and following serious fire damage to St Paul's cathedral in the 1560s.  The large and very beautiful Westminster case, pure Italian renaissance in style, still exists at St Brieuc in Britanny ; one of the earliest organ exports to France !  It is unlikely that similar organ-building activity went on in the provinces, where in general the status of music in church worship was under sustained attack from hard-line bishops, except in the south-western counties where many organs continued to be used and made right up to the Civil War.  English sea power and zeal for trade make it possible for Thomas Dallam, from a dispossessed minor-aristocratic Catholic family, to go with a very complicated and expensive mechanical instrument through the dangerous Mediterranean to Istanbul as a gift for the Sultan.  He compiled a detailed Diary of this journey in 1599 and 1600.  The oldest English keyboard instrument (of any kind) to survive in playing condition is a consort organ since at least 1682 at Knole House, Sevenoaks (in Kent), and is now thought to date to the later years of the 16th century, the time of Dallam's journey.
#2
4. The later medieval use of organs, from about 1450 onwards, is implied in wills which are primarily bequests to employ singers, very often chantry-priests.  One, two or even three organs became quite common in town churches and in richer country areas, newly-fashionable rood-lofts being sometimes equipped with a small 'portatyf' (that is, easily portable, but not hand-held) used during special liturgies.  The organ used every day was often placed on the north side of chancels alongside the singers' seats ; towards the end of the fifteenth century their sound were made more flexible dynamically by an earlier redeployment of the key sliders as rank-sliders, to stop off some individual ranks of pipes.  The invention of these 'stops' may have been due to English or Flemish makers ; finger keyboards and key pallets were presumably developed from the key actions of the strap-carried tiny processional organ. 

Organ players were usually first trained as boy singers ; in both singing and playing they improvised descants and basses to the plainsong melody. Playing alternated with singing, verse by verse, and – copying the vocal style they had learnt – organ players developed an ornamented keyboard style.  The title of 'organist' was not official in many cases until the 19th century, and this peculiarity underlines the historically close association of the English organ with its own 'vocal' sonorities with voices in churches.  In secular music, organs were played in consort with other instruments such as viols and sackbuts in dances, 'fancies' and in solo song. 

It is possible that by the early 16th century there were around 4,000 organs in Britain, some very large ; research to try to refine this figure is going on at present.  See my web-site : soundsmedieval.org  for further information.
#3
3. In larger early medieval churches, organs of various sizes, probably made in monastic workshops or on the spot by town-based workmen, were installed in the various places where services were held, such as the nave, Lady chapel, and other guild chapels, or – as at Canterbury – on the pilgrims' route through the building.  These organs still had nothing to do with the professional choirs or their music, but seem to have had specific uses within ceremonies which varied from one cathedral or monastic community to another.  Organs also began to be built in parish churches under the patronage of monasteries and priories ; there were about six hundred major and minor monastic communities by this time.  Towards the end of the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote ironically in his Nun's Priest's Tale about the arrogant and proud cock Chanticleer, whose (cracked and shrill) ...
... voys was murier than the murie orgon
On messe-days that in the chirche gon.
[His voice was livelier than the noisy organ
That sounds in churches on mass-days.]
So it is likely that by then some London parish, courtly or monastic churches known to Chaucer possessed organs, and they were used on special days, perhaps liturgically inside the churches.  In Chaucer's time the organ was already starting to develop into various types of instruments, some of which were capable of doing more subtle things than just making a loud noise.
#4
2. Several Anglo-Saxon monasteries and cathedrals in Britain are known to have possessed organs, probably mounted in their west facades.  Like the Roman organs they were there to amuse and perhaps frighten the faithful, but also to sound out with bells and Te Deums to welcome princes and prelates and to signal high feast days.  One at Winchester (c985) was celebrated in part of a long poem in praise of the bishop who had it enlarged :
'Considuntque duo concordi pectore fratres...
Here sit two brothers of harmonious spirit
Each a guide ruling his own alphabet.
There are hidden holes in four times ten tongues [sliders]
...And they strike the seven separate joyful tones
Mixed with the song of the lyric semitone
...And the melody of the muses is heard everywhere in the city...'
Which in a city in a hollow surrounded by hills is indeed perfectly possible...
#5
We all think we know something about the history of the organ in England - after all, there are plenty of books about this.  The only problem is that all these books are written from a 'north side of the Channel' view.  But you only have to go across the water, take a look at what has gone on there, and then your perspective changes radically.  From over there, the history of the organ in England looks very different, rather picaresque and definitely more amusing.  Over the next 20 episodes, all very short and written originally for audiences in France and Spain and using the latest scholarship (some of it my own - you'll have to work out which), let us take a look at more than 2000 years over the next few days.  Hold on tight - here we go ...

1. The Romans almost certainly introduced organs to Britain, to be used in the amphitheatres of the major cities.  So, while the gladiators fought and the chariots raced, several bellows-slaves sweated while two or more players manipulated key-sliders in an organ whose high-pressure wind sounded a multitude of copper pipes.  This organ was described by Vitruvius in the 10th century, but Auden's poetic description (c1942) in his Ode to St Cecilia, who was allegedly martyred to the sound of an organ and became consequently the perhaps rather unwilling patroness of musicians, captures the essence :
    And by ocean's margin this innocent virgin
        Constructed an organ to enlarge her prayer,
        And notes tremendous from her great engine
        Thundered out on the Roman air.
However, the organ perhaps known to Cecilia and since associated with her had no ecclesiastical connections whatever until long after the Western church became the official Roman religion.

(c) Martin Renshaw