And for some "historical background".....
http://www.organmatters.com/index.php/topic,297.msg1024.html#msg1024
Eric
KB7DQH
http://www.organmatters.com/index.php/topic,297.msg1024.html#msg1024
Eric
KB7DQH
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Show posts MenuQuote Religion, UK
Nearly two-thirds of British people stated that religion causes more harm than it brings benefits, according to a new poll, which shows Muslim beliefs at odds with those of the rest of society.
The poll of 2,004 people conducted by Survation exclusively for Huffington Post UK revealed that nearly two in five Britons have no religious allegiance, with just 56 percent describing themselves as Christians.
The figures for active worship are even more stark, with 60 percent of the population surveyed claiming they are "not religious at all" with only 8 percent saying they are "very religious."
"Religion has become a 'toxic brand' in the UK," Linda Woodhead, professor of the sociology of religion at Lancaster University, told HuffPost UK.
"What we are seeing is not a complete rejection of faith, belief in the divine, or spirituality, though there is some of that, but of institutional religion in the historic forms which are familiar to people."
Young people tended to be less skeptical. Roughly 30 per cent of 18-24 year olds believe that religion does more good than harm, while only 19 per cent of 55-64 year-olds agree.
70 percent of Jews, who constituted about 1 percent of those surveyed, claimed that religion was a force for the negative, more than any other group.
The participants also showed that they did not believe that belief was an indicator of being a good person, with 55 percent saying that atheists are just as likely to be moral as believers. In fact, more (8 percent) thought the irreligious were more likely to be good people than the theists, than vice versa (6 percent).
"This survey just confirms what we know is the common sense of people in Britain today - that whether you are religious or not has very little to do with your morality," said Andrew Copson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association.
"Most people understand that morality and good personal and social values are not tied to religious belief systems, but are the result of our common heritage and experience as human beings: social animals that care for each other and are kind to others because we understand that they are human too."
"Not only that, people understand that religious beliefs themselves can be harmful to morality: encouraging intolerance, inflexibility and the doing of harm in the name of a greater good. We only need to look around us to perceive that fact."
The results show a continuation of existing trends, with church attendances halving to only 800,000 a week over the past half-century, and the number of Christians falling from 72 to 59 percent in just a decade between the 2001 and 2011 surveys, with a corresponding increase in those openly irreligious.
Indeed, the only religion to exhibit growth in the period was Islam, from 3 to 5 percent.
While only 2.5 percent of those surveyed were Muslims, those who were displayed a greater commitment to their faith. One in five UK Muslims describes themselves as "very religious," and only 7 percent say they are not religious at all. 'Toxic brand': Britons say religion does more bad than good, atheists 'more moral' than believers
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About The Project
Kimball "Boxcar" organs were the low cost, high quality solution for small rural churches throughout America. They were designed to be easily installed and effortlessly maintained. This one served faithfully for almost the entire 20th century before water destroyed the wind system.
We rescued it for a client, but the instrument never made it to the hoped for new home, so it is again available for purchase.
The pipework is in exquisite condition, being untouched from the factory (probably never even tuned). The chests are in good restorable condition, the console is in fair restorable condition. The wind system and the tubular pneumatic coupler relay are a total loss. This is an easy conversion to an electro-pneumatic primary following a pattern that Kimball themselves used to convert these instruments.
GREAT (Manual I, 61 notes, Enclosed)
8 Open Diapason (17 basses in facade, metal-61 pipes)
8 Dulciana (metal-61 pipes)
4 Violina (metal-61 pipes)
SWELL (Manual II, 61 notes, Enclosed with Great)
8 Stopped. Diapason (wood-61 pipes)
8 Gamba (metal-61 pipes)
4 Flute D'Amour (wood and metal-61 pipes)
PEDAL (27 notes)
16 Bourdon (wood-27 pipes)
COUPLERS Great to Pedal, Swell to Pedal, Swell to Great, Super Octave
ACCESSORIES Swell Expression Shoe
Crescendo Shoe
DIMENSIONS Footprint: 8'6" wide 5'8" deep (+ ~3' for bench and organist)
Ceiling height required: 11 feet
- See more at: http://www.seanod.com/project/7#sthash.dayz9Ynn.dpuf
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Culture
Music
Classical music
Paul Morley: 'Pop belongs to the last century. Classical music is more relevant to the future'
For years, this rock critic viewed classical music as pompous art of the past. Now, tired of pop, he explains why classical is the truly subversive form - and selects six favourite pieces to convert the unbeliever
Paul Morley
The Observer, Saturday 20 September 2014
During the 1970s and 80s, I mostly listened to pop and rock music, when even the likes of Captain Beefheart, Henry Cow and Popul Vuh were filed under pop. However far out I went as a listener, though, classical music seemed connected to a dreary sense of uninspiring worthiness that was fixed inside an ideologically suspect status quo, lacking the exhilarating suggestion of new beginnings, a pulsating sense of an exciting, mind-expanding tomorrow. There was something monstrous about it, as if in its world there were lumbering dinosaurs and toothless dragons, refusing to accept they were extinct. Next to Iggy and the Stooges and the Velvets, it sounded frail; next to Buzzcocks and Public Image, it sounded pompous. While I wrote for the NME between 1976 and 1984, interviewing stars from Lou Reed and John Lydon to Sting and Mick Jagger, I didn't think about classical music – it was from the past, back when the past stayed where it was and wasn't as easy to access as it is now.
I owned hundreds of albums and thousands of singles by the early 1980s, and then replaced them with thousands of CDs, many of them the same rock albums. Now I am rebuilding once more as compact discs become as anachronistic as 78s. I have a rapidly expanding virtual library – in my head as much as inside the cage of Google – that might date as much as the vinyl and CD libraries did, or might last me for ever.
I now listen to much more classical music than I do pop or rock and on the surface that might seem like a classic, cliched, late-life move into a conservative, grown-up and increasingly remote world. For me, though, it has been more a move to where the provocative, thrilling and transformative ideas are, mainly because modern pop and rock has become the status quo.
If you are going to go back to the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s to find music that still sounds new and challenging – because then it was an actual risk to look and sound a certain way, whereas now it is the norm – you might as well go even further back in time, to the beginning of the 20th century, to the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. Now, with all music available instantly, and pop more a nostalgic, preservative practice rather than one anticipating and demanding change, classical music comes to fresh, forward-looking life.
The alluring, addictive sound of pop does still evolve, but what is sung about remains more or less the same; the poses, controversies and costumes repetitive and derivative. It is machines that are now the new pop stars, the performers and singers like travelling sales workers whose ultimate job is to market phones, tablets, consoles, films, brands and safely maintain the illusion that the world is just as it was when there was vinyl and the constant, frantic turnover of talent, genre and style. There is today a tremendous amount of sentimentality in making it seem as though things are as they once were, a desperate future-fearing rearrangement of components that were hip 40 years ago. But pop and rock belongs at the end of the 20th century, in a structured, ordered world that has now fallen apart.
For me, pop music is now a form of skilfully engineered product design, the performers little but entertainment goods, and that is how they should be reviewed and categorised. The current pop singers are geniuses of self-promotion, but not, as such, musicians expressing glamorous ideas.
Most rock is now best termed trad. I like a bit of product design, even the odd slab of trad, and have not turned my back completely on entertainment goods, but when it comes to music and working out what music is for, when it comes to thinking about music as a metaphor for life itself, what tends to be described as classical music seems more relevant to the future.
Once you make it through the formalities of classical music, those intimidating barriers of entry, there is the underestimated raw power of its acoustic sound and an endless supply of glorious, revolutionary music, all
easily accessed as if it is happening now. Now that all music is about the past, and about a curation of taste into playlists, now that fashions and musical progress have collapsed, discernment wiped out, classical music takes a new place in time, not old or defunct, but part of the current choice. It is as relevant as any music, now that music is one big gathering of sound perpetually streaming into the world. If you are interested in music that helps us adapt to new ideas, to fundamental change, which broadcasts different, special ways of thinking and warns us about those who loathe forms of thinking that are not the same as theirs, classical is for you.