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wolsey

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Posts posted by wolsey

  1. File notes from Nov. 1945 include a typed out "Reservoir Key" shewing what is fed from which reservoir and at what pressure:

     

    No 1 - (Under Solo) Chancel South side 10" & Solo Swell engine 10"

     

    No 2.- (Under Solo) Solo back soundboard & Cor-di-Bassetto, Ped.

    Bourdon & Violone 3 1/2"

     

    No 3. - Chancel Pedal: Open Bass, Octave, Flute, Octave Flute 3 1/2"

     

    No 4. - Solo front soundboard: Con. Fagotto, French Horn, Cor Anglais 7"

     

    No 5. - Solo Front soundboard: Trumpet, Con. Posaune, Chancel Ped

    Ophicleide 17"

     

    I don't want to spin out this thread unnecessarily, but looking again at the 'reservoir key', is HW3 correct, or am I missing something? Surely No 1 reservoir should read:

     

    "No 1 - (Under Solo) Chancel North side 10" & Solo Swell engine 10"

  2. This has been discussed before on the 'old' forum. David Willcocks', David Lumsden's and Philip Ledger's knighthoods arose from their services to music in their positions as conservatoire Principals, rather than their services as cathedral musicians - which they undoubtedly were. The last knighthood was surely to George Thalben-Ball, while the last organist to achieve a comparable honour (for services to music as an organist) was Dame Gillian Weir. Dame is the female equivalent of a knighthood in the British honours system.

  3. I emailed Ian Bell who was responsible for the Mander work in the 1970s. John Pike Mander had also mentioned the question of the swell wind pressure to him, and Ian has the following points to add to the information provided by JPM in post 12 above. He writes:

     

    As is usual with anything that Willis worked on during the time of HWIII, several of the Cs were adorned with printed paper labels recording name, pitch and pressure, which was what first alerted us to the fact that things were not as we expected. The pressure on the labels was 4 1/2 inches, but when measured it turned out to be a bit less, at 4 3/8.

     

    The reason that we checked this early was that the Swell Mixture, which remained cone-tuned, was in a very bad state with several dumb pipes, so it was brought to the shop, repaired, and fitted with slides as soon as we took the organ on, a couple of years before it was rebuilt, and checked for length and speech on the wind.

     

    The 1872 work at St Paul's always had some aspects which were not pursued or repeated elsewhere (such as the Hautboy being on the reed pressure, and the half-length 16ft reed)). Most of the published material suggests that the Great and Swell pressures were 3 1/2 and 7 which were the usual HW practice (though not without exceptions, especially in the mid/late 1880s where some, such as Canterbury and Truro, had fluework on 4). I did not believe this was an exception, and was inclined to guess that this was raised either when the organ was moved to, or back from the nave, in 1925-1930; or perhaps more likely when it was roughly dismantled and reassembled after WWII.

     

    However the published recording of wind-pressures in organs is often erratic, sometimes because the builder either works from memory or deliberately misleads the writers (especially with some very high pressures which everyone knows have never been what they were claimed to be), and sometimes because the voicers changed pressures on site which never found their way back into the file. There are very few detailed lists of pressures for St Pauls, which HWIII simply bracketed in print as from 3 1/2 to 30 inches - neither of which were in fact accurate. But John Bumpus, in his Organs and Organists of St Pauls, 1891 (which can be read online), lists the pressures in some detail and gives the Gt and Sw as 3 1/2 and 6, which are probably wrong - but who is to say? It might have been re-jigged to what were by then standard Willis pressures, in 1897-1900. He also notes the other thing which was relevant to the question, which is that the two Choir reeds were higher than the rest of the Choir - the flues being shown as 2 1/2, and the reeds 3 1/2.

     

    What I had forgotten in talking to John on Monday was that we found when we dismantled the organ that the Choir was 2 3/4, but the reed pallets (no longer feeding reeds by then) were fed from the Swell low -pressure reservoir, in wooden trunking, and clearly had always been so. In 1949 Willis III replaced the Choir reeds with upperwork, and also added three more stops (mutations and a Trumpet) on a Pitman chest, which was also taken off the Swell flues - and the pressure for these is noted in his published material at that time, and thereafter, as being 4 1/2.

     

    So for what it is worth we can infer that by 1949, deliberately or not, the Swell flues were on a nominal 4 1/2. Either way, this was not altered at the Mander rebuild - though some other pressures were, and the Hautboy was brought onto the flue pressure.

  4. Is it possible that the Swell wind pressure could have been increased at some time since 1945 (and before the Mander rebuild)? For example, I believe the Lewis pipes for the Dome Diapason Chorus were installed in 1949. Could other minor alterations have been made then or at other times since?

     

    But David Wyld says in post 10 above: There is a works copy (typed) specification in no 17. file (from 1st Jan 1970 - 31st Dec 1970) of the work done in 1960 which shews the pressure retained at 3 1/2" - the last time that Willis did any work, so it couldn't have been changed between then and the rebuilding. Does this not mean, then, that attention should be focussed (as John Erskine says in post 13) on the twelve years from 1960 to 1972?

  5. The mystery continues. My Mander contact messaged me earlier today: "I had to look it up! According to our wind pressure chart, the Swell fluework (inc Vox Humana and Hautboy) are on 4 3/8". I will try and find out if that is how we found it in 1972."

  6. Also - forgive me for repeating my plea above - does anyone here have any knowledge of the workings of the so-called "Ashfield Committee" on church organists' pay scales?

     

    Ashfield's Wikipedia entry says "In the late 1960s, relations between clergy and musicians in the Church of England became increasingly strained over the question of fees and salaries. Ashfield represented the Royal College of Organists, working initially in partnership with William Cole, of the Associated Board and Gerald Knight, director of the Royal School of Church Music, he helped to provide a series of recommendations. However, following delays in their acceptance, Ashfield unilaterally produced his own suggested set of fees. Subsequently championed by The Church Times, the Ashfield Scale, as it became known, stayed in vogue throughout the decade."

     

    The source of this information could be his The Times obituary.

  7. I've also often played this by ear as well, and it's available on YouTube. Could I just add one or two differences (in red) to Martin's excellent harmony scheme above:

     

    Unison Bs

    G major triads

    E major

    B major

    B flat

    F major

    C major

    G major

    Repeated unison Ds

    B flat triplets

    F major triplets

    C major triplets

    B major

    Ab major with 7th

    Three ascending chords of E flat major (Ic; I; Ic)

    Two A major chords constituting a 4-3 suspension (D- C sharp) between them

    D major

    organ then leads from unison D in contrary motion to G major for start of Nat Anthem.

     

    I would also endorse the Willcocks arrangement/descant which we tend to do instead of the Jacobs.

  8. They look similar to T C Lewis's key-touches. Stephen D Smith writes here (http://www.organreci...warkpistons.php) that they took the form of ivory rectangles (measuring approximately 3/8" high, 3/8" wide, 6/8" deep) located at the back of the keyboard associated with the stops they affected (unlike pistons, which are located below their keyboard). Also, key-touches were pressed down (whereas pistons are pushed in) and, for this reason, they were more usually operated by the fingers (rather than by the thumbs, as in the case of pistons). Key-touches can still be seen on the Lewis instruments at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow, and Saint Luke's Church, Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey.

     

    The ones in the picture above look different though, and there's quite a large number of them in view of the small number of stop-keys which are apparent.

  9. The Brahms Fugue was played on a real organ but mimed to on the film.

    I'd be interested to know who, precisely, was Gwen's double in the playing of the Brahms Fugue in A flat minor. I learned it decades ago for a diploma, and it's not a piece an actress can accurately mime. The double was clearly playing the right notes - and in the right order.

  10. But first, what of the Ryemuse series ? I'm only dimly aware of it. Was there a Barry Rose/Guildford on it ? Have they ever been transcribed to CD and, if so, what are the important ones?

    I have Priory Records' 2-CD compilation (PRCD 933) of the Ryemuse series. It includes Barry Rose's performance of Parry's Chorale Prelude on the Old 104th.

  11. A whole CD for a tiny amount of documentation is a bit of a waste. I'd have thought they might have included the front covers of the LPs as well as the specs from the backs, especially as some of them were missed out because there are less CDs than LPs. The essay about the series is decent enough (much less tolerant of unstylish playing of older music than this board seems to be, though), but surely it wouldn't have been that hard to prepare fuller notes.

    I'm not sure how fuller you want the notes on the CD-ROM to be. The essays by Brian Culverhouse and Graham Barber are really quite enlightening (the absence of record sleeve notes on each of the albums is itself covered in Professor Barber's essay), and all the specifications of the organs - as then recorded - are on the CD-ROM. There is also information on the organs as they stand today, as well as brief information about the organists and their ages at the time of their recordings.

  12. Surely an organ requires a somewhat different acoustic ambience to that favoured by orchestral players? Yes, an orchestra could sound good in Gloucester Cathedral, but if one listens to commercial orchestral recordings, there is clearly a more 'studio' type of acoustic being preferred by most, if not all, conductors.

    Yes, it’s a matter I remember vey well from the acoustics part of my Cambridge music degree three decades ago. What remains a mystery though to this former Croydon resident of seventeen years is that if the sound doesn’t “come together“ in the highly-regarded concert auditorium at Fairfield, Croydon, then I shudder to think of the sound produced by organs in other concert halls with less favoured acoustics. Being the gentleman that he is, MM has been gracious enough to address the point I made, therefore I will "hold fire".

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