deadsheepstew

I am aware of a Vowles IP with a lovely chorus, in original condition, only played once since complete clean and overhaul and releathering bellows. As far as I know it's 88842 with 16p. It's fully dismantled, wrapped and stored, but needs to go urgently. The owners are asking 3 grand which is what it cost them to buy it, have it dismantled and cleaned. It's in their spare bedroom so you understand the urgency!!!

I guess that's the joy of werkprinzip... it all works downstairs but not up. Agree ref the action - this is easily adjustable by providing a good bit of lost motion at the top of the key to control the pluck. That's probably the largest instrument to which one can profitably apply tracker. It does seem the organ world swings constantly from one extreme to the other. I commend to you some of the articles on www.gillianweir.com - now there's a woman who knows what she's talking about - many of the articles are remarkably insightful and often unexpected but pretty generally always amusing.

Edington's a dreadful IIP Henry Jones with obligatory 1970's unbroken 19.22 Mixture over soft choruswork. Always amazes me how people make it sound wonderful. Filsell used to do an amazing job, as did Stevie Farr and more recently Matthew Martin. The resident organist is mega protective and doesn't see anything wrong with it at all. Westbury where the recitals are is astoundingly wonderful IIIP Bevington with lovely pedal department. Surprised the music is less important than the organ - one is there to serve the other, after all...

Matthew Martin, Robert Fielding, Henry Parkes, David Coram, Peter Barley. Every weekday lunchtime at Westbury I think.

In case you're sadly unaware - choristers from all over UK form in medium sized but gorgeous priory church in Wiltshire, form three choirs and perform all daily offices for a week, four services a day every day. Weds evensong is broadcast. This year also a lunchtime recital series on very big exciting Bevington just up the road. Come!

Sermons and voluntaries, material, originality of: irrelevant. Should not the same preparation be given? Equally, have you ever been in a clergymanist's study and not found shelf after shelf heaving with tomes containing metaphors, themes and worthy anecdotes for inclusion in sermons? Gloucester - given the choice between these two instruments, which would you choose? One is a 1920's rebuild of something that used to be good. There is a mass of 8' tone from which all harmonics have been eliminated, and the 4 and 2 ranks are softened down accordingly. It is topped with shrill mixtures to pierce through the fog, and a battery of loud reeds seem to make the chorus quieter. This is a typical early 20th century instrument - marshmallow and lemon juice, as Dame Gilly puts it. Secondly, there is an instrument on which each rank has been intelligently planned to fufil a purpose within a cohesive chorus, namely to cleave to the 8' fundamental. We may not like the timbre of that chorus, but there is no escaping that it is brilliantly voiced and executed to fulfil a purpose within a building, namely that if one registers with the ears rather than the eyes and a predisposed judgement about what a combination of stops should sound like, you can do masses with it. Better still, it holds together just as well at the back of the building as the console, possibly better because the chiff doesn't carry so far. I know which I'd have - certainly, when held against contemporaneous rebuilds, it would seem to be a fantastic achievement for Mr Prosser. Oh, and also working on the voicing was the exceptionally gifted Stephen Cooke, whose work see, then on his apprenticeship.

I have witnessed, at Steeple Ashton, the vicar ask; Tammy-Wynette, do you take Dwain to be your lawful wedded wife? Unfortunately, he realised and corrected it, and not a moment too soon judging by the size of her...

pcnd, do you have three different sermons? I sometimes cover for a big church near here where I have had to listen to the same sermon three times, badly prepared and badly presented. I usually find it's a good time to go through the tuning and voluntary books and from the plethora of cartoons it's clear the regular does the same. No wonder churches are emptying in droves... and, yes, I entirely agree about people talking through voluntaries and once even had a vicar announce a hymn, his hands cupped to his lips in a shout, while I was still playing. I am reminded of someone or other famous who, seeing the line in a wedding order of service "during the signing of registers, the organ will play" sticking a pencil under middle C and going to the pub. When collared he replied that the organ was playing, and if they had wanted him to play it, they should have said so.

There must be tons of concerts that make a loss because people don't know about them. Let's do something useful by sharing the information. Here goes: Friday August 5, Romsey Abbey, 7.30pm: David Briggs improvising to a silent film. £8.50 on the door. They have to fill the nave to break even on this. Perhaps a pint beforehand, anyone?

Actually, I think I have played this, too, but my stoplist also has a Corned Beef 4, with aluminium shallots and cardboard resonators, horizontal on 15 inches of wind. It's extended down to the pedal, too, at 10 2/3 pitch with the bottom octave and a half provided by a Casio Kt1372 keyboard powered by 6 AA sized batteries.

This topic shouldn't be here at all, unless we also seriously consider adding a moustache to the Mona Lisa or adding some extra columns to Stonehenge. To seriously propose mixing digital and pipes is no less a bastardisation of ideals and principles, and one which absolutely no other field of art or culture would entertain. If money NEEDS spending, then it's going to be something like action or soundboards or a simple wash and brush up. Adding stops or whole divisions is NOT a need, it's a want. Ego, ego, ego, as with so much else in this insular and confused world we inhabit...

Oh. The booklet about the organ claimed it was done in 1987. Interesting! The Sw mixture is actually growing on me but it would be nice if there were a 12th in it at the bottom. The Great Posaune definitely isn't growing on me. Its net effect is to make the chorus quieter. I just use the Clarion.

Nice, isn't it? I was surprised by the former Sw oboe now on the Choir - very un-English... to the right of the great stops there are two buttons labelled Naz and Tce which, when pressed, bring on each rank of the Sesquialtera. The 20 generals on the keypad were borne of not wrecking the Bevington console. That's where the Pedal stops were formerly operated by light switches. This instrument is definitely worth a visit. The organist is also the organ builder. I was mildly thrilled by the standard of work - Stephen's done several rebuilds/alterations for me, always to a completely outstanding level of workmanship.

John, The big problem at Westbury was undoing a previous rebuild, which left pedal stops operated by electric light switches due to lack of space on the jambs. By doing things like joining redundant stopped basses to the only rank they served space was freed up. The console is now pretty much as Bevington left it. There being no fractions on the organ, it was felt obviously beneficial to have the facility to put the Sesquialtera on two slides and be able to select each rank. Two stops would have been put in were there space on the stop jambs, but the maintenance of the console was felt to be the higher priority. It's quite an exciting project, actually - pedals have been re-trackered on new chest and all horrid 60's stuff undone, and whole instrument moved one bay west which makes a **tremendous** difference to its sound - go and see it!!!

1) Have you seen the Stephen Cooke rebuild of the Bevington at Westbury? That has an arrangement whereby the whole stop is drawn, and individual ranks can be isolated by push buttons. That would be the plan - to enable isolation of useful and consistent portions of the mixture (i.e. 15th, 12th). To maintain this arrangement on an individual slider would make the breaks a bit ugly to look at on the chest, but hey. 3) It appears that the upperboards were replaced in their entirety by Rushworths, at the time the Great Mixture was changed from Harmonics into something sensible. The alterations have definitely taken place since, possibly whoever did the capture system and addition of the Choir Celeste in 1987. Incidentally, the Swell Mixture definitely starts at 15 and not 12 - to my mind, blocking the whole thing down just that one stage would make it infinitely more useable on top of a really rather small, Gemshorney chorus. I would be interested to learn more about the construction of an 1870's Willis Posaune, and its typical winding - the (horrible) rank on this one is Willis pipework, but on 10 inches and weighted. Shurely this would have been 6 or 7 inches and not necessarily weighted? The 1970's rebuild and new console cost, unbelievably, £30,000. I can't find that value of workmanship anywhere in there and agree the console is a complete biatch, badly proportioned and badly made with mock-woodgrain plastic stop jambs. Even a DIY redesign of this would be highly beneficial.

Sorry guys, but it is my personal opinion that there is an awful lot of brown stuff that emerges from male cows in circulation. So, I'm going to add some more. Maybe the issue is that there is no real forum for debate and collective historic decision making. The National Trust, English Heritage and all these other organisations exist to protect and maintain our national parks, historic homes and so on - I may be wrong, but it seems that the Diocesan Organ Advisors scheme is largely suspect and BIOS has only limited, passive influence. I think there is a good case for a little enforced Communist-style dictatorship to say "no - this is a historic organ. It works. The things that are wrong with it can be cheaply fixed and realistically prevented from happening again in the next hundred years. It is necessary to preserve this instrument, and there is no sound justification for scrapping it." None of us, it would seem from another thread, would hesitate to say this about obviously outstanding or important instruments like New College Ox, Pem-broke Cambridge, Grosvenor Chapel, Bristol Cathedral et al. They all have important historical things to say, either as new instruments of their type or as diligent historic reconstructions, and are highly effective musical instruments in their own right. But so was the old Hill at Bath Abbey. I was quite closely acquainted with it, and its main problems were haphazard internal construction and too many actions meaning everything spoke at different speeds. It had some of the most outstanding fluework imaginable - thoughts of the the 4' Flute on the Great still make me go misty-eyed - and I really don't think the replacement can be considered an improvement, if you compare it with how the Hill could have been after a sensitive and thorough reconstruction on new chests and actions. Tonally, it was capable of being absolutely stunningly beautiful, exceptionally versatile, and a testament to the legacy of its maker. I do not hear the same being said of the Klais, or indeed many of their other instruments in this country. The same probably has to go for Worcester. It works! Leave it alone! Are BIOS present in this debate? If the music scene at Worcester supposedly needs reinvigorating, and I'm not sure it does, then I'm sure that has little to do with the organ - the Oundle Festival has no problem being highly invigorated, even with that asthmatic production-line ratbag of a Frobenius centre stage and a clonky old Walker in the parish church. Commissioning Hope Jones was a brave and risky move, and successive generations have made it into a really splendid musical instrument. I for one would crawl on hands and knees to see it even though Virgin Trains could probably get me there in half the time. If Worcester really have money to burn, I could do with some of it and I'm sure Christian Aid could, too. If it really is up to us - as some seem to think - to allow an institution's organist to be responsible for the stewardship (or, in this case, destruction) of a part of national history, we can wave goodbye now to a whole raft of amazing instruments. For many it is already too late. We can then secure ourselves a place in history by becoming the generation that sat back, entrusted the asylum to the lunatics, and wondered why it all went wrong. We currently trust a slew of unregulated advisors and unaccountable private consultants on the payroll of who knows how many organbuilders, and rely on people like JPM to have the commercial integrity to refuse to make fatal or irresponsible alterations. No law or statute stands between that incredible instrument at Bristol and its replacement with a Percy Daniel 6 rank extension with pedals by Copeman Hart, and that stinks. In the absence of any such move, I hereby volunteer my services for helping load the old girl up into a couple of artic's and setting her up where someone will appreciate the generations of hard work, initiative, skill and musicianship she contains. Sad thing is, though, the instrument and the building is the combination that matters. Might sound quite good in Christchurch Priory, actually!

1) Yes - but the unenclosed section of the Choir is the one I was thinking of doing the Harmonics to - and, as you know, it only has 8 and 4 and therefore a 15th rank would appear to be essential to complete the chorus. This would be in place of the Acuta which needs flattening and selling off as key rings. The Principal is lovely, and original to Willis. The 4' could probably do with revoicing. 2) Ref the unenclosed Choir the idea would be to make it a la the old Hill at Bath, and available on Great or Choir as a separate division. 3) All the Mixtures have been changed numerous times, demonstrated by the numerous bits of ply glued to the tipboards. But, at the moment, it's all ideas but if you know the instrument you'll see that the only suggested alterations are to the non-Harrison work, which is of distinctly iffy quality...

I've been doing a bit of looking into Harrison mixtures of the early 20th century. There are a couple of fairly untouched ones in Bristol, at St Mary Redcliffe and Clifton College. Both feature "Harmonics" consisting of 17.19.b21.22, and Redcliffe has a Tierce mixture on the Swell, though how original it is I'm unsure; the college is still original spec, and has a sensible "gap" mixture on the swell of 12.19.22 compensating for the bits that are missing from the chorus. The rebellion against tierce mixtures was said to have begun with J.C. Bishop who objected to their sound in equal temperament. I'm interested in this particularly because I'm trying to redesign an early 1900's Harrison mixture composition, in a compromise between authentic and useful, that got Rushworthed in the 70's. At the moment my thinking is send the Great mixture down a bit and include a small tierce to help with the fat reeds, lower the Swell mixture to 12.17.19.22.26 and put an authentic Harmonics of something like 15.17.19.b21.22 on the "solo", breaking back to 10.12.15.b21.22. Interested in the host's input here - might also be phoning for a quote.

They produced loads of little one-manual extension things with a device that picked out the lowest note played and added a 16', which were a reasonably ingenious solution but probably rather short-termist. Not only did nobody ever learn to use the pedals, a good number of historic but feeble chamber organs got slung on the bonfire to make room.

Here we go then. On the Drake question - I unhesitatingly agree about the quality of the instruments, the musicality of the voicing etc etc etc - and totally concur re: the advantage of a clear mandate over the please everyone, satisfy no-one school occupied particularly by Frobenius - every instrument of theirs I have seen has been a bit of a hotch-potch. I've played a lot of Drake machines as well, spent some time with him in the workshop and on site and am a complete admirer of the craft. For me, personally, though, it seems peculiar to follow up the effective restorations/reconstructions of historic instruments (Grosvenor and Lulworth) with a series of all-new instruments with, for instance, trigger swells and no playing aids which may be just a little too puritanical. A strong identity is one thing, but surely there ought to be some discreet concessions to the modern world, or else I might as well go and put solid tyres on my car. On the other question, pcnd, you are entirely right about all those things - it is basically a wonderful machine, if somewhat stuffed in a corner and unable to speak. Tonally, it's probably one of the finest products of the 1960's, and everything that even quite recent Frobeniae (Oundle for example) would love to be - cohesive, eclectic, sensible, versatile and eminently distinctive, with just enough nods to enough styles to do genuine service to each one. Why not come and see for yourself?

www.williamdrake.co.uk - if you look at the scheme for Lincoln College, Oxford, you will be pleased to note it has a Dulciana on the Swell. Seems quite a sensible thing to do bearing in mind the tinyness of the building.

Well, obviously, yes. In many cases though, especially in the UK, "romantic" organs tend to be once-classical organs but had all the fractions, mixtures and upperwork castrated or removed altogether because of the shock to the shenshibilities that was brought about by equal temperament. In this restorative environment there is often a case for changing temperament and then opening the upperwork up a bit to see what it can do - none of which, you will note, spoils the "romantic" 8' and 4' sounds.

I have bulldozed many instruments, large and small, 1850's and much later, into some form of unequal temperament (usually Thomas Young's, as described by Charles Padgham) with never less than startling results and absolutely no loss of functionality: 1) The difference in tone is clearly discernable to the layman and manifests itself with greater clarity and travel, greater perceived volume, and much less shrillness 2) Extended mutations are generally more useable 3) Tierce mixtures (and, to a lesser degree, quint mixtures) are INFINITELY more pleasant to listen to (hearing the difference, one could never go back again - and one can understand why someone with such taste as J.C. Bishop went around ripping out Cornets and Sesquialteras when equal temperament started to spread) 4) It is far easier to tune Repertoire-wise - 5) Most things, if not everything, works fine if you've chosen the tuning well. Howells in particular often works better - look at the Psalm-Preludes - like any composer (especially Bach), Howells builds tension by introducing unexpected harmonies, so the temperament serves to amplify the effect that is already in the music. These are generally resolved onto "pure" chords where, again, the lack of beats will amplify the sensation. Sometimes, it may be necessary to miss out some notes to avoid too close proximity of slightly unhappy 5ths on the final chord. Viz - end of Bach Orgelbuchlein "O Mensch, bewein dein wotsit oojimmy" - those notes are there for a purpose and the tension created by the tuning is paramount. Listening, slowly, to these last two bars in a good unequal temperament will change your life, and dissolving all that tension and discord into the radiantly sunny slopes of the pure final chord will make you a disciple. (This is why there is no dominant in the final chord; because it would have burred just a little bit, he left it out. Brilliant.) Then, play the second movement of Trio Sonata I and tell me what's different about the rising dominant 7ths and semitone clashes. Finally, if you will, play the C major prelude from the 48 and - guess what? - yep, same thing again, each time with an awesome resolution into a pure key. If one more person tells me Bach invented equal temperament, I shall most likely punch him in the hooter. If you're still not convinced, go for Piece Heroique and listen for the right hand F#-G-F# in about bar 4 (or 8 - can't remember the time signature), the staccato pedal bit in the middle where the potentially contentious notes are on a different stop, and the big chords at the end. It all works. So, as you may have gathered, I am something of a fan of unequal temperaments as long as they are carefully and thoughtfully chosen because: a) they improve the sound of all mutations and mixtures the vast majority of repertoire sounds better, and all of it can be played c) equal temperament has been around for by far the minority of the organ's lifetime, and created the startling difference in tone that directly led people to build instruments with nothing above 4' pitch Keep equal temperament on the piano if you must (even though mine is currently Werckmeister III) but let's all go out under cover of darkness and retune every organ in the land. Please!!!!

At Lambourn, the organist/organbuilder/composer Anthony Scott installed, in the 60's, a stop called "Great to Pedal II" which connected two halves of a pipe, one end of which terminated under the console at the bass end, and the other of which was fed from a barrel of Wadworth 6X on top of the Swell. It didn't stay long.