Brian Childs
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Posts posted by Brian Childs
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Well, I must say it's always nice to be remembered - Large Hat or not!.
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As to microphone placement, well, where do we begin? Certainly NOT by placing microphones of any size, description or type, on the ground - where did that one come from? Head height in the building was only ever what we did - the only part to stand on the ground, was the stand.
I thought this was probably more likely to be the case, but glad to have it confirmed.
It wouldn't do for us all to like to same things and Paul's requirement for detail is understood while not being agreed with by me - there is plenty of stuff available which provides exactly what is required there. All I would say, possibly in my own defence (if that is required) is that in 16 titles we never had anything other than first-class reviews.
A final point: in 1990 when I approached a fairly well-known organisation to arrange distribution I was fairly giggled at for my views on single microphone technique and the 'don't fiddle with it' approach to recording. I was more-than-slightly amused to see that, within a short period they had adopted more-or-less the same technique and had even plagiarised our description of it in their own advertising materials. C'est la vie, n'est ce pas?!
Big Hat number 1 off- Biig Hat number 2 on:
If anyone would like to come to the works, just let me know;
If anyone would like a copy of a short brochure (21 pages) we produced last year (to give out to members of visiting Organists' Association's etc.) please send me address details and we'll post them out;
The out-of-date website has been mentioned - sorry for this, we have simply been too busy to deal with updating it! However, there will be changes very soon so keep looking.
Sorry, this has gone on a bit - but better to have it all out at once I suppose, to prevent any degeneration.
David Wyld
HENRY WILLIS & SONS LTD.
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I am (as usual) thrilled to see my name in print........ but...
when he was wearing another large hat - that of owner/director/recording expert from Mirabilis - explaining to our merry band of organists why organs are always best recorded with microphones placed directly on the floor [iMHO this is total rubbish, by the way!] He has (I believe) a degree in acoustics.
*I
Is there any significance in the hat being large ? Did it perhaps have a large brim to keep off the sun ? What happened to Mirabilis records ? I have the recordings they made of Liverpool with Ian Tracey, Francis Jackson playing Bairstow at York and Andrew Fletcher - there was one promised from Riverside Church , NY but it never materialised, and they just faded away. Despite what seems an idiosyncratic approach to microphone placement I did not think what they produced was that bad.
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Yippeee! Now off to see if I can find any recordings of the efforts of Caleb Simper. After the praise it has been accorded here I just know I shall love it, and I think I'll put on Jane Parker-Smith playing Lefebure-Wely to listen to while I conduct my enquiries since Priory have yet to release any of the 3 CDs from Liverpool Metropolitan CathedraL devoted to LWs music. An essential purchase and bound to become a best seller!!
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Hindemith wrote the first Sonata on his way to America on the ship. The others followed pretty quickly.
There are no crescendo markings in the first two sonatas, and only a few in the third - in fact the one I find the most difficult to register on a neoclassical instrument. The rather cool opening gestures of the first two sonatas seem not to want mixtures, or not big ones, at any rate; in fact, Hindemith wanted 8+2 onlyy for the second sonata too. So not really forte at all.
Hi Barry,
I had always thought the sonatas were spread over several years, so tonight I pulled out my old LPs of the complete Sonatas as performed by Lionel Rogg on the Grossmunster, Zurich and Simon Preston. The notes to the Rogg recording state that Sonatas 1 and 2 were written in 1937 while number 3 was composed in 1940 and was the first important work completed by Hindemith after he arrived in the United States. Is this now known to be wrong ? The notes to Preston's recording do not mention chronology but do suggest (I think) that there are more marked crescendos and decrescendos in the 3rd sonata than the other two. I have to say this surprised me.
I think in another thread comment has been made on how the first recording one hears/owns of a piece tends to serve as the benchmark performance by which all others are judged. In a similar way I think the information one assimilated from the notes to that first performance tend to become imbedded in the mind as the truth about the piece, at least for those of us who are not professional musicians constantly in touch with the latest scholarly thought and writing.
At one stage I could just have gone to the library to look this up but our local public library has a fairly limited music section and I think it simpler to ask here than to make the trip up to Belfast.
Best wishes,
BAC
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I remember a time in the mid 80's, I was unemployed for a few weeks, so to fill time in I used to go to the library in Durham City and get out the organ lp's. All sounded ok until I played one by a french chappy called Messien, I am so sorry, but I could not get by head round it at all, and even now I find it very difficult to "get into". Am I alone?? :angry:
Peter
Probably only in terms of having the courage to voice what others think in secret.Owning up to not liking Messiaen (= Messien yes?) is on a par with admitting to having the pox or leprosy(in the days before modern treaments were available). Instant reduction in circle of friends prepared to own up to knowing you. But as you have put your head above the parapet I will join you by admitting that there is much of his music I can no longer be bothered to listen to. We may even have quite distinguished company. I have never heard Francis Jackson play any of his music in public and I am fairly certain he has never recorded any of it.
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I dunno, it might be useful if you wanted to make a point at the end of a Remembrance Sunday service or something....
For example ?
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Hi guys,
Microsoft Office spellchecker is an instrument of Satan. Discuss.
All the best,
Paul.
Or perhaps a timely reminder to read the small print ! Microsoft spell checker does a good job of checking spelling once you have configured it to recognise British English so that it stops trying to "correct" eg the spelling of labour to make it labor. As far as I know it does not promise that the correctly spelt word will be the correct word to use in the context or the word the author meant nor does it promise to identify the occasional missing word of some significance , for example, "not" whose absence can tend to radically affect the meaning. Human proof readers not quite redundant yet !!!
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Sadly, I have to agree that you're spot on here. The musical taste of the average recital-goer is not that discerning. Most (alas, not all) organists apart, they are less interested in the music than the sound it makes. Where I live the majority of organists are "reluctant organists" who would never claim to be musicians. Their taste - and I daresay that of other recital-goers here - seems to be predominantly for music with a "good tune" (or, failing that, flashy virtuosity) and I'm sure several of them find Bach too cerebral and "spiky". You'd probably need to adopt a Curleyesque approach to Bach to win them over, but for better or worse (worse, no doubt), I can't bring myself to be such a showman.
I thought recital goers were an endangered species and had to be conserved at all costs wherever discoverd,with the possible exception of London. Since CC earns his living by giving recitals "bums on seats" are the number one consideration for him if he wishes to continue to eat. Mind you... I do not suppose too many people on this forum count as their principal source of income the fees obtained from giving recitals. And CC can certainly pull them in. Whatever may be the situation in continental Europe , no recital I have ever attended in the UK has been as well attended as those performed by him, and supposedly "the customer is always right..."
BAC
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Well, indeed! Having said that, are you not allowed to 'hate' someone, purely because it is a personal (and subjective) viewpoint?
I remember, some years ago, reading a review (in OR) of some new work by William Mathias; the reviewer was Marc Rochester. He was somewhat candid in his language and forthright in his opinions, to the effect that he did not think much of the piece under review.
In the following edition, there was a letter from a reader who pointed-out that, since (at that time) Marc Rochester was working in the same university as William Mathias, it might have been safer to adopt a slightly more diplomatic approach.
As far as I know, William Mathias never instituted legal action against Marc Rochester!
Christians as I understand it are not supposed to hate anybody: hate the sin, love the sinner. However, relatively few are able to control their emotions to the extent that they achieve total compliance with this desideratum. Nevertheless, what you feel and what you say about what you feel should not necessarily or even ordinarily be the same thing, if for no other reason than that malice defeats defences in libel which would otherwise be available. So you can reach this situation. A writes a book . X and Y both review it in identical damning terms. X has never met A and his opinion represents a dispassionate judgment. Action against him will fail. Y has met A and absolutely loathes him. It is argued in court , and believed by the jury, that Y's review was influenced by his attitude towards A. So A succeeds in his action against Y and Y has to pay damages for saying exactly the same as X said. Difference Y was motivated by malice and X was not.
If Rochester was a University teacher I am not surprised Matthias did not sue. He would have known what his salary was ! In any event if M was R's Head of Department he had plenty of other ways to give vent to his displeasure after all someone has to do the 9.00 am tutorials and someone has to take charge of the evening extra- mural class on Friday night and someone has to be secretary to the exams board and draw up next year's timetable and in a relatively small department with few candidates for these various jobs. Well that's what I would have done . Not that I did but I was only Head of Department for a relatively short time and had no occasion to.
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It's a funny thing, but whenever I play French music, I play it very fast, so as to get it out of the way as quickly as possible!
Head to head in the Widor, I'm not sure whether Jane Parker-Smith or myself would claim the chequered flag.
Mulet's "Tues es Petra" .....now that's given me an idea for a new thread....organ-works you really HATE!
MM
I thought the record for the Widor was held by Reginald Goss- Custard at something like 3.56 but then he did leave a bit out. In order to make the race fair we have to know the guidelines for it -
Is it (1) necessary to play all the notes and if yes , must they (2) actually be in the right order or is it acceptable if they are all there but moved around a bit ?
As to the the idea of organ works you really hate you have to be careful this does not degenerate into composers of organ works I really hate , especially in the case of those still alive who might sue!!!
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I quite like these pieces. I don't know anything else in the repertoire quite like them stylistically. I even went so far as to learn No.1. But one thing bothers me: how do you register the thing effectively? There seems to me to be a dichotomy - so much so that I've never played the piece in public. The contrapuntal texture is quite lean and transparent - the sort of writing that seems ideally suited to a classically voiced organ with terraced dynamics and manual/stop changes. Yet the dynamic markings in the music seem to demand an altogether more Romantic approach which includes a Rollschweller. To play the piece in the way it speaks to me (with a slightly clinical approach to registration, but very expressive phrasing including a certain amount of flexibility) would mean ignoring a lot of the composer's directions. I must be missing something fundamental somewhere and I gave up long ago trying to make sense of it. Does anyone else have this problem?
Not in terms of a decision whether or not to play it in public ! Have you listened to Gillian Weir playing it at the Mother Church, Boston, on Priory and/or read her notes which accompany it ? They seem to me to bear out the conclusion you appear to have reached (or perhaps not) that Sonata 1 is written with a different sort of organ in mind from the far more intimate Sonata 3 ( the one I know best). As far as I am aware the three were not conceived as an integrated set - they were hardly written as such at least - and so there is no real reason why Hindemith should have conceived them for the same sort of organ, not being principally an organist as I understand it, even if displaying considerable facility on a variety of instruments. If the piece makes sense in terms of the type of organ it appears to have been conceived for, then is the problem you experience not similar to (if not quite identical with) that experienced by those trying to make sense of Bach on instruments unlike the ones for which the music was conceived, except you seem to be approaching it from the other end from what is usual ?
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Sorry, Brian, but I don't really agree.
That is of course your undisputed right. And of course a courtroom setting is different from the process of academic research but I was not intending to suggest otherwise.Only that iF "legal" terms like "evidence" and "proof" are employed it is important to be clear that they are not interchangeable, but rather evidence is the raw material from which proof may be constructed if you can assemble enough of it
There's a difference between musicology and a court of law. In the latter you start with a result - a case to be proven or dismissed - and assess how well the evidence stacks up for or against it. Musicology, on the other hand, starts with the evidence and sees where it leads. Admittedly it can all too easily end up like a court when PhDs find their pet theories under attack and set about defending them, but ideally it shouldn't be like that. Unlike a court it doesn't have to reach a decision on anything
But it often does , surely ? Courts in one sense have it much easier because their task is not to seek the truth but on the other hand their decisions can produce immediate consequences in people's lives so their is some responsibility thereBecause you cannot prove anything from an absence of evidence (and the dog not barking in the night is not an absence of evidence).
This is undoubtedly true but I did not claim that you could. I stated that the absence of something was as capable of being evidence as the presence of something, which I believe to be correct. As I have been at pains to point out evidence is not the same as proof which requires a context
In any case, you misunderstand where I am coming from. I did not craft my argument around an assumption that anyone has to prove anything. I simply discussed the evidence as I see it and the direction in which it seems to me to lead. With respect to the stop changes in the D minor concerto, if people wish to use this as evidence for manual changes in preludes and fugues, the onus is on them to demonstrate that the evidence in a concerto is applicable to a different musical form
I am not sure that I do, although it may well be the case. I fully accept you did not start out with any consciousassumptions but what about subconscious ones. Coming to a subject with an open mind is not the same thing as coming to it with an empty mind . We all run our lives on the basis of assumptions and understandings that are so ingrained in our habits of thought that we are hardly aware of them. In my case the assumption is that everything is permissible which is not expressly forbidden because that has been the traditional common law stance: you do not have to show you have been given a right to do something ; someone else has to show that what you are doing has been forbidden. Coming with that background I apply the same assumption to the issue of manual changes in preludes and fugues - allowed unless and until shown to be forbidden. From what you write above it would appear your frame of reference is the alternative (continental) view that in order to do something you need to be able to point to something which authorises you to do it. It is a perfectly valid approach; just a different one
Well I for one have never argued this. I'm a great believer in trying to think outside the box. Very occasionally I will play the P&F in G major BWV541 reflectively on a single 8ft flute, in much the same way that I would play some of the "48". Try it: it can be made to work and gives you a whole new slant on the piece.
No. As I have said several times recently, I am very far from dictating how one should play anything. If people want to change manuals in Bach, or even use the swell box, that's their choice and if they can produce a good musical performance, I hope I am flexible enough to appreciate it as such. But I do think we all need to be more honest about admitting that the result may not actually have much to do with Bach. But then, it's possible that no one's "Bach" has all that much to do with Bach and it's merely a matter of how distant it is
I fully expect you are. I am going to follow your example and bow out of this thread because I also have no particular axe to grind and can enjoy JSBs music presented in a myriad of ways from the solemnity of Rogg to the flamboyance of Carlo Curley or Kevin Bowyer doing his late 20th century Edwardian Bach Recital bit I am basically perfectly content for people to perform the music in the way that seems to them most appropriate, leaving it to JSB himself in the hereafter to discuss any shortcomings in particular performances from his point of view. There will, after all, be plenty of time
Isn't the problem really that we like to imagine we are playing Bach so that we seek to legitimise what we do by making him in our own image?
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Eminently sensible, Brian - I whole-heartedly agree.
Just as long as you do not 'find' (possibly wrapped around some fresh meat) a miraculously-preserved treatise, purporting to be by the very hand of Johann Sebastian Bach, in which he extols the virtues of tonal percussion stops....
Funny you should mention that because it just so happens that a friend of mine doing research on Mozart 's influence on Beethoven.....
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Lengthy Brian, but very wise.
I would also add, that when faced with an organ which really only had ONE decent chorus,I probably wouldn't want to stray away from it during a Bach P & F.
Point made?
MM
Absolutely. Now as to pineapples and celery
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When considering evidence we need to decide what it is (or may be) evidence of before we can begin to draw conclusions, however tentative. So, where the use of more than one manual is specified by the Bach or the copyists, it is worth considering the circumstances in which this occurs. I'm currently at work so working from memory, but the only ones I can think of are:
1) For an ongoing dialogue (e.g. the concertos, the Dorian Toccata)
2) To project a solo melody (e.g. many of the Orgelbüchlein preludes)
3) To effect trio textures (e.g. some Schübler chorales)
If we also include forte and piano markings, which are frequently more easily effected by changing manuals than stops (and could conceivably always indicate this), we can add
4) Echo effects
The odd man out is definitely the opening movement of the D minor concerto with its change of tone colour (albeit stops, not manuals) in mid flow. If I recall correctly this marks the entry of the ripieno in the orchestral original.
Somewhat similar is Ein feste Burg, which starts with a trio texture on two manuals, but later moves to both hands on the Hauptwerk. But this is a very individual piece - and an early one - and I also seem to recall something about the source(s) not being as straightforward as one would wish so that is it not clear whether all the directions are Bach's (though the opening ones certainly look as though they are).
If we then look at how many instances of the above four categories do not have different manuals specified when we should expect them to be, how many do we find? Without my scores I'm not sure, but I suspect it's rather few. The trio sonatas (though the texture leaves no other option), Alle Menschen from the Orgelbüchlein, the adagio from the Toccata, Adagio & Fugue, the echo passges in BWV 565 and some of those in the "jig" fugue (the new Bärenreiter edition gives me the impression that there is more than one source for this piece and they disagree about the echo effects, none showing a complete scheme - does anyone anything further about this?) There must be a few others, but maybe the copyists' information is not nearly as incomplete as might seem.
In no case are manual changes specified to highlight the episodes of fugues or their preludes and, as I said before, the absence of any such directions in the D minor concerto is very suggestive. It is common to cite the concerto influence in the later preludes and fugues, but the fact remains that they are not concertos - there is not the degree of dialogue you find in the arrangements.
So, as far as I can see, the D minor concerto is the only piece that provides some crumb of comfort to those who like changes of tone colour in the preludes and fugues. It's a pretty weak case, though.
Almost anything [/i]canbe evidence - even "nothing", like the curious behaviour of the dog in the night (Silver Blaze which was significant in leading Holmes to his conclusion - but a single item of evidence is a pretty puny thing. It hunts better in a pack with fellow like-minded pieces which come together to form a narrative , into which each piece fits, with which each piece is consistent, and which is not contradicted by any other evidence. This narrative has to be placed within a context. The context with which I am most familiar is the legal one which provides rules as to both who has the burden of proof and the standard that proof has to meet. Thus in the context of a criminal trial it is for the prosecution to prove the guilt of the accused beyond all reasonable doubt; not for the accused to establish his innocence.(Admittedly there are a number today who find this an inconvenient rule and would like to do away with it or water it down in certain contexts but that issue is hardly germane for discussion here). More appropriate to this discussion is proof on the balance of probabilities (the civil standard)
by which something that is shown to be more likely than not on the evidence is taken to be proved. In civil cases the claimant has to establish his case and if he has no evidence he will fail: the defendant is not required to introduce evidence to establish that he is under no liability.
The relevance of all this to this discussion is
(1) for the subject under discussion on this thread the civil standard would be more appropriate, but more importantly
(2) your carefully crafted argument is based on the assumption that it is for those who desire to introduce manual changes into the preludes and fugues to prove that this is permissible but on what basis is the burden of proof placed on them rather than on those who argue that in the absence of any indications such changes should not be made ?[b]
If we adopt the converse approach to that you have assumed, the evidence bears a rather different appearance. There is some slight evidence in favour of the practice but none(at least none introduced so far) against it. So such evidence as there is tends to support the practice rather than argue against it.
Perhaps one day we will know the answer but two further traits of the way humans operate now , and are likely to have operated at the time of JSB , ought to be borne in mind.
(1) Every communication, however, carefully structured to be complete will always (of necessity) leave a lot unsaid on the assumption that the hearer or reader can fill in the blanks for him or herself. We have been using cooking analogies a lot . I claim no particular expertise - in fact I would normally caution anyone against eating anything cooked by me - but I have not encountered any recipe book which starts by saying, make sure all your pots and pans are properly clean, or when it says "add water" goes on to specify that the water should be wholesome, fit for drinking and not contaminated with sewage. Communication would be impossibly tedious if much in life could not "be taken as read" .
(2) Emerson said "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..."and most of us are more than happy to act on that assumption. Indeed, we tend to look askance at those who insist on always doing things in the same fashion and suspect them of having obsessive-compulsive disorder. PCND has earlier on this very thread admitted to adopting a different approach to performing the same piece of music on different occassions, and that (as I understood it) using the same instrument. How much more would this be likely to be so if he had been performing on different instruments. I seem to recollect previous discussion on this board about how the same organ could sound quite different in different hands, with certain pieces not working. At least one explanation advanced to account for this was visitors registering a piece according to what looked to be right on paper rather than using their ears to determine what sounded right in a particular venue. If we are prepared to be flexible and accommodating to changed circumstances, on what basis do we assume that Bach and his generation were not likewise so prepared ?
And so I finish with a question. To what extent is there any evidence to support the view that in Bach's time a single ,uniform approach to performing a particular piece once composed was the norm in the area where he flourished ? In the absence of any persuasive evidence tending to establish that conclusion, I am inclined to adopt the assumption that he was just as likely to be inconsistent in his approach as we are today, and that it is perfectly possible that he sometimes played a piece one way and sometimes another, depending on such fortuitous occurences as whether there was anyone to hand to add or subtract stops or whether another keyboard was capable of producing an effect he liked.
Apologies for the length of this.
Brian Childs
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I would be so very grateful to receive a good diagram or photos of a Nag's Head Swell. Is there a kind soul who can help me? Do E-mail or drop a message to make contact. More the merrier. I am on a learning curve!
Many thanks,
Nigel
There is a photo on page 42 of the November 2005 issue of Organists' Review of the new Goetz and Gwynn reconstruction for a single manual Avery organ in the context of Paul Hale's "something old, something new" column.
Best wishes,
BAC
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Oh, I love it myself! And, yes, I can't help being wowed by the sheer panache of Bach played by a performer like Curley or Fox or, for that matter, Guillou - though personally in those cases I find myself admiring the sheer technical prowess rather than their taste.
I had forgotten about Guillou. I started collecting his Bach series on Dorian but it never got past Volume 5, or if it did they concealed the fact well. I have not listened to it lately but my abiding impression is of extremes of tempo - either incredibly fast or so slow that the snails were zooming past in the fast lane - with a large gap in the middle. As you will have gathered I like my Bach done in a variety of fashions to suit my mood but I have never warmed to his particular style.
On the other hand I shall always be indebted to Virgil Fox for making me appreciate the Fantasy and Fugue (BWV 537) . The very first recording I ever owned of this was on an Oryx sampler album called the Historic Organs of Europe - well I was a student at the time and budget price was all I could afford. The performance on that was by Lionel Rogg at Arlesheim and I could not fathom it at all. Then someone loaned me a copy of Fox playing the same piece in his inimitable way. Once he had shown me where to look as it were I came to appreciate the structure and beauty of the piece and now it is one of my favourites amongst the larger works.
Soloing themes on reeds does have its uses, even if it is not terribly authentic.
Brian
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Well, as a motter of fact, I have. When I was six. Still don't know the stopping board too well, though.
As far as weaponry is concerned, I think I would prefer the Way of the Sword. It's messier.
Best,
Friedrich
In that case consider a chain saw. They can be obtained legitimately and transported through city street without provoking the attention of any passing plod.
Brian
PS For the benefit of anyone reading this at GCHQ. This is intended as a JOKE.
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As one of Bill's daughters I have the sad news that he died on March 2nd. His funeral will be on Monday March 20th, Tunbridge Wells Crematorium at noon then St Mary's Church Salehurst, East Sussex (nearest station Robertsbridge 1.5 miles) at 2.30 p.m. We know that many people have happy memories of his organ playing and music making, any recollections here will be most welcome.
Alison Davies
Whilst never having had the privilege of meeting Bill Davies, I have known and owned, admired and envied the talent displayed in, his recorded performances, at first on LP and subsequently on CD, for over 30 years:from his very individual use of the Royal Festival Hall organ to "A Retiring Collection" from Howden-le-Wear. They have given me, as I am sure they have given innumerable others, enormous pleasure. and will continue to do so. It is a legacy of which anyone can be proud. My sincere sympathy to the family members at this sad time.
Brian Childs
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No offence taken, Brian!
As you say, I doubt our views are really very far apart. I would merely add that I don't think the impossibility of achieving an authentic performance should be taken as carte blanche for ignoring what we do know about how pieces would have been played. To do so is, I think, dishonest to both the music and the composer.M. Pierre-Cochereau-Notre-Dame has got it right in his post above. These days early music performers are cagey about claiming to be authentic. Rather, everything is now HIP ("historically informed performance").
Thank you. Most of the time I agree with you, but every so often I get the uncontrollable urge to listen to Virgil Fox or Carlo Curley or Lew Williams on the Organ Stop Pizza Wurlitzer or Kate von Tricht playing from Karl Straube's performing editions... Then I get all guilty and go back to Lionel Rogg or Helmut Walcha or Anton Heiler or Karl Richter or Peter Hurford. I suppose, if one takes a cooking analogy, some people always like their steak done the same way, others like to vary it, and some do not like steak at all.
Brian Childs
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And the evidence for changing manuals within a piece is...?
And the evidence for changing manuals within a piece is...?
my Bach in a broad sweep - a panorama if you like. I don't want the camera zooming in on every tree and bush. Just my view.
It seems to me there is a danger of getting evidenceconfused with proof in the discussion here. There is no proof that changing manual within a piece was practised nor is there any that it was not. The conclusion one comes to therefore depends entirely on who has the burden of proof. Is it necessary for those who advocate the practice of manual changes to establish that this was done before it becomes appropriate to do this OR is it for those who oppose the practice to establish that it was not done in order to make it inappropriate ? This is not merely semantic quibbling. In situations where there is either no, or no reliable, evidence the allocation of the burden of proof will determine the outcome because the person who is required to establish the case will be unable to do so.
Evidence on the other hand is simply a fact, or set of facts, which may tend to prove or disprove a particular conclusion. Thus there is evidence for the practice of manual changes in the fact that it was possible (evidence of opportunity) and the fact that there are indications for manual changes in at least one autograph work (evidence of previous practice). Whether this evidence is sufficient to prove a conclusion is a different question.
Personally, I find the lack of directions with respect to manual changes less compelling than I otherwise would because registrational directions are likewise far from comprehensive though more instances exist. Yet Bach must have registered each piece. If he or his copyists did not always consider it necessary to specify registrations, why would they feel it necessary to specify manual changes. And if the answer is that the practice was to leave it to the discretion of the performer, then that provides a route out of the problem...
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I agree, MM. Particularly in the case of the B minor - the Prelude is comparatively long. I once played it on fonds 8p and 4p on the GO (as: GPR) and got seriously bored. The next time I played it, I tried it (arguably more conventionally) on choruses up to and including mixtures - again with no changes of clavier. I was still slightly bored. I prefer it best when I change claviers for the pedal-less episodes. I took the trouble carefully to work-out exactly where I should return to playing on the GO beofre I started. In fact, there are places where it is possible to return to the GO without disruption - often one hand returns before another, but I found that this actually enhanced the effect.
There is a further point, along the lines of those already mentioned by MM - since registration changes were, if not impossible, then extremely awkward without a friend, I am happy to believe that JSB would have prepared contrasting choruses, or ensembles, in order to introduce variety. Whilst I would not pretend to be an expert on JS Bach, I am fairly certain that the last thing which he would have been was boring. Just a change in texture does not really do it for me.
I also incline to this opinion. The evidence may be circumstantial but there is quite a lot of it, especially his reputation as a player, and particularly as an examiner of organs. One would not anticipate that he would have obtained his formidable reputation in this sphere if his examinations were perfunctory and undemanding, or simply focussed on one area viz ensuring the wind supply was adequate to support the tutti.A thorough examination covering all aspects of the instrument would have taken a not inconsiderable amount of time if each test piece was confined to a single registration.
Bach fathered 20 children at least three of whom were fairly celebrated keyboard players in their own right. It is hardly all that fanciful to imagine one or other of the boys being pressed into service to help Dad by pulling out/pushing in the odd stop while he was playing over something. This would certainly have augmented the possibilities available through judicious pre-preparation of registrations for each division of the instrument.
Quite apart from that there is the pragmatic consideration that ,on many English organs at any rate, seven or eight minutes of full great, even without reeds, would be somewhat more than the average listener might wish to hear. Scaling back to more modest power output might obviate this problem but the registrations employed to achieve it will not look much like those in the textbooks of baroque registrational practices.
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I'm wary of a one size fits all approach. As you say yourself, the important thing is to make music. But this really belongs to the thread we had a short while back about what exactly it is that constitutes the composer's composition. You can argue that, unless you play BWV544 exactly as Bach would have played it, it ceases to be BWV544 - because the composition is the sound, not the dots on the page. But you can also maintain that this is all rather a sterile argument!
I would certainly agree this is most likely to be a sterile argument because (1) we have , to my knowledge, no evidence that would not be ruled inadmissible as being hearsay, as to how Bach played BWV544, and even less as to whether how he did play it was how he wanted to play it , but was prevented from so doing by the fact that he was feeling a bit off-colour that day, part of the organ was playing up and could not be used etc etc!!! (2) different historians tell different stories, eg David Irvine has a somewhat different view of the holocaust from that held by many others. If this is true of events within living memory, then it is even more likely to be true of events for which eye witness testimony is no longer available.
I entirely endorse your reluctance to embrace a one size fits all approach so I doubt the views we actually hold are radically different. I am sorry if my initial posting did not make it sufficiently clear that I was not suggesting you personally were hung up on "authenticity". In my experience unswerving devotion to a particular point of view tends to be largely (but not exclusively) associated with the very youthful: experience of life normally leads to a greater appreciation of the necessity of compromise in many things in order to keep the show on the road to the best advantage of all.
Best wishes
BAC
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As you say, I doubt our views are really very far apart. I would merely add that I don't think the impossibility of achieving an authentic performance should be taken as carte blanche for ignoring what we do know about how pieces would have been played. To do so is, I think, dishonest to both the music and the composer.
H,n&b
in General discussion
Posted
Thank you Dr Wylde for taking the considerable time necessary to provide all this information. Sorry about the hat query, which I now realise is capable of being taken more than one way, and possibly in a way I did not intend.
I liked the Mirabilis records I acquired but I do not think I got up to 16. I was looking forward to the Riverside release on the basis of the Liverpool sound and am sorry it never appears to have been released , in this country at any rate.
I am in no position to comment on various different recording techniques but I do strongly hold the opinion that if the recorded sound has been obtained in a way which means that it is quite impossible for the ordinary listener to hear it "in the flesh" - I recall reading somewhere about only hearing the organ in this way "if I were suspended from the ceiling with my ears 18feet apart" - then this fact should be mentioned somewhere so that nobody actually goes to hear an instrument live on the basis of a false prospectus.
BAC