David Coram
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Posts posted by David Coram
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May I highly recommend the two "Masterclass" discs by Nigel Allcoat on improvisation. For those of us who stick to "safe" formulas, here are step by step guides to unlocking the doors. Very impressive.
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I know it was deliberately put into voluntary liquidation back in July to enable the new owners to take over, so the legal entity of Percy Daniel Limited ceased to exist but the trading name of Percy Daniel continues.
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I keep hearing rumours about the new owners of PD/Cawston being on the verge of ditching the lot or splitting it up etc etc etc. Anyone know the true story?
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Stop names and previous instruments aside - if other work by Tickell is anything to go by (Dulwich, Eton and the recent rationalisation/augmentation at Sherborne) Worcester is likely to be in for something quite exciting. If they are able to go for the best solution to their needs then good for them! It will be interesting to see the Nicholson part of the whole scheme.
AJJ
Indeed it will. Nicholsons seemed to integrate the diaphones and shouty reeds at Christchurch Priory quite well into the scheme & it all blends well despite appalling positioning. I get the impression the several revisits to revoice things were more to do with the consultants than the builders & most of the workmanship is either good or being sorted. I do hope N's do a better job of voicing the flutey upperwork than at Christchurch, which has some very strange & unpleasant transients.
Surprised at there only being one open diapason on the Gt but hope the Gamba is nice and edgy, like the Wimborne one. I don't think Sackbut is a particularly daft name at all. Doesn't it suggest something more bassoon-like than trumpet-like? If you're going to have a new organ, then have a new organ and not a load of secondhand bits cobbled together in a different order - hardly a step on from where they are now. Certainly keep really good stuff - New College Oxford still has Willis pipework in the Sw. Speaking of daft names, Sherborne has a Contra Batten 32, which is a pretty daft name (think it was named after a former choir member).
Much as I would love to see the old beastie rationalised & rebuilt, at least we're not having another Klais (or a Goll...)
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I can put you in touch with someone who looks after a couple of vintage Bryceson (or Bryceson & Ellis) instruments if you like - let me know.
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I think we might already have a terminatrix on the organ bench at a Cathedral close by, though.
That's no way to talk about ******* (unless you mean dominatrix? I can see that)
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No! No!! No!!!
Nice link - clever, that - let's talk about Worcester! Or shall we talk about London? Let me know, so I can wear the appropriate anorak.
Fact is, there won't be organists in 50 years time. There is already a crisis. So, heads out of sands, then, and let's talk about what happens if we DON'T discuss this rather insightful question, & play a full part in the development & application of technology in our working lives.
Hmm. Well, there doesn't appear to be a great shortage of drummists, guitarers or tambourinists, so perhaps they ARE the natural inheritors after all. Best chuck out those dreadful old "hymn-books", then.
So, as the last generation for whom the words "Choral Evensong" are likely to be in any widespread way relevant, how shall we play this - "no! no!! no!!!", or supporting a realistic application of existing technologies to maintain the standard of music in smaller parishes?
Or, put another way, what's more important - the repertoire of organ music, hymns, choral works, one of the central defining characteristics of religious worship in the last few hundred years, or our egos?
Many would have it that machines took over the organ loft long ago. This was probably said at the introduction of the electric blower, the balanced swell pedal, electric action, pistons etc etc etc - midi, and the ability to play back or play remotely, are just the next stage in development - and in my opinion critical ones if many churches are going to retain organ music.
All the more critical, then, that the technology be developed to work with the pipe organ, rather than become synonymous with the Digital Pipeless. This can only happen if we make it.
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Midi playback is easy to do with modern switching systems & more frequently being incorporated. I have heard confession from a player who, feeling under the weather, set the instrument to playback a previous performance of the Widor Toccata at the end of a wedding. Stop control not always available though. I gather you can also feed a score into Sibelius or one of those programmes & send it to minidisc as midi, then command the organ to play it. My understanding of these things only grows when I actually see it happen. I have discovered the possibility of recording Crimond at the local crematorium and just setting it off every 25 minutes (in Gb, in quarter comma meantone - another benefit of electronics), which enables me to get more Sudoku done.
With the speeds wireless networking can achieve I have often considered the possibility of setting up remote access to an electric/ep instrument. A PC at either end running next to no processes could quite happily receive information during the sermon, then be set to play at the right time. Then, I could be organist of ten churches, and play all their services simultaenously from a laptop in front of the fire, or perhaps in the lounge bar when the pubs are open Sunday mornings. Marvellous!
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I believe Peter Collins and Allen Organs collaborated on a few instruments, not sure if it was that far back or not.
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Right... often it's said that the same people hawk the same old programmes round again and again, and this is a turn-off not just for the gen pub but also for our own species.
Any thoughts therefore on favourite & least favourite pieces? What on a poster makes you think "I'll go" or "definitely not"? It's obviously a more complicated science than that, but as it's something we most of us criticise from time to time I'm guessing there are some fairly strong views out there...
Personally, in recital planning I pick a theme (doing lots of Scherzos at the moment) & then string things together in a logical sequence of keys, big works in the middle & fluff on the outside, alternating loud and soft wherever possible. Keen to understand other approaches & audience perspectives.
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well, I did not realise there were that many JSB complete projects out there. Just having done a "search " for any complete boxed sets I was amazed who has done recordings. I did not realise that I had volumes 1 & 5 of Peter Hurford lurking away in my cd collection, so after dusting them off, I listened to a couple. They sound ok to my ears, I have always liked the Ratzeburg organ even though it a bit, "in your face" but a few 80's recordings were done fairly close. I am off to look at E Bay, to see what is on offer.
Peter
That set is the nicest I have ever heard the New College instrument sound, as well. Isn't there one in Australia as well - can't remember who by?
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As a rough estimate, using a cross-sectional diagram of Haarlem (without a scale!), I would say that the length of the Bovenwerk action is in the region of forty feet. There appear to be two ninety-degree changes of direction.
Do you by any chance have a link to a drawing of this, please? Would be interested to see how they tackled the issue.
Thanks
David
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Of course tracker has its place - it should be the default choice unless there is a good reason for doing something different. In the case of seriously long runs, the costs and disadvantages & potential for things going wrong completely outweigh the positives. If you no longer have prompt speech, perfect repetition, easy regulation & complete, taut control of the pallet then - why bother? 50 feet is an awfully long way!
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I've got some of the Rubsam - often they're quite nice (chorale preludes). Also got Rogg (v academic), Hurford (great fun - all those squeaky instruments), the bits that Weir has done (v nice indeed) and Bowyer, probably overall my favourite for fairly contemporary & moderate common-sense scholarship & gentle musicality.
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your hands are going to have a wonderful time rather than dealing with pneumatics or electro, and all the wonderful delays etc involved.
All best,
R
Hmmm... if only that were true for a very long action! As one who plays weekly upon a machine with trackers of perhaps 30-35 ft length, I take my hat off to the consultant & builder for making it work at all. In truth, though, it has much to offer to an argument against repeating the experiment; it is an absolute nightmare to maintain in playable condition, and there is so much weight, flex and bounciness in the action as to make anything quick a real pig to play, & the repetition is naturally not too good - all of which eliminates the reasons for preferring tracker in the first place. You will save money, both now and even more so in the future (on maintenance), by reaching for the Kimber Allen catalogue and accepting that, just occasionally, the 20th century came up with a better solution...
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So to bring it back home a bit - should I have put Schwimmers on my bouncy Victorian plodders, or gone back to big double rise & concussion? Also, is much of the talk about wind trunk design true, or a red herring?
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"Anonymity equals irresponsability and impunity for whatever one may
happens to say."
Only the case if abuse is taking place - and we can all see, as was the case with our recently departed friend, when this is happening.
"A forum is a public place so that we must behave like on a public place"
If behaving as in a public place means respect and courtesy, then fine. It doesn't mean we all walk around the streets with name badges. The campaign against compulsory identity cards in this country centres on the right to individual privacy & freedom. I could have a conversation with you in a pub without knowing your name; why must I need to know it in here? Or am I supposed to keep a file on you?
If I say something illegal or inflammatory then I should reasonably be required to identify myself. Even with an assumed name, IP logging & email address verification will see to that. Until that happens, I think I should have every right to be a nonny mouse if I choose to be.
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3. I also agree with Pierre on the issue of pen names and am not persuaded by the reasons so far advanced for this practice (though I might be by others). The fact that people have jobs or work for companies in an area relevant to this site surely does not deprive them of their right to hold and express a personal, private opinion, provided of course it is made unequivocally apparent that the opinion expressed is a personal one and not associated with their professional position.
Brian Childs
Accurate but not necessarily fair. Go to Google right now and search for barker lever - results 4 and 5 on the list are from this board. Alexandra palace organ - same thing again. Osmond Taunton - number 2.
Material put into the public domain will inevitably be associated with the person putting it there, irrespective of any caveats you include about personal opinions; for example, on my (I thought) fairly innocuous post mentioning a Gordon Stewart recital at Romsey, I used the words "pub" and "drink" which my employers at the abbey frowned upon, apparently having stumbled across it in an internet search for Gordon's biog. Even now, six weeks after the event, "gordon stewart organ" on Google brings that message up in the first 8. Had it been done under an assumed name there couldn't have been any association and therefore no issue; as it was, it could have been reasonably assumed by anyone browsing this public site that this was how Romsey Abbey saw fit to advertise its events. Knuckles rapped, circumspection plugged in.
It's easy to say that views on here are private; but in the public domain they're just not, and accordingly it's in the interests of free speech that those who use assumed names and make worthy contributions to the conversation must be able to continue to do so. Amongst our best contributions on the board come from pcnd and various other assumed names. Forcing people to identify themselves will either drive valuable contributors away or bring an enforced gentility to the conversation - in both cases, working very firmly against free speech. We are talking here about a low-speed organ anoraks' chatroom with an audit trail - hardly a court of law...
As we have seen, if anything is said that shouldn't be, or that 99.5% of us find distasteful and highly irritating, we have moderators who act quickly to restore the balance - and therefore no problem.
And Nimrod is an incredibly tricky piece to get through - musically. DGW and the sounds she can create are the reason I and many others kept on playing - I was getting bored of all the C.H.Trevor and pedestrian pedal exercises by about age 15 until I came across her Scherzo CD and saw for the first time the light at the end of the tunnel. Musically, she puts fire into bellies; she is an amazing writer & communicator, whoever the audience, as demonstrated by the article reprints on her website I am always banging on about; and an unrivalled ambassador for the organ in every global sense of the word, worldwide and across ages/skills levels. She showed many kindnesses to me when I was younger, and to many others of my generation going to Oundle courses in the early 90's - hardly a job she would take for the money. She has stewarded the organ and its music in and out of several different fashions with consistency and integrity. So, there's my two cents - leave off this amazing, skilled, inspirational, hugely generous and monumentally talented person who is giving her best - we all have a hell of a lot more to learn from her than the difference between a couple of wrong notes. Get a Clavinova with midi input if you want the notes right.
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Well, that's a fascinating article - thank you.
I can't help wondering if it's a bit dated and dogmatic now - applies just fine to historic work, but being of the 21st century I want to play Langlais, Messiaen, Eben etc which needs if not completely static then fairly steady wind.
I don't know if it was accidental or deliberate, but the Schwimmers fitted to the 1880's Sweetland I mentioned seemed to be slightly fluid, or languid - there was just a tiny amount of flexibility and slow pulsing as Fisk describes on light/medium registrations, a sensation (barely more) that the wind was catching up with itself, but when you moved up to full blast and big double pedal notes they became bang on rock steady. Don't know how, don't know why, and not sure if the builder did either, but sure it was a good solution.
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Ok, ignorance time. I know what a Schwimmer does, but what I don't know is how old the design is, where it was first used and by who, whether it had an English counterpart with a quaint name, etc etc etc. I know New College runs off them, and is rock steady; the MF-G book on the firm seems to suggest a degree of sniffiness in the air at the time about them. I know of other all-English machines pre-New College (eg Wimborne Monster) that run off a variant of them, but without the adjustable springs, and aren't rock steady by any stretch of the imagination - presumably because there's no facility to adjust the behaviour of the pan. At the same time, there are instruments (the University Church, Oxford, Metzler 1986 and a fantastic musical instrument) that have no stabilising equipment at all beyond the reservoir, which itself appears to be little more than a lilo with bricks on, and yet the wind supply is absolutely fine & steady. There's much talk of tonal, action & casework preservation but I don't hear much being said about winding, after all one of the most critical factors in how an instrument sounds.
Is there current received wisdom about wind systems, what's hot and what's not? Is everyone building to traditional double-rise and Bishop pattern concussion? What would be considered acceptable to do to a Victorian instrument that's been prevously botched up in the 1960's - should you spend tons of money reverting to a traditional pattern, or is it accceptable to say that we can now do these things better and fit Schwimmers? I've done this myself on a couple of instruments where you couldn't actually play stuff with a busy pedal part, like the 2nd variation of Mendelssohn VI, without sending the thing barking mad. On one memorable occasion, the last page of Eben's Moto Ostinato didn't create any sound whatsoever after the third bar, other than thumping reservoirs and the odd gasp of half-blown mixtures. In both cases, traditional concussions had been removed (by a certain recently taken-over organbuilding firm in the west of England) and double rises converted to single, in an apparent effort to save money (read: increase profit margins). In both cases, we fitted new Schwimmers, but bearing in mind one was an 1860's Bishop and the other an 1880's Sweetland, I always wondered whether we had committed heresy and risked being sent to the ducking stool. At least you can now play them.
There seem to be other impediments to steady wind - I read once somewhere that right-angle bends in trunking without a 45 degree corner section create a "turbine" effect and cause problems. The physics stack up in a theoretical sense. But, taking the argument to its logical conclusion would have us all fitting Kopex instead, and I don't see that happening (thankfully).
Any information and experience shared would be of great benefit. Hopefully we will be spared any comments from Edna about either her problems with wind, or experiences of blowing - there, said it for you.
Yours,
Confused of Wiltshire
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Fortunately the system does function absolutely as traditionally expected until someone with The Key enables it to do weird things on a given channel (function changes aren't global) - nobody need ever know... The screens will live in the normal place, just the two additional programming buttons will be away from the console and require access priveleges to avoid inadvertantly launching a nuclear attack on a small, neutral country or, worse, making the general cancel bring all the reeds out. Likewise the stepper/sequencer will be generally operated from a keypad with the option to force (by a rotary switch) two of the toe levers to become a plus and minus. Just not possible or right to drill lots of extra holes in an untouched 1830's console... mercifully, nowhere near cathedral-like resources to drive but an excellent choir that needs thoughtful accompaniments & can't always get them with an inflexible generals-only system. The thing about modern organs being instantly driveable by anyone is absolutely right and works for modern organs, but this ain't one of those...
Sequencers are fine, but with steppers I have previously been irritated to find (halfway through something quiet) that my "expected" generals have become several variations on full organ, set by someone who was just working from 1 to 999, oblivious to the fact that they were quietly (and totally inadvertantly) devouring my carefully worked out anthem accompaniment. There's something that needs a padlock.
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Pierre's scheme does have flaws - there are some who wish to respect the right to privacy (because of their work, perhaps for an organbuilding firm or a teaching establishment, for example) and there are some who represent a company (including the moderator of the site).
Who knows - perhaps Edna is really called Gillian? (She's not. Don't worry.)
It seems any post started by Alan Taylor is doomed to end in tears... curse that Alan Taylor... does 'e float? is 'e a witch? shall we burn 'im?
It's sad that after the AP thread killed the conversation stone dead, we should have another threat to sensible conversation... and nothing to show but another couple of pages of cr*p to add to the 30 million or so already out there...
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Yes- if I'm playing an unfamiliar large organ, I like to have some kind of standard "formula" to manage the beast... All organs are different, of course, but large ones with buttons can be made less different....
I've noticed H&H have used the "hidden drawer" method, where there is a drawer hidden underneath the "table" on which the manuals, stop jambs etc are mounted. I think it was first used to re-use the pull-out drawers at the Usher hall and used since at places like Armley. It's a neat idea and doesn't compromise old consoles like adding stepper and scope controls above the uppermost console, which does rather detract from the amibance of an historic console...
Another way is to have an Ian Tracey style plug-in remote control, which can have stepper controls, a handful of pistons and the setter controls on it, and page turners can also use it. One of the suggestions floating about is that there should be two such keypads available to plug in, one with the Scope controls and one without.
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What caused the cypher at the RAH for the Dame's recital earlier this evening?
Ah! You're back.
Rah And John's
in Nuts and bolts
Posted
"The second point - surely no-one tunes in a 'mathematically accurate equal temperament' - the octaves would be too wide. Most organ builders (and, for that matter, piano and harpsichord tuners) have their own system of modified 'equal' temperament tuning. Fourths and fifths (in 'white-note' keys) are often bent one way or another, for example. This is surely why each key has its own tone-colour. To my ears, D-flat major is a richer sound than D major - which I find brighter than E-flat. I also find G major brighter than A major, to name but three examples."
The whole point of equal temperament is that the intervals are all forced to fit into a perfect octave - I think you're thinking of just intonation, which would (if you tuned perfect non-beating 5ths and 4ths all the way through the scale) produce a very wide octave. Equal temperament is by far the hardest scale to set. If you've got it right, and the temperature hasn't changed by more than 2 degrees since you did, there will be NO key colour at all as all the 3rds, 4ths and 5ths are supposed to be out of tune by the same amount. That's what makes it such a BAD tuning... oops, off we go...