David Coram

Presumably only if they restored the fifth manual and undid all the tonal changes. Is there not still a stipulation that anything the Lottery contributes to must have an element of mechanical action? Much as I'm in favour of stick organs, I don't think I'd fancy making and maintaining a 5-manual coupler chassis, with or without octaves. Pneumatic might actually be smaller and simpler.

I'm sure they will welcome your cheque. If I recall correctly, having spent just under £250,000 they now have two manuals working adequately to lead hymns on a Sunday morning.

I'd go along with all of that - it's a whacking great noise, for sure, bought only for its size and just preposterous in a small-ish town church. The cost of keeping it (just) alive and (just) playing in the past 20 years (which is roughly how long I've known it) could have paid for a wholly appropriate instrument of quality and distinction.

Definitely the other way round, I'm afraid - HH donated the giant in the church after his house organ had been so widely admired for its, er, size.

Oh dear - the exhibition at St Michael's I presume - curious choice of Sweetland organ to use! Nowhere to park, apart from anything else. Why on Earth did they not go to Devizes, where they would have had a far better instrument in a quieter surrounding and stacks of parking?

Find all the trio registrations! And I mean all of them, including up the octave and down the octave. The instruments I know best and can get round the most colourfully are ones where I know exactly what balances with what. In considering that statement, I've realised that pretty generally involves abandoning all playing aids and hand registering.

Not the place for this, I know, but replacing the 1100/1300 (which was glorious, much admired, and both more clever and better packaged than the Mini) with the Allegro isn't representative of cost-cutting and rationalisation, surely? I'm glad there are now voices emerging (including a recent Top Gear publication) which admit that, actually, the Marina wasn't that much worse than the Cortina. It's just that it wasn't as many light years ahead of the competition as every other BMC product had been.

OK, I'm sorry it made you feel like that. As it happens, that part of my original posting wasn't responding to you or anyone else in particular, and therefore there's no reason for you to assume that anything in it was in any way referring to what you prefer to do, which I very much admire and wish I had the patience to do so. I'm glad you can find your way round the octaves at Salisbury. I hate them. I'm only just familiar enough (and brave enough) with octave couplers to realise, far too late, where the extra noise is coming from and stare hopelessly at the Swell stops looking for the octave, before (eight pages later) realising the one I want is over the other side. Then knocking off the wrong one. And so on.

That's not even two inches! I'd be astounded - and very impressed - if they were on less than 5. They're very good indeed. You might not blow any hats off with them, but you can gently inflate the surplices of a choir lining up - I've done it, even though a whole tone scale descending down the sharp side and back up the C side wasn't the most musical thing I've ever played at 5 to evensong. And you can certainly startle inquisitive tourists, to the quiet delight of the chap who rings the bells.

Oh, I'm sorry - there was nothing further from my mind. I was confessing, apologetically, my own deliberate shortcoming that I tend not to bother with it too much any more. I used to, and spent so much time worrying about hitting the right button at the right time that I was far too tense and wound up to enjoy the experience and help others enjoy it too - which is why people organise cathedral visits, on the whole. So now, I make quite sure there are no surprises in store, and then go for a pint with everyone else

Amen to that. (PS - I'd thought both the A series and B series engines had merely been light revisiting of very much older units than that?) (PPS - do you really mean to suggest that nobody noticed the lack of investment in BL ('too busy to notice the effect')? Isn't that a bit of a glamorous spin?) (PPPS - retires to Austin Rover Online forums)

St Albans is indeed loverly, even more so now than a couple of years ago. We're there in August and I can't wait! I'm afraid I tend to adopt the viewpoint that the resident organists know the instrument far better than I ever will, and simply borrow their 'general crescendo' channel and use common sense in its application. The three things I look for are; 1) in the Sw buildup, what comes first - Trumpet or Mixture - 2) which one brings on the Sw Oboe - 3) which one is the Solo/Choir Clarinet on. The rest I do by hand. (Easier said than done at Salisbury where there is a veritable sea of interdivisional super and duper octave couplers, which usually get me in a tizzy. Where every option is provided like that, I find myself wishing they'd stuck with the row of tabs above the Solo...)

Think how much better BL cars of the 70s would have been had they bought in good technology rather than spending 50p trying to improve a 60 year old engine... I can buy in a Fifteenth for about £900 from the very best pipemaker I know, the only man who can keep the most finickity of clients happy for sustained periods. For that money, I can retain a pipemaker on the books for three weeks or less, assuming I've already got the space and the materials. Let's say the materials in a Fifteenth are worth a week's wages. In reeds and 8' flues it's far more of course. You need to be turning out at least 27-30 new stops a year to break even on that one tiny part of the business. And, of course, any honest mistakes in production will be rectified at your cost. Then you must send your man on trips round the world sharing and developing knowledge with others, and pay for him to have a couple of weeks holiday a year, and a pension, and national insurance. 45-50 stops a year perhaps? Get selling! And don't be the least bit surprised when you end up at £20k a stop in order to simply tread water year after year! It's strange I'm this belligerent, because I frequently pour scorn on those who buy all their action bits in. Those are generally things which are not difficult to make; it's just about being careful. Pipework (metal pipework at least) is altogether another matter.

Email sent.

I'm genuinely interested in this. Cornet does seem to mean a dozen different things. As a Swell mixture, whether full compass or split bass and treble, you seem to be right. As a Great stop it more often seems to appear mounted as a solo voice.

It's like the 1980s all over again...

Could you provide some evidence of this? I'd challenge it.

I suggest anything which necessitates necking a bottle - e.g. Shepherd's Pipe Carol.

A hypothetical to take this down a slightly different route - Organ, big, old (late 1700s), not certified but probably should be. Taken out of old case and placed in new one, with logical expansion (double flues and octave reeds). However, new one cannot be positioned ideally in building; most effective way of getting sound out from compromise location seems to be to adopt a completely new style, a little along the lines of Clifton RC cathedral (see here for those not familiar). Alternative appears to be disposal of instrument. Which is the better option - re-clothe in alien outfit, or bin? Do you think a BIOS inspector, being faced with something which looks like the link but in reality is jam-packed with 18th century pipework, should write out the certificate? Or should he put the designer in prison?

ian@robinhoodmusic.co.uk has been an excellent bet for tracking down out-of-print stuff every time I've needed him, and incidentally is quite good on volume discount for choral pieces too. Website dead, but he's definitely on the end of the email address - I've just ordered 50 copies of various Oldroyd choral pieces from him.

I'm no expert, but if I was designing a soundboard to contain 4 or 5 stops of 8', plus a wind-hungry Harmonic Flute and maybe a Principal (but more often than not such things are on the Swell in a small scheme), and those 8' stops had to create vast volume, I would be providing good chunky pallets and a very ample wind channel. This would be necessary to support full organ and still make it possible to press the keys down reasonably easily. Conversely, if I was designing a soundboard to contain a chorus of 88442, it might have considerably more modest wind channels with longer and thinner profile pallets, since each successive stop to be added would be considerably less wind-draining than the one which went before; pallet movement need not be so great, the extent to which they bend under pluck is lower, and the action can be geared in a much more responsive way. How large a slice of bread do you wish to spread jam on; which sort of knife is most appropriate, or would a ladle be better? Find me an organ builder who is prepared to respond to a parish's request for more stops with 'nah, leave it alone' and I'll show you a man who drives a 15-year old Volvo with 200,000 miles on the clock and has holes in all his jumpers... I'll also bet ten bob that the parish goes with the firm who says 'yes' to all their requests, however ill-advised they may be.

Dear Mr Clarion Doublette - when someone writes this, there is almost always a good reason for doing so and directly second-guessing the church and diocese is apt to create difficult situations for people. Your 'real improvement' may be someone else's 'wanton destruction'. There are too many instances where people have turned up, hacked the top two-thirds off a Dulciana rank and called it Fifteenth, or added totally inappropriate fractions and upperwork. Frequently, the people who do these things are not as talented as the original builder. In rare examples, they are (Roger Yates for instance). I would tend to trust that a builder of Harrison status knew perfectly well what a Fifteenth was, but chose not to include one; and therefore the rest of the pipework wasn't voiced to accept blending with higher partials, and the choices made in winding and soundboard design would be ideal for wind-hungry 8' stops and Harmonic Flutes but would make life very hard for a 2' sufficiently delicate to work with fundamental-heavy stuff. I can't say that I agree with every BIOS certificate ever issued, but it seems to me that the protection of good organs from the whims of organists, organ builders and diocesan organ advisors (who are usually just as human as everyone else involved) is a sensible priority to have. It also seems extremely right and proper that someone outside the church (e.g. a DOA) should be able to instigate that process to protect instruments from the whims of clergy who are often hell bent on throwing them away. It may frequently be a useful certificate to wave in insurance claims, too.

Dogma in organ building works two ways; there's the Ralph Downes sort, and there's this sort. The sooner we collectively ditch the notion of designing organs for choral accompaniment (a completely nonsensical idea, if you stop to think about it for even a moment) and focus instead on designing musical instruments the better. That should be the end of the matter. A distinguished elderly organist, whose passing was mentioned recently in another thread, lay down in front of the bulldozers when his church commissioned a historical reconstruction by Bill Drake after a fire. Of course, a few weeks of living with it went by and he then realised the absolute simplicity of the matter - they had obtained an exceptionally good musical instrument upon which - surprise, surprise - he was able to play pretty much any music, including accompanying the choir. Therefore, it doesn't matter that this Cavaille-Coll won't sound like a Harrison. It doesn't matter that Gloucester doesn't sound like a Harrison. Whether they are good musical instruments or not lies only 25% at the most in the stoplist. No two pianos sound alike; if the whole world were full of Steinways and nothing but, wouldn't it be a tedious place? Many pianists embrace different types of instrument and temperament and other characteristics and exploit them to the max. Yet frequently we organists are guilty of ruminating that no instrument should be without two sets of strings, a 32' flue and an enclosed Clarinet just like the ones at Salischester. I will be very near the front of the queue for a visiting choir slot at Sheffield when this is complete.

Some would say the same of tracker. I think that's entirely beside the point, however; it's important to take things as we find them, accepting (rather like your diesel engine in a steam train idea) that there are pros and cons to any solution. In this situation, it would be inconceivable to move an organ and install in a new 7-days-a-week role without replacing a 40-year old electric action and everything associated with it from magnets to cabling to key contacts to power supplies to transmission gear - in short, significant cost. It appears sensible to spend a little more on something which is a) restorative, and therefore qualifiying for more grants and generating more interest and is quite likely to last longer than the electric action it replaces, whilst not having any significant disadvantages.

Six years' knowledge of the Romsey organ, which is Barker lever to the Great, convinced me of its excellence. You get a very fast and crisp action which is exceedingly low maintenance, can be played very expressively, doesn't require complicated transmission systems and power supplies, and from backfalls up is just a simple mechanical action with no underactions and nasties hiding within the soundboard waiting to go wrong. There is a definite difference between a toggle-touch electric keyboard and the actual feeling of pressurised wind against your fingertips. It's one of those things which will never be possible to simulate exactly. IMHO talk of public order offences is just silly; such noise as there is tends to come when inferior quality leather buttons have been used or (as is frequently the case in France) maintenance is not so thorough. Then, whenever you press a note, you get a click as all the slack is taken up in the trackers, backfalls and usually the coupler chassis. That is all straightforward to adjust to give a perfectly acceptable clean and quiet response. Nobody in the choir stalls at Romsey could hear our action going, and even the close microphones when we recorded it only get the occasional clunk. I have experience of louder, coarser actions* of all types, from tracker to direct electric. Incidentally, I don't think it's fair to cast about that they are about to create an anachronism which won't be any good for Choral Evensong, which appears to be just under the surface of one or two postings. To play music, you need a musical instrument. The controls might be in slightly different places and do slightly different things, but that doesn't matter. The more a player is engaged with and working collaboratively with an instrument, the more colourful the results will be. * I make one exception - the incredible contraption by Aubertin/Gaillard at Thann, which has a Barker lever action running on very high-pressure air provided by an industrial-sized compressor. That does make a bit of a racket, it has to be said.