Vox Humana

This one might take some beating (though I bet it can be done):http://npor.emma.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch...ec_index=C00530

AND stops! At least - thank goodness - there was a swell box. Having said which, I have a copy of a CD of Howells and Leighton made by the choir of Queen's College Oxford. Everything considered, the accompanist did a really good job on the Frobenius. Ahem... Sorry to run off topic.

I wouldn't presume to judge you, MM. I should perhaps have mentioned before (and I did think of doing so), that, since I don't have a church job these days, I don't have the problem of having to make music fit on an instrument not best suited for it (either that or deny myself the opportunity of playing lots of music I like). By and large I am able to pick and choose repertoire to suit the instrument at hand. For me the problems come when I am accompanying choirs - and, yes, I had to play Howells "Gloucester" service and "O pray for the peace" on a neo-baroque job last year.

There's no harm in wondering, of course, but how do you know what the spirit of the work is if you do not understand the historical background? Bach's [insert piece of your choice] consists of more than just the notes on the page and to assume that just because a performance may be utterly musical and riveting it therefore has anything to do with Bach seems to me a mighty big leap of faith. That's not to say that one is wrong to enjoy such a performance - this is a completely different issue. It's like the Mendelssohn performance I mentioned. The notes were Mendelssohn's and the performance was very musical, interesting and enjoyable. But what came out was nonetheless a complete anachronism that had little point of contact with Mendelssohn other than the frequencies and durations of the pitches. A composer's notation is necessarily king, but it is nevertheless subject to a whole parliament of other considerations which the performer ought least to take into account, even if the circumstances at hand (such as the organ) demand that he then adapts them or even ignores them. If you want to capture the composer's spirit, that is. If you're content to capture any old spirit, then of course, none of this really matters. Why do people persist in thinking that all you need to interpret a composer is the notation, imagination and musicianship? But I seem to be p*****g into the wind. This is in no way an attack on MM, by the way: I've got it in for the world in general!

Yes, I think I'm approaching it from the direction most people seem to approach Bach from.

I think I should fermez la bouche harmonique and draw a Curleyesque cape over the precise identity of the instrument lest our reluctant organists club together to take out a contract on me.

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 "vertical" 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?

Oh I know. When I was younger I regularly used to hump a reel-to reel tape recorder around with me and, more recently, I’ve got a few live voluntaries on CDs (not to mention a floppy disc drive on my IIP boopatron too). As you say, it’s very revealing to hear yourself play. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't - it depends on how well I play! But when there's a problem it doesn't seem to be with the registration, but with the interpretation (speeds, articulation, phrasing, shaping and so on). If you choose to play a piece on one registration then naturally it imposes extra demands on the player to hold the musical interest - which in itself is a useful exercise. Harpsichordists have to do this (since their stops only give them limited tonal variety) and if they can do it, organists should be able to. However, all this depends on there being a reasonably incisive diapason chorus that can handle this approach effectively. When I was young I made the mistake of playing the Toccata in F at Canterbury Cathedral on the Gt diapason chorus (based, if I remember correctly, on the OD 2 - and I think I may have coupled a Swell reed or two to the Pedal). The critic found the result too lightweight for the building. I have to admit he was right and these days I would certainly beef it up. Where I live there's a very large and uncompromisingly Romantic organ that is used for recitals. There is no way under the sun in which it can be made to sound remotely like a Baroque instrument, even in the softer stuff. Many cathedral organists have played big Bach pieces on it. Some have used a single registration, others two manuals. Neither approach works satisfactorily, but the two-manual one sounds frankly ludicrous because the choruses are too different and the manual changes do a violence to the music. You might think variety of tone colour would be more necessary on a Romantic organ than a classically-voiced one, but it doesn't work here. The only really effective performance I've heard was one of the "great" C minor where the organist played on the Great throughout, starting each movement on the diapason chorus and doing a gradual crescendo to the end, including the addition of full Swell and gradually opening the sell box. I'd be interested to know the results. But, as I've hinted (and depending on how you play them), you might find that you need to rethink the piece(s) in order to get them to work on a single registration. 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 don't know this recording, but I've just been listening to a performance of it by one of Cleobury's former organ scholars on the "Fit for King's" programme on Pipedreams here at 01:07:36 and he seems to be trying to do something similar at 01:09:00. We get something similar towards the end (at 01:11:30) where the accompaniment actually swamps the melody for a while. I wonder whether this is that mysterious and rather variable French registration known as "le coque-houp". But this was a live broadcast, which is bound to be a bit stressful even for the best, so I'm not inclined to be too hard. I agree with the posters who find themselves influenced by the first recording they hear of a piece. But one "different" interpretation that comes to mind was hearing Robert Clark's BWV 545 on the Bach at Naumburg CDs. The slow and magisterial opening to the prelude is about as far from Hurford as you could get and immediately made me go "wow!" Mind you, in that acoustic perhaps he didn't have too much option.

Like the trumpeter in Brandenburg 1 remaining silent throughout the middle movement? At Cõthen I believe the prince employed his own musicians, though I daresay pairs of itinerant brass players turned up from time to time. The court band were essentially servants - they weren't professional prima donnas in a position to demand this or that. For at least his first seven years at Leipzig Bach had to perform his Cantatas with only St Thomas School students and civic musicians (all unpaid), with help from time to time from university students, usually no more than two at a time (who were remunerated for their trouble). There is no impression here of demanding professional performers - in fact we know that Bach did not consider the standard of performance up to scratch. The cantatas do not employ every instrument in every movement. There is variety of scoring. So why don't we see such variety within a single movement? Barry's point seems perfectly valid to me. Sorry - I know I said I'd stay out of this...

I've seen reference to a UMP edition. Maybe that's it? Unfortunately I can't check as their website doesn't seem to have a complete listing of their organ music (or if it has it's very well hidden).

There is some evidence for stop changes between discrete sections of this rhapsodic, sectional, North German type of prelude and fugue. And I think you could fairly argue that you could apply this to the early Bach A minor BWV 551 which is so very Buxtehudian. But I think I'm going to bow out of this thread here. I've said more than enough on the topic and it's sounding as if I've some sort of axe to grind, which I really haven't.

Ouch! Then they could have done better. The medieval Latin for "chapter" and, by extension, "chapterhouse" is capitulum - but the genitive is capituli. For the record, a canon (as in priest) is canonicus.

Did it yet again!

Oh dear. You disappoint me: that sounds like a closed mind. I go along with you to the extent that I don't suppose either that Bach intended it to be performed thus (but of course I don't know that). But I do find it broadens my musical appreciation to look for varying interpretations. I wouldn't play the quiet version in public though.

Sorry, Brian, but I don't really agree. 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. Because you cannot prove anything from an absence of evidence (and the dog not barking in the night is not an absence of evidence). 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. 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. 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?

Alas indeed! Still, I've enjoyed the stories that have emerged. Which reminds me: is there any truth in the rumour that after the first performance of Tippet's Mag & Nunc the officiant announced the creed: "I still believe in God"? I'd love it to be true, but somehow I don't quite believe it!

To date, yes. But, to my mind, even that - wonderful though much of it is - isn't Howells at his very best. I reckon his songs are even better. They certainly have more variety.

Least year I heard a private (and quite possibly surreptitious!) recording of him playing a couple of the "eighteen" during a service. The word "bizarre" flashed across my mind!

What have I been missing? Does anyone have a copy they can send me by private message please? Or a URL?

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, 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 passages 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 know 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 fugue of 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.

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.

Sounds like a load of bull to me. Sorry, someone had to say it.

I recently heard Mendelssohn's 6th played with a wealth of Romantic colour. Flutes + célestes here, a Clarinet solo brought out there. Very orchestral it was, and very musically done. A fine performance in fact. But it sounded almost Brucknerian and not a bit like Mendelsohn.