Vox Humana

Well there is a photograph of me somewhere on the web. It's very old, but I haven't the heart to update it - I look so handsome and dashing... But as it won't mean anything to anyone I won't bother to elucidate further.

Just remind me why it was he took to drink....

Funnily enough, this is a piece where, given some semblance of a balancing chorus, I would play the second fugue on a different manual. I'm also extremely naughty in the prelude and play the accompaniment to the arabesque melody on the subsidiary manual, returning both hands to the Great at the dotted chords just before the return to the main theme - which is definitely contrary to the indications in the print where the forte mark definitely looks as if it is meant to apply to both hands. However, everything does depend on the organ. I don't know yours, but it sounds as though you're right not to change. At any rate, I'm sure your right to trust your instincts. (You see, I'm not so dogmatic after all! )

I've got less up top. Hair, I mean! (Stop sniggering in the back row there!)

And the evidence for changing manuals within a piece is...? And the evidence for changing manuals within a piece is...? Because it's a different instrument? Because of practicalities? Because the music is quite capable of speaking for itself? This isn't evidence (and nor are the points I've just posed): it's no more than how we'd like to envisage the music. Ditto. Quite. But I don't. Sorry. I'm not getting at you. We all make Bach in our own image and I would go so far as to say that if you don't play music in the way you feel it should go your performance is doomed (and I wish some teachers would recognise that). But, genuinely, organists who hop manuals destroy the music for me. To change the medium, there are choral works - for example Tallis's Spem in alium, one of Palestrina's Litanies of the BVM - whose architecture relies on sustaining a mood over a long timespan. They are ruined if you try to be fussy or clever. Wagner's operas work in a similar - though obviously less monochrome - way (though personally I agree with Rossini: "Wagner's operas have some wonderful moments. And some awfully boring quarter hours.") Similarly I like 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.

If you think all the interest in Bach is in the registration then, yes, you'd find it tedious. Obviously it's for others to judge, but I don't think my Bach is any more boring than the average harpsichodist's. My Effar examiners didn't mind too much: it seems they preferred my Bach to my Franck!

You'll just have to stop telling her all those dodgy jokes!

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").

By "changing direction" I take it you mean changing manuals or registration. Back in the neo-baroque euphoria of the 50s and 60s we were taught to play the (pedal-less) episodes of Bach fugues on a different manual in order 1) to provide some variety and 2) to demarcate the formal sections of the fugue more clearly - the unspoken law here, of course, was that every fugue had to be straightjacketed as best you could into the academic fugue form as expounded by the likes of Ebenezer Prout. Personally I think it's all tosh and most of the time you can't effect manual changes without doing a violence to the music. As everyone knows, it's easy enough to get off the Great, but it's rarely easy to get back. But my real objection is that, on British organs at any rate, it completely destroys the continuity and architecture of the music - though the contrast might be less violent on Baroque-type instruments. Of course, you can't assume that absence of manual directions in Bach's autographs (where they exist) and contemporary copies menas that changes were not made. It may or it may not: you can't argue from an absence of evidence. Nevertheless, if you take the view that only one manual and registration is ever needed unless the source says otherwise, it actually works perfectly satisfactily. Bach's autograph of the concerto in d minor is suggestive. The first movement actually has the registration specified (I'm quoting this from memory, so may have got the odd detail wrong): RH on one manual, LH on another manual, each played on a 4ft Octave, Pedal on an 8ft. Then in the middle of the movement, while everything is still going full tilt, Bach instructs the 8ft Prinzipal to be added to the LH (not the right, apparently) and the 32ft Subbass in the Pedal - these additions could have been done only by a registrant. The link to the next movement is marked organo pleno. The last movement also has the use of two manuals marked very carefully. In view of this careful marking, it may well be significant that the second movement - a fugue - has no manual changes marked at all. In short, no manual changes for me. Bach's method of providing variety in a fugue was to drop the pedal part - and that's all that's necessary.

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!

Neither. It should be a partnership!

Oh, quite. I wasn't actually advocating "authentic" performances. In any case, true authenticity in music of the pre-gramophone eras is unattainable - which is why I put the word in quotes.

Indeed. I've not checked the Gloucester and Salisbury specs on NPOR, but I'll bet that in Howells's day the registrational aids were much more limited and an "authentic" performance would involve a lot of hand registration.

And, if we really want an "authentic" performance, play it mostly on 8ft stops, with the addition of 4ft in forte passages (maybe) and adding the mixtures only with, or after, the chorus reeds - if at all (anyone know what Howells's or Brewer's views about mixtures were?) Did anyone say that? I think the point being made was that an "unauthentic" performance isn't automatically unmusical, even if it's not quite what the composer wanted or expected.

No way!

Exactly, Richard. Pierre: I think there may be a difference in national terminology here. I understand what your are is saying, but I feel pretty sure that British organists understand the terms "neo classic" and "neo baroque" as meaning exactly the same thing. Of course it may just be me who is misunderstanding the usage, but I don't think so.

But with a name like that it should be a poncy little thing, shouldn't it? Or has someone been listening to too many Henry Wood arrangements? (I haven't taken the pills today. You can tell, can't you? )

JUst to be pedantic (coz I'm in one of those moods today) Coventry isn't a neo-classic organ. A Grant Degens & Bradbeer is a neo-classic organ. Coventry is an eclectic organ. Not quite the same thing. I don't disagree with you about the mixtures though: they are not authentic for Howells. (But Howells can still sound fine on it.)

What about the first 100 years though?

Excellent! I was of course generalising and, as with all generalisations, there are exceptions. Not all congregations are philistines. It's a pity that you had the opposite experience so soon afterwards though.

I suspect you might get as many different answers to this as there are organists. If you want to "theme" your voluntaries to the service you are more or less going to have to restrict yourself to playing chorale preludes and other programmatic music. But I don't see any need to be so restrictive. To my mind a voluntary that enhances the mood of the service is sufficient; if on occasion a more direct link is possible, all well and good. And, yes, as far as I am concerned it is part of the service on a par with any other musical item. In my book (though not everyone takes this view) that means an offering to God through which the congregation can hopefuly raise themselves to a more spiritual level as an aid to worship. The one thing music in a church service definitely is not - under any circumstances - is a concert.

I'm surprised no one really answered this. The term "voluntary" dates back to the sixteenth century (no earlier, I think) and means the same as "fantasy" and "ricercare" ("to search out"). The concept common to all these terms is "the composer's whim". The voluntary/fantasy/ricercare is a distinct form, which Thomas Morley described thus in his A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musick (1597): A few paragraphs later Morley speaks of "points of voluntary upon an instrument". In practice the voluntary/fantasia/ricercare is a contrapuntal form that treats a number of points of imitation in succession, in the same way that the more "meaty" Tudor anthems and motets have a different point of imitation for each new phrase of text. Tallis's motet O sacrum convivium actually started life as an instrumental fantasia. So did Byrd's Laudate pueri Dominum. As for the pig-ignorant attitude of British congregations, I despair. What a contrast you find in Germany. I remember a few years ago playing Vierne's Carillon de Westminster in Aachen Cathedral after the Sunday morning mass. At the end I was surprised to be greeted with an ample round of applause. I looked over the balcony and found the whole congregation still glued to their seats. That's how it is there - the service isn't over until the voluntary has ended. And that's how it should be. Of course, they are cultured and take music seriously over there. I suspect the British tradition (since at least John Wesley's time) of producing softly pious, liturgical "mush" of no musical significance whatsoever hasn't done us any favours.

That settles that then. It's the revised version that Latry plays and which is in my copy. I've always thought that ending marvellous, even before I knew there was an alternative. When I heard the early ending I thought it very disappointing in comparison. It's interesting that there's no consensus here on which version is better. I wonder whether our tastes are influenced by which one we got to know first. I'm pretty sure mine is.

Yes, the big one. I'm afraid I know nothing about when it was added. http://www.orgelsite.nl/koeln.htm

Cologne Cathedral has one of these too. So does St Fridolin's, Munster, but there it only plays the bottom note (a resultant one, of course) - presumably you use it much as you would a thunder pedal.