innate

Would you prefer, Colin, there to be no German organs in France, no French organs in Denmark, no Danish organs in the USA, no USA organs in Canada etc.?

I think they're from Her Majesties Chapel Royal, St James's Palace. Some would say all the choristers were in fancy dress

Are you suggesting they should ditch their fine collection of old Italian string instruments too? And maybe churches and schools from the USA, Australia, Japan and Italy should be reprimanded for buying pipeorgans from companies based in the United Kingdom. I do agree that the mock-up picture makes the proposed organ look ugly and completely out of character with the rest of the building.

I'm a big fan of the old clefs and I love Brahms for using Alto Clef in his final pieces, Op. 122. It was standard practice to use C clefs (Sop, Alto, Ten) in choral works, particularly in Germany and Austria, in the 19th Century. The so-called facsimile edition of John Stanley organ voluntaries by, I think OUP, from the 1970s "helpfully" rewrites all the C-clef passages in modern clefs. The old Peters Edition of Bach organ works uses C clefs in many of the choral preludes as does, I think, the original Bach Gesellschaft, but Peters changes the Tenor Clef of the LH cantus firmus in Wachet Auf to the Bass Clef whilst preserving Bach's original Alto Clef for the RH obbligato.

I think Fry was quoting Carl Sagan and the space mission was the Voyager probe(s). EDITED TO ADD: According to this site the quote was by biologist Lewis Thomas: “I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach . . . but that would be boasting.”

My first thought was to use MIDI to make identical interpretations, but that's not really fair either, as I'd like to think we all, as musicians, tailor our interpretation, tempo, articulation, registration, to the instrument and building we are making music with and in.

Is there an issue comparing pieces such as the famous Bach and Widor toccatas, where (I imagine) the organ sound is bound up with piece in non-organists' minds, and less "iconic" pieces where, in order to perceive the music the non-organist has to first comprehend the sound? I'd also be interested in research that addressed how non-musicians perceive the same organ piece played on different organs and registrations compared with how the same non-musicians perceive the same solo violin piece played on different violins by different performers and with different microphone placement. Only because I imagine the sound of a solo violin "in your face" can be as much of a turn-off as any organ!

Sorry, not my department. I think Gems is a Dutch word meaning goat or chamois, so either a hard g as in get or, maybe, a raspy throat noise as in van Goch. Not a j as in gemstone.

Sibelius now does the correct (non-French) thing of adding an accidental to the second of two notes tied over a barline only at the start of a new page (or is it new system?).

Hi DR, Just had another look, this time at the Largo from the D Major Harpsichord Concerto. Maybe it's there and I missed it, but presumably these are your own transcriptions intended for the organ - is that right? If so, perhaps that should be made clearer on the download page. Bar 10, RH: there should be a # before the second A (5th semiquaver). The ties seem very odd on my pdf viewer (Preview on Mac OS X 10.6). Quite often, eg RH bars 8-9, the tie is vertically aligned with the end of the stem rather than the notehead. In the "Scotch snap" sections, eg RH bars 23-24, the short beams for the second demi-semiquavers in each 4-note group are on the wrong side of the stem. I think this is a bug in Sibelius and can't, sadly, suggest a workround but it does look odd. Keep up with the good work. By the way, I agree with Chauncey's post and suggestion of a "Members' Websites" section on the board for discussion of non-commercial sites.

There's a missing flat before the lh E at the end of bar 6 in the extract from the Chaconne transcription. Found it about 10 seconds after going to the site so can't really comment on the rest of your work! Well done for doing it all though.

Hi David, As no one else has come forward I'll put in my 2d-worth. Your first point concerns a held note in one voice coinciding with the same pitch in another voice. I would play the note again in your bar 3 example, in other words change the minim g# into two crotchets. Generally that's probably the way to go, but there are probably some situations where another solution is appropriate. Your second point concerns wide stretches in legato playing. The bar I think you mean is bar 12 (counting the first incomplete bar as bar 1). Take the low b with the left hand; you'll then have to do a very quick change from 5 to 4 or 3 on the bottom b to avoid a gap between the b and the low G#. Alternatively, as the piece has no pedal part you could couple the pedals to the manual with no pedal stops drawn and play the low b and g# on the pedals. Some might call that cheating but I say if it helps to produce a musical performance just do it, and I guess that Brahms had larger hands than you. Good luck, it's a beautiful piece.

I played the Widor Toccata from Sym. V at a funeral on Saturday. The deceased had arranged all the details of the service including the venue and this concluding voluntary. It was, I think, uplifting for everyone except me, who was waiting in vain for the post-service chatter to start!

A letter in the Musical Times in the early 1980s pointed out that if you removed the first three notes of the theme (GEA) from JAEGER, Elgar's best friend, you are left with JR, so the question Elgar was prophetically posing in the Variations was "Who shot JR?"

Any iPad-like touchscreen has the potential for adding comments, both as text and as freehand graphics, depending on the software being used for displaying the music. This feature alone would make an iPad more useful than a more traditional laptop, in addition to the problems of putting a laptop on the music stand of an organ [a grand piano is a different kettle of fish; you can easily put a laptop on a grandpiano by putting the music stand flat - also on a box organ]. If you were able to use Sibelius (or your music notation app of choice) directly on the iPad you would be able to add your fingering, registraton, marks of expression etc directly into the file as you practise. Which would be cool.

But in this example the Cornet is on the HW so the earlier explanation doesn't quite fit here. NB you have to click the very small "next" at the bottom of the linked page above to get to the stoplist.

I don't think so. You may only open Scorch files in a browser (Netscape, Safari, Firefox etc.). As a reader/printer it offers more than midi files or pdf; depending on how it's been distributed you may view/print individual parts and change the key. The only way you can do what you want is to get the maker of the original Sibelius file to send it you :-) You can also try importing the midifile into Sibelius. This can be successful or a disastrous failure depending on many factors including the complexity of the music (harmonically and rhythmically) and the settings in Sibelius. Best of luck, Michael

I'm not sure exactly what you mean but I think Sibelius 3 is rather old; you would be well-advised to consider upgrading to the current version. If you stay on 3 there might come a time when your files will be extremely hard to open. More certainly you will get a new computer that won't run the old software. Scorch: as far as I know this is a method of viewing and printing Sibelius files via the www. It is not a means of transferring the musical data back into Sibelius. My hunch is that Sibelius 3 is not compatible with the current version of Scorch and that even if it were it wouldn't do what you want it to do. Best wishes, Michael

Interesting - that list, apart from the Salicional and adding a Krummhorn, can be seen as the Positive division in any number of neo-classical (or do I mean neo-baroque?) instruments.

In my limited experience, on modern "historically informed" three-manual instruments the Larigot is often on the Positive/Choir with the 12,17 Sesquialtera rather than the Swell where the Nazard and Tierce are, or the Great with its Cornet. Is this, to use a trendy phrase, a bit of a mash-up?

No iPad here but I'm guessing the keyboard works on the same principle as the iPhone: try keeping your finger on the "e" and a slew of differently accented "e"s should appear.

Thank you so much for posting this, Vox. I had no idea.

So it does all come down to size in the end. What was so wrong with the principle of a collective acting on behalf of its members that the hard-won right to combine is now seen as anachronistic?

I don't think that's necessarily true, Vox. I first heard the story about the cathedral organist's improvising before evensong gradually becoming louder until a sudden stop, mid-full organ, left the Dean's wife shrieking to her neighbour "in the clear" about 40 years ago, so the problem existed in the "good old days".

What I was talking about is different; rather than moving the notes to a rhythmic grid, which is what quantising does (and it is possible to quantise both the start and the end of all or selected notes), some MIDI software allows you to move the grid to the notes, in effect making a tempo "map" of the recorded performance.