innate

It’s really not difficult, Rowland. All Souls College, Oxford has been suggested as a larger war memorial in the UK.

Is there an organ in All Soul’s chapel?

Ben Sheen at Queen's College, Oxford

One of our regular deputies repurposes 20 congregation Taizé booklets for the same effect!

I’m nervous about how to respond to this. I’ve just read the Bicknell article (which I must have read many years ago; it seems familiar). I don’t think (and I may be misunderstanding both he and you, Rowland) Bicknell considered pitch and temperament to be inter-related except in the very particular circumstance of organs at one pitch playing with orchestras at another, specifically that when the orchestra is playing in B minor and the organ playing in A minor (effectively they are sounding at the same pitch standard) the organ (if tuned in meantone or modified meantone, as was usual in Bach’s time) would avoid the “wolf”, making life better for all concerned. One has to assume that musicians playing oboes, violins etc. would naturally not, necessarily, be playing in a temperament that exactly matched the temperament of the organ, just as nowadays. I don’t know what Bicknell means about Bach writing the B minor Mass in “4 sharps” but I haven’t looked at the manuscript to check. I’m now interested, based on what Bicknell says about Bach’s exploitation of the characterful effect of modulation on meantone organs being sufficient as to render performances of his long organ pieces without any change of registration still sufficiently interesting, to hear Bach’s B minor Prelude and Fugue played on an organ tuned in Silbermann temperament. I really don’t think Bicknell says anything in his article about the effect of the pitch standard of an organ on the temperament.

Yes, Bach’s use of the organ with orchestra in Leipzig has been researched in depth. Some of the cantatas required that three different pitch standards were combined. I think some German organs had one or two sops tuned to the low Kammerton to save the organist transposing when playing continuo with orchestras. e careful not to confuse “temperament” and “pitch standard”. It wasn’t the mean-tone tuning/temperament of the church organs that meant the organists had to transpose, but the high pitch. The reasons for the organs being at high pitch included the very high cost of metal for the pipes; which was also a reason for them not providing the bottom C# on pedals and manuals.

Twice as much I wouldn’t describe as vast.

Given that before modern heating systems were installed in churches organs would not have had a “basic pitch” that remained constant through the seasons of the year I doubt we should attribute Wesley’s (or anyone else’s) response to different tunings to that.

Yes, the A flat major chords are awful. But the B flat and B flat minor chords are rather lovely!

Thanks for posting this. We are planning a Vigil service for Ukraine next week and now we can sing this! The only downside was that saving the first page to my computer crashed it! All ok now.

Just for comparison the world record price for a violin is $16M and you’d be hard pushed to lead a congregation of 1000 singers with it. Many churches spend £100k on sound systems which only last 10 years.

Presumably there was Choral Matins before the Eucharist on Sunday mornings. I felt it a shame that Howells’s Missa Aedes Christi was never sung in my time at Christ Church (1978-81) because it wasn't in Latin.

Looks lovely, Jeremy. I too would be interested in the dimensions. Might be time to move our harpsichord into another room! Is the blower inside the main case or does it protrude? Best wishes, Michael

The lack of equality of opportunity is not just about numbers of places in cathedral and Oxbridge college choirs. It’s about the ranking of those places in terms of the institutions that are most likely to launch their former choristers into musical careers at the highest level. The “strike rate” for choristers from Kings, St Pauls, New College, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral is, I’m almost certain, much higher than from, say (and I mean no disrespect), Derby (my home town), Ely, Truro, Carlisle.

I’m relieved that there’s no debt. Thanks for putting my mind at ease.

For 500 years there were no women in Cambridge colleges.

When I was there as an undergraduate 40 years ago the choir would normally sing at the West End but they were always at the East End for the Thursday Evening Eucharist (where the Mass Setting was always unaccompanied), which certainly gave the service a Mediaeval feel.

That secondary definition may be how some use the word but it’s kind of the opposite of its original meaning and its general adoption would render the word ambiguous and therefore useless.

Let me know when Nicola Benedetti plays a recital of Brahms and Stravinsky on an electric violin or Yuja Wang plays Debussy and Rachmaninov on a digital piano. This really isn’t a question of being “truly authentic”—we aren’t demanding Liverpool Cathedral has a mean-tone mechanical instrument at its West End nor are we expecting Benedetti and Wang to play Bach or Scarlatti on harpsichord or gut-strung violin (although Nicola has done just that!), just on instruments whose constituent parts excite the air and interact with each other and the audience in a natural, musical way. if you’re getting epsdis ffo maybe the problem is in you.

Sorry, I meant to say that Anna was talking on BBC Radio 3: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000n6bt

Contrabombarde—I know exactly how that felt! I did a 2 minute version and it was still too long. The next day I heard Anna Lapwood relate that she once played it at the start of a wedding—she could see the West End and the East End from the console but not the middle bit of the bride’s route. She’d worked out the length of music that was needed and started when she got the signal from the clergy. At the end she could see no sign of the bride. So she played it again. Still no sign of the bride. And a third time. Turned out the bride had stopped halfway for photos!!

Thank you both, Dafydd and Jonathan for your helpful suggestions.

I’d love to hear from organists that have found good, musically convincing, cuts in this popular Wedding prelude. I think I need it to last about 2 minutes; and I probably play it at a less than virtuosic tempo.

I’m fairly sure that the old “blockwork” organs had no sliders; if there was wind and you put down a “note” all the pipes sounded. When they introduced the first slider it would, I imagine, have had the function of “stopping” some of the pipes (probably the highest ones) sounding so the lever was probably called a stop from the very beginning. Whenever that was.

I don’t think this is the right place for a discussion about mask-wearing in general. There’s plenty of information both authoritative and bonkers easily available.