innate

To save others the time this is the relevant page of Goetze and Gwynne's site: http://www.goetzegwynn.co.uk/restored/aldgate.shtml

Great site, and I'm sure it's an amazing organ. I enjoyed this, on the Organ in Facts page: Numbers of Registers: 63 Numbers of noisy Registers: 47 Michael

I wonder if they used the Compton when they performed Sweeney Todd in Wormwood Scrubs with lifers in the cast?

Many thanks for all the help from members of the group. I now have all his contact details Michael [original post edited]

For Ozzie soap organ stuff you have to go back to Mrs Mangan (?) playing the organ for her son's wedding in Neighbours c. 1989. Michael (and *I* was reprimanded in another thread for going off topic!)

No apologists for Robinson here? I quite enjoyed accompanying a recital by a soprano on it a few years ago; obviously I couldn't use many of the louder stops but apart from being so close to the pipes and therefore very aware of slips the sound and the action were lovely.

An ordained friend likes to refer to friends as God's apology for relatives. Michael

Belated thanks for the constructive suggestions. As it turned out, the clients had heard this particular movement played on the organ and as they were connected to professional musicians and were paying a very acceptable fee I determined to give them what they'd requested. I got hold of the Cembalo part and added in pencil, from the score, all the flute or violin parts where they were required. The result was much more effective than I would have imagined and a church full of Hampshire folk experienced something a little out of the ordinary! I should point out that I have played the harpsichord part in concert before so there were no insurmountable difficulties for me there.

And you should be proud! Well done! Not a demographic but I passed ARCO paperwork first time at 18 and the playing 6 months later. I took FRCO three years later and passed the playing first time but failed the paperwork - this was a few weeks after getting a good 2nd Class degree in Music at Oxford. As they say these days "Go figure!". I never bothered retaking the paperwork and wouldn't dream of putting myself through an exam now. At the presentation ceremony for my ARCO the recital was given by Nicholas Kynaston who made a short humble speech in which he warmly congratulated all the diploma holders for doing something he would never have been able to do, referring to his FRCO (hon.).

Thanks for the info and your committment to the NPOR, Tony. I think you forgot the stops of the Grand Orgue and is it really Vox Humaine on the Positif? Cheers, Michael

But isn't scale fundamentally to do with the ratio of the length to the circumference and only incidentally connected to absolute pitch? Of course a "B major" chord will sound lower and therefore slightly thicker than a "C major" chord but what is it that makes a chord inherently "C major"? As I understand it, in Bach's time the pitch for insruments in the court was a full tone lower than the pitch of the organs in the churches, so when the orchestra played with the organ in church the organist had to play a tone lower than the orchestra. Which was the "real" E minor of the opening of the St Matthew Passion? The E minor of the orchestra or the D minor of the organ? Or is the question rather: which is the real E minor, the E minor of the St Matthew Passion or the E minor of the Wedge Fugue? Rescaling the RAH organ as you describe must mean changing the length of a pipe with regard to its circumference. Simply moving the pipes up or down would just change the pitch, not the volume.

I presume that it's an electronic 32' reed - is there an enclosed 32' acoustic stop anywhere in the world? Michael

I might well be missing the point here, but moving the pipes up a note is effectively changing only the name of the pipe and not changing its scale or character at all. It is merely saving the organist the trouble of transposing everything a semitone. Apart from questions of temperament the organbuilder's and voicer's creation is maintained. There is, as far as I know, nothing inherent in any pitch standard so that an A has some sort of "A quality". See the appendix to Helmholtz which lists in pitch order a great many different pitch standards over the centuries and countries. Michael

I would not have used the word "judgmentalist"; rather "discerning" or "artistic". At the risk of exacerbating the situation I think Lee's attitude is the more judgmental; "First remove the beam from your own eye". At least Andrew included the important information in his appeal. If he hadn't considered that "Viscount" might be a deal-breaker he probably wouldn't have mentioned it. Michael

I think that's unfair, Lee. We are organists and real organs have pipes. Imagine asking a concert pianist to give a recital for a church on a digital piano, or expecting a string quartet to play Mozart on electric instruments. Nothing to do with Christian love. Michael

I've never seen so many shiny shirts in one place! Michael

I'm with you on this, Alsa. Three C-clef scores are rife in various areas of church music; Christ Church, Oxford used to sing a Brahms Motet from such a score. And even if you never have to read Soprano clef in your working life the fact that you can indicates all sorts of good things about your musicianship. I didn't realise it at the time, but looking back on it, the main point of the Harmony and Counterpoint papers at Oxford was to check how much you could "hear" music in your head. The opposite end of the spectrum was an O-level Music teacher who demonstrated a whole-tone scale on the piano to my brother's class by reading it off some manuscript paper.

Well, there is an accelerando from dotted crotchet = 84 to crotchet [sic -should be dotted] = 126 from bar 137 to bar 144. Michael

I'm not sure but I think I saw the Dupré G minor on the list of pieces for AB Grade 7. Can that be right?

Thanks for the support, vox! Actually it isn't a wedding, but a post-funeral memorial and I'm happy to oblige if I can. I have just played it through on the piano from the score and your suggestion will do as a last resort; sometimes the harpsichord rh is less convincing than the flute/violin stuff on its own. I'm gonna need a page-turner

I have been asked to play the first movement from Brandenburg 5 at a service. A quick google hasn't shown anything useful. Is anyone aware of an arrangement of Brandenburg 5 for organ? I have to say that I suspect that even if one exists it will probably be by Reger and be unplayable by mortals. Thanks in advance for any help. Michael

Cromorne, if I recall correctly. Perhaps there should be a poll along the lines of Ch Ch Rieger - is it a cr*** of sh***? Although I don't think I have the courage or knowhow to set it up myself. My opinion is that it is a first-class instrument for much of the solo literature and is more than adequate for most of the rest. As an accompaniment to the anglican choral repertoire it places constraints on the player but that is not a bad thing per se. From a design point of view it is a shame that the Cornet is on the Great rather than the Bombarde, and independent mutations (even using principal-scaled stops) would be more flexible than the Sesquialtera on the choir. I would agree with the previously expressed opinion that the action is lovely and wrong notes glaringly apparent. I remember the old organ as an RSCM cathedral course chorister c.1973 and from a couple of plays in 1977. It wasn't such a brilliant specimen of the romantic cathedral organ - there was a wooliness which went some way to compensating for the lack of a cathedral acoustic but playing, say, Bach and Leighton was at best unrewarding. My experience of the Rieger includes wasting too much time listening to the voicer at work, hearing the opening recitals and playing for a few services.

re Westminster Cathedral I remember a concert by the RSCM Westminster Abbey Cathedral Course choir in Westminster Cathedral in August 1971 conducted by John Bertalot. The choir was in the apse for most of the concert and the choir organ was joined by the grand organ at the climax of Ireland's Greater Love. Had the organs been at different pitches it would have been, ahem, Grater Love, but I remember no discrepancy. The organs were played by two organists, I think; one of them was Simon Wright and the other possibly Michael Fleming. Michael

Well said! My point was not that we shouldn't put serious amounts of money towards church music, but that there is no inherent difference between church music and any other kind of expense from either a logical or a Christian point of view; why single out organs as underserving?

There is no way you can justify *any* Western expenditure, whether on the armed forces, clergy salaries, hymn books, candles, cancer drugs, air-conditioning or children's toys when put in the context of global poverty and starvation.