pwhodges

When I was a chorister at Christ Church, the lay clerks certainly gave that impression. Paul

It's previous situation wasn't that dignified either... Paul

Reading Minster ("St Mary's, Butts" as we called it, to distinguish it from "St Mary's, Castle Street" about 200 yards away) is where I first played and practiced the organ. Although ignorant of most things about organs at the time, I felt that it compared favourably with the similarly-sized organ in Christ Church, Oxford, which was the only other organ I knew well (not to play, though). It was all working fine back in the 1960s... The rebuild appeal has been going for ever, it seems to me. I have an privately published LP recording which includes one track on the All Saints, High Wycombe Willis. It is Widor's Toccata, played by Alastair Ross, and it's the slowest performance I have ever come across - apparently because he couldn't reliably play it faster on the organ as it then was (in 1977). I don't know why that organ was used, given that the rest of the LP was recorded in Reading Town Hall; perhaps the Willis there (not so very long before its restoration) was in a worse condition at the time. Paul

Because that's how it's meant to work? People who know the answers correct it - there's no magical authority which checks all the text continuously. For that there are commercial offerings, but I wouldn't like to guarantee that they are uniformly better than Wikipedia. I quite often correct articles in which I find mistakes, and have even contributed much of the main text of a few articles. Paul

From a local guide (in English): "The church has the organ installed by the company „Driver&Co”, built in 1925 in Burnley (United Kingdom)" Another guide says: "Tourists will be interested to see the ancient organ and the choirs, made of dark wood." Paul

The Benedictus is from Sonata Britannica (Sonata #3), surely. Paul

Oops - I mis-remembered! Paul

Darke provided a piano transcription of Bach's O Mensch, bewein' dein' Sünde gross for A Bach Book for Harriet Cohen Paul

My wife showed me how to search the Bodleian (to which I have a login) properly, and I found the letters concerned (three from Wesley, and one reply). The image-based PDF files are too big to upload here, so you can get them from my server instead. Paul

An article about SS Wesley in the Musical Times of 1 Jul 1900 has a footnote which says that Wesley's views on temperament were set out in detail in three letters he wrote the Musical Standard in 1863 (issues of 1 Apr, 1 Jul, and 1 Dec). Sadly, a simple search on jstor for Musical Standard as a publication name netted me no hits. The Dictionary of National Biography gives the quote ‘The practice of tuning organs by equal temperament is, in my humble opinion, most erroneous’, attributing it to similar dates: (Musical Standard, 1 April 1863 p. 242, 15 June 1863 p. 321, 1 July 1863 p. 337). Paul

Recording sound in mono or even stereo with normal reverberation confuses the listener by forcing all the ambience which is part of the natural sound into the same direction as the "target" sound. Means to reduce the confusion this unnatural sound balance creates were an inevitable part of the development of recording techniques. Remember also that listening rooms in the past were likely more reverberant than our modern carpeted rooms, and the reduction of the double ambience effect was also an issue. But it may also be true that as the worst effects of this in mono were lessened by the move to stereo, and somewhat to a minimal form of surround, these techniques have not been stepped back from by a suitable readjustment of recording techniques. But only full Ambisonic recording (or some equivalent) combined with full 3D reproduction can claim to render tweaking of the original recording unnecessary. Remember also that there are two fundamentally different approaches to recording: one attempts to reproduce the original as heard by a listener in the original venue, and the other attempts to capture the original sound with as little of the surrounding ambience as possible so that it can be replayed as if performed in the listener's own venue. For the second, the idea of an orchestra playing in your sitting room is clearly absurd, but maybe a solo piano, not so much? The possibility of the two methods is highlighted by Hauptwerk, where the availability of ambient recordings for listening pleasure is set alongside dry recordings to be used as the sound sources for an installation in a church or other suitable venue which will provide the acoustic. Paul Background: I was trained by the BBC primarily in mono recording, have made commercial CDs in stereo, also demonstration recordings in full Ambisonics, and use a dry sample set in a portable Hauptwerk organ I take around for continuo work.

Engineers and critics alike have for many decades preferred "clarity" over "naturalness" or realism. This is why I generally prefer my own recordings (some of which have been commercial) to those of others. I use a single-point surround microphone (key word: ambisonics). Because realism in playback is limited if a full 3D playback system is not available (I don't have one, but do have horizontal surround in a symmetrical format - not cinema layout), I often make binaural files using my own HRTF to play back over headphones. But in this case the best realism requires head tracking to keep the reproduced sound stable in position as the listener's head moves, and again I don't have adequate hardware for that. The trouble is that without full surround, the choice is between having recorded reverberation included from the same direction as the musicians (which muddles the image) or simply reducing it (which makes the acoustic unrealistic). Adding reverberation in playback is no more realistic, but may be a useful compromise in some situations; again, it works best if not limited to a stereo pair of speakers in front. Paul

Only the person who wrote the post in which the quote is embedded can change or correct that quote. The person quoted has no access to it - the one quoting must take the responsibility. Paul

On the other hand, being able to edit a quote means that a small selection from a large post can be isolated and responded to; something I encourage forum users to do to prevent walls of duplicated text building up. Paul

For noise reduction, WaveLab is pretty good. It's not expensive when put alongside programs like iZotope RX (a very powerful noise reduction package). The late CoolEdit (which I used to master a couple of commercial CDs before I got WaveLab) morphed into Adobe Audition. It's a very capable package, but I no longer use it, as for years now it has (like all Adobe software) only been available on subscription. In this case, a 50Hz hum might be readily removable with no more than a very sharp notch filter. But more likely, it will have harmonics as well. In that case either the noise sample and subtract technique mentioned by Colin can be used; or, for instance, iZotope RX has a specialised hum filter which applies a very sharp notch filter to the hum frequency and also to as many harmonics as you specify, and has a mode which makes the filter adjust to follow the hum frequency if it varies (e.g. because of tape or record wow). Paul

Canterbury - Forwoods - I was at school there in the early '60s, and my (school) house was only just round the corner, so I spent many hours (when I should have been practicing, perhaps!) reading The Gramophone and chatting to old Mr Reginald Forwood about records and hi-fi. It was just the one family shop then, but now they've moved and run a rather effective mail-order business that I've used a couple of times. Reading - Barnes & Avis - In my childhood my piano was a "Barnes & Avis" upright; the music shop was founded about 1910, I think, and sold a lot of pianos, some branded with their name; I believe Avis had been a piano tuner, but I don't think Barnes had any link with the Barnes who built pianos in London in the earlier twentieth century. I have little memory of the shop itself. Oxford - Blackwell's barely needs mentioning, of course; I bought many early hardback volumes of the Neue Bach Ausgabe, organ and more, from their nicely obscure secondhand department (a subscriber had died), and was once introduced by the staff to a harpsichord maker (Michael Thomas), to whom I subsequently presented a dead pear tree, which he favoured for jacks. But from my school and student days I also remember Taphouse's (his son was at my prep school, but not in the cathedral choir), and Russell Acott's. The latter would always stock up with music required for the Oxford Music Festival, and when one year there was an Alkan class (only my son entered) they stocked up with all of Alkan's piano music, just in case. They had a huge music sale when they closed their shop in 1998; I bought some music still priced in £.s.d, and they honoured the prices on the old tickets! After a short period as a hire piano setup, they've finally closed. Paul

Wikipedia (in the composer's entry) says that it's based on a foreign carol (maybe Italian). I understand (from Hyperion sleeve-notes) that Hogwood's 1983 edition gives the carol titles for all but one of the Noëls, so that might help confirm the above. (Later:) There is an article on Daquin's Noëls starting on page 22 of this PDF. The author states that the Noël Étranger is the only one he has not been able to identify a source for. He writes: Paul

Reading Minster (where I first sang as a chorister, and first learnt the organ) also has a significant (BIOS grade II*) 1862 Father Willis organ last rebuilt by Willis III in the 1930s which is struggling to remain usable. They have an appeal open for £600,000, but (not currently living in Reading) I see little sign of progress. Paul

Howells Aedes Christi was not sung in my time either ('55-60). Paul

When I was a chorister there, the choir stalls were at the crossing end of the nave, further from the organ than now (still not far, the nave being so short, of course!). Evensong was sung there Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday; Wednesday was men-only, and Friday was unaccompanied at the East End (occasionally using the "Crotch" organ - no longer present - for continuo). Sunday mornings had Mattins in the choir stalls, followed for my first couple of years by the Litany, after which we processed to the East End for the Eucharist, which was unaccompanied; the only exceptions were Christmas Day and Easter Day when we sang the Eucharist from the choir stalls, with organ. No weekday Eucharists except 8am on red-letter saints' days, when the boys, alone, sang plainchant - most often, but not always, Missa de Angelis. Stories about what the choir got up to while having breakfast alone early, supervised by only the cook, don't really belong here... Paul

This is sad news. As for his book, he published it through Ex-Libris Books, so although they don't list it as their own publication, it might be worth asking them if they can sell it. Paul

I have no photo of the old console at Salisbury, but I found this quote in an article by Alcock in The Rotunda (March 1932, p29): How many organists these days have a lathe to hand, I wonder! Paul

He did, however, make the very odd decision to move the choir case at Christ Church to the back of the organ so it faced the doors! It got moved to the front again after barely a decade. Paul

The tuba was fine when I was a chorister there (55-59), and unlike many was enclosed. The arpeggio figuration in the last section of Walton's The Twelve was written to be played using it, and sounded very well that way (of course, Walton would have been familiar with it). In the orchestral version performed a few days earlier than the Ch Ch premier, the figuration was given to a glockenspiel - a very different way of getting it to stand out! Paul

Sadly I've never been able to find a copy of that disk, the only one ever made of that organ played solo (the only other recording of it is accompanying Preston's 1974 recording of Dvorak's Mass in D, played by Nicholas Cleobury). A friend and I recorded Paul Morgan practicing for the Abbey recording, and the tape of that is in the British Library sound collection, as part of their collection of recordings by the late Michael Gerzon which were gifted to them on his death. We also recorded Paul M playing through a number of hymns, as if they were being sung to, for a friend of his who was a missionary in West Africa and wanted to be able to have organ acct for hymns in his tent church! Both those tapes are in the library, in spite of the fact that they both have my name written on them - I've not yet managed to get copies of them for myself. Technically I have reason to believe they are better than Harry Mudd's recording for Abbey; for one thing, they were in stereo, and I don't think the Abbey disk was. As for the organ itself, it was a reasonable example of the type and times (Willis with the H&H treatment, fairly lightly), and sonically, it could probably have stayed, but for the fashion of the time. Sidney Watson told me shortly before retiring that the reason he never asked for it to be restored or replaced as it started to get cranky was so as not to limit the choice of his successor - which he certainly didn't! However, the side extensions to the Smith case were a travesty, and the depth and weight of the chair case containing an enclosed choir including a 16' were actually in danger of making it collapse - so major changes were inevitable. The pipework all vanished, except the bottom octave or so of the 32' violone (wood) which found its way to the Grove organ in Tewkesbury Abbey when John Budgen restored it, to complete the 32' rank there. Paul