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Richard Fairhurst

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Everything posted by Richard Fairhurst

  1. The arrangement in New English Praise is well worth investigating if you've not seen it already.
  2. There is a toccata on the Veni Creator in Jeanne Demessieux's 12 Chorale Preludes on Gregorian Tunes. Easier than the Duruflé, and rather enjoyable. (iTunes link for a 30-second snippet.)
  3. I've been coveting the Apple iPad for exactly that - something where I can load up a PDF of some music, put it on the stand, and just touch it to flick to the next page. My usual pageturners for voluntaries are both in the choir, which means I can't really nab them for that twelve-page anthem we're learning with the turns in the most awkward places...
  4. I went to have a brief look at the Chipping Norton instrument this morning as some light relief after having my mouth rearranged by the dentist over the road! St Mary's in Chipping Norton is embarking on a reordering - leaflet here (PDF). The leaflet mentions "provision of additional storage in this area (made possible by the recent removal of a now redundant pipe organ)". There is also an artist's impression showing the pipework retained but with the console removed to give space for a new room. In fact the organ is still very much in situ. The console is, however, obscured by a pile of materials and its case firmly locked shut, so I didn't get to see much. Clearly it has not been played for many years. A photocopied sheet dated November 2009 (well, it actually says November 2007 with the 7 crossed out and replaced by a 9 ) says: "We have received permission for the internal pipework of the unviable Porritt pipe organ to be taken away by Peter Collins, organ builders (for use in repairing Porritt organs elsewhere) and some of the pipes have already been packed for transportation." The current instrument in use is an electronic of fairly antique vintage (I played it once several years ago and don't remember being particularly enamoured of it). The church certainly has "worship band" services but I'm not honestly sure what provides the music at the main Sunday morning services.
  5. No disc space or bandwidth would be used up by including them on a thread here - well, none more than the usual amount for a textual posting. The disc space used to store the images is on the server hosting the images - fotopic or flickr. It's just the same as the image used in, for example, pcnd5584's signature: if you right-click that and choose "Open in new window" (or your browser's equivalent) you'll see that it's hosted on an external website.
  6. Assuming you can get an image of the score (whether scanned, or Sibeliused, or what-have-you), you could just upload it to an image-hosting service such as flickr.com or fotopic.net. Once it's uploaded, you could then use the little "Insert Image" button (looks like this: ) to insert it directly into a posting. fotopic.net is probably better than flickr.com for this as they encourage such "direct linking". Perhaps, with our generous host's permission, we could have an ongoing "Descants and harmonisations" thread for it?
  7. G# above middle C died at 3pm on Christmas Eve, just as I was trying to wrap up the Festival Toccata for the evening's two services. Fortunately the churchwarden is both handy with a soldering iron (which I certainly am not) and quite used to calls of this nature at Christmas/Easter/major weddings/etc. etc. Our new Wyvern should be in place at Easter or so. Hallelujah.
  8. I was about to point out that it's Longpont. Longpont is in the Aisne. Longport is in Stoke-on-Trent. Then I remembered that Vierne did write Les Cloches de Hinckley, so Stoke-on-Trent may not be that far-fetched after all.
  9. Entirely dependent on the church, I think - we've always sung Kingsfold until trying Vox Dilecti for the hell of it last year. On balance I think that Vox Dilecti (first two lines in G minor, then two in G major) is sufficiently cheesy that RVW was right not to even admit it to the Chamber of Horrors. But each to their own. As for the other one, I've always known it as Jesus Wants Me For A Mungbean...
  10. From France, M et Mme Enson, and their talented singing son: "choral" Yves Enson. The music at the end of the ball will be played by another Welshman, the son of Mr and Mrs Sionel - Rhys S Sionel.
  11. 'Lord of all Hopefulness', sadly. Probably requested for 80% of weddings at our church.
  12. It sounded like 4/4 but with 3-3-2 phrasing, if you see what I mean...
  13. Absolutely! There's a recording of the Soissons carillon on Wikipedia though sadly in a rather obscure file format. I like the fugue best at about dotted crotchet=90 - maybe a little faster, but to my ears, 100 doesn't give it enough space to breathe.
  14. Hell, why not. Our 9.45 this morning was the kids' nativity, and with a bit of camping it up on the acoustic piano, I acquitted myself reasonably well, I think. 6pm was a reflective service for which it was deemed the choir would sing "up top" (as our church has been reordered to be back-to-front). Consequently I couldn't play the (electronic) organ as I would have wished - we'd have been at opposite ends of the church and the timekeeping would have been appalling - so chose to use the (electronic) piano instead. But, hey, the piano has an almost passable organ sound which will do for the first hymn, Creator of the Starry Height, at least. Well, it would have done had I not accidentally selected "Electric Piano" by accident... and started the introduction accordingly. One muttered curse and a bit of frantic button-pressing later and I got... "Rock Harpischord". And another false start. At this point I decided to make the best of a bad lot and just go for the default piano sound. I'm not sure all this flailing did a lot for the reflective atmosphere. But hey - pretty much everyone stayed and listened to the closing voluntary (Boellman's Priere a Notre Dame), which is probably a first in our place.
  15. John Milford Rutter is our Christmas bread-and-butter and if I hear one more blasted arpeggio to the recycling bank with the whole pile of them, I shall go
  16. Which I see has been named as "the best carol"! http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/a...ure/7752029.stm (who's afraid of the Darke, indeed...)
  17. I can't play that one without following "Knowing you, Jesus" with a silent "AHA!"...
  18. In case anyone's not seen it: http://www.imbibit.co.uk/
  19. Do have a look at 'Common Ground', edited by John Bell, St Andrews Press. You might also find this splendid volume a worthy contender.
  20. The problem we find with the "electronic hymnbook" is that the words are never quite what you're expecting. We have a hymnsheet most Sundays, which enables us to choose from AMNS, CH4, CP and a few others of which I will not speak the name. This is, by and large, what the congregation sing from - sometimes we'll put the words up on a projector too. But, of course, the choir need the music, so they stick with their copies of AMNS; and the words are never quite the same as those on the songsheet, which come from SongPro (I think it's called). It gets very frustrating. Incidentally, I'm interested to see that CH4 is now available in a new binding as "Hymns of Glory, Songs of Praise" - a deliberate attempt by Canterbury Press to market a Church of Scotland hymnbook outside the Church of Scotland.
  21. We sang it during communion last Sunday and several members of the congregation commented afterwards on how lovely a tune it was. And I was rather chuffed earlier today to pick up a (second) copy of New English Praise, mint condition, for £2.99 in the Oxfam shop by Hereford Cathedral...
  22. Rumour has it Fnac are coming to Britain: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-...ain-793149.html
  23. A little, but to my untrained eye, significantly less solid-looking! That said, the contacts are at present the least of our worries. I arrived at choir practice yesterday, turned the organ on, hit General Cancel followed by one of the pistons... only to be greeted by something that sounded like a detuned asthmatic harmonium at a distance of half a mile. So we shall have the full thunderous might of 'Jesus lives! Thy terrors now' on an upright piano tomorrow. Hey ho.
  24. I can speak with a little authority on the organ in question, as the parish in question is mine! (And Barry's visit was very much appreciated.) The mechanical problems are principally with the manuals. They have a rather Heath Robinson contact design which is not at all robust. On several occasions - usually half an hour before weddings! - the churchwarden and I have made panicked fixes with a soldering iron to repair it. A 17-year old electronic keyboard of standard mechanism, similar to that found on a thousand Casios or Yamahas, would be less likely to fail (indeed, we have a little portable Viscount of exactly the same age which has not failed yet). But if it did, a complete replacement would be simply a matter of pulling out the old manuals and slotting in a new one at a cost of a couple of hundred pounds. The point is not just that the manuals are fragile, it is that they are non-standard. To some extent, the same can apply to the sound-generating technology. It should be possible to pull out antiquated circuitry and replace it with a new "heart", keeping the case and manuals intact. (This should be where Hauptwerk comes into its own, but there are as yet far too few 'dry' sample sets for it to be of much use in reverberant spaces.) But unfortunately, with our organ, the piston-only design and erratic manuals would make this a fruitless exercise. Perhaps a 17-year old narrowboat is a better comparison than a car - something built to last and which you can keep upgrading.
  25. Any digital organ with MIDI input/output (that is, anything built in the last 20 years!) can be played by a machine... if you see what I mean. The device that sends the notes to the organ down the MIDI cable is called a "sequencer". You can either have a hardware sequencer (a little black box that you plug in), or a software sequencer (a program that runs on a PC/Mac, like this one). I suspect there are probably digital organs with built-in ones, too, but the presence or absence of a built-in sequencer shouldn't dictate the choice of instrument. I agree with Denis that this approach should be avoided wherever possible. On the rare occasion where it may be used, though, I'd strongly advocate that the real organist records the hymns into the sequencer for replay later, rather than just using an off-the-shelf collection of "MIDI files". The latter will not be at the speed or registrations that the congregation is used to.
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