contrabordun

especially dangerous when they're singing from a printed order or service or a different hymn book and you forget to check whether they have the same number of verses (or even in the same order) as you. (Or, in the case of O Little Town, which order the lines within a given verse are printed.

Oh yes...... and perhaps a smigeon of accompanying the wrong verse - you know, where you get five consecutive verses with more or less identical words

Sadly, the insurers probably wouldn't know the difference

I'm with Lee, here. It's their wedding. If I had a real issue with whether something was appropriate for use in a church because of its extra-ecclesiastical connotations, I'd run it past the Celebrant: if s/he was happy than I wouldn't have a problem.

as in, she made the organ sound as if it was 400 miles away?

e minor. Every time.

Open pigeons...insert cat. Example deliberately chosen for the reasons stated in the replies to my posts - the point is that it is the customer's budget, not the firm's image (whether this image be a reflection of their current output or some folk memory of past glories) that determines the quality of the end result.

I think this unfairly maligns the workaday firms, who are, after all, constrained by their customers' budgets. You don't go to a Jaguar dealer if all you can afford is a Skoda, but the latter will get you from A to B. Top quality costs. Those firms with the right reputation can provide that quality, because those customers with the budget to pay for it will go to them. But that doesn't mean they're any more willing to go the extra mile than would be Boggis and Sons, for the same budget. And again, it's the customer who makes the tradeoff between finishing time and a couple of extra ranks of pipes.

Read 'em online. Hell, in the recent eon of forum-less wilderness I've been getting through the online Times and Telegraph and on really bad days, most of the Guardian to boot.

Ha, I can make hymns sound just like that without any additional pairs of hands.

Well you'd have to. You certainly wouldn't be able to play it in the normal way.

Anyway, we'd call them "couplings"

Hmmmm...despite publishing on Thursday a letter from Timothy Byram-Wigfield complaining that a previous article about the RFH hadn't mentioned the organ. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/d...icle1895999.ece Searching back to find the reference to the above, I came across this from Richard Morrison, which sounds very ominous: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/c...l&offset=12

Yes, as another cradle catholic with what you might call ecumenical crossover interests, I'm occasionally ashamed of some of the things that many otherwise pleasant and tolerant RC's come out with about the reformed churches. You'd think such people would at least be sympathetic - they think all the prods are quite literally going to hell, after all - but it doesn't seem to work like that.

Ah, yes, now you come to mention it, maybe there is a good reason after all.

and another thing - (as I've quite obviously been outvoted re rall at end of playover - not that i'm going to stop doing it!) - why announce hymns? It's on the board, the playover is rolling...we do the same thing every week...ok, there might be some newcomers or infrequent visitors, but everybody else is opening the hymn books (well, not in the Catholic church I play in, but that's a different story). But if we must have hymns announced, can we please not read the entire first verse out? And above all, not with long pauses between the lines so you never know if it's time to start or not.

or the "Rhythm" method?

She's also against any rall at the end of the playover, which I think is necessary to let the opposition know it's coming up to audience participation time.

There is of course the low tech alternative - bucket of water left standing inside the instrument.

Yes, I've always thought that a rather brilliant remark. I mean, this guy who had probably only seen a pedalboard about twice in his life before, somehow mananges to convey the impression that such new fangled and foreign things are quite beneath his dignity, while avoiding the question of whether he would have been able to use the things if he'd wanted to.

"learnt", surely?

But hugely unfair on any of the many other talented choral directors out there who might have applied had the job spec not specifically required an organist...

I was just quoting from an order of service of a wedding i did a couple of years ago. Like Cynic, I employed fuzzy matching to identify what to play. With a repertoire much smaller than his, the decision wasn't hard to make...