contrabordun

Andrew Fletcher once told me that he thought that Urtext was all very well, but that when the source contained obvious misprints / copyists slips etc etc, he didn't think it was doing anybody any favours to reprint them...

you were there?

Sometimes it ends up so in more ways than we might wish. I was deputising in south Birmingham a couple of weeks ago. After the last hymn and dismissal, I launched the voluntary and several pages later realised there was none of the usual hubbub. Very nice, I thought, this is one of the places where they do stay and listen. Some while later, JSB thundered to a conclusion and the vicar stood up with the notices he'd been patiently waiting ten minutes to read...

ah, well, maybe everybody's got a toaster these days? btw, I thought Stephen Bicknell had had the last word on toasters years ago. Mind you, Lord Peter Wimsey was shown playing in Gaudy Night. Don't recall much organ music in Morse, though.

Can't beat Dover for value for money... Complete P's and F's - USD10.95 (~£5.50) BWV531,2,3,4,5,6,9,41,2,3,45-51 + 8 Short T's Fant's, Passa and other works - USD11.95 BWV537,8,40,42,62,3,4,5,6,8,9,70,72,3,4,4a,5,8,9,82 Organ Music (USD13.95) 6 Trio Sonatas, ClaiverU III, Orgelbuchlein, Schubler and the XVIII The only trouble is, it's the Gesellschaft, so quite a lot of C clefs in the Chorale Preludes. I reckon even this is no bad thing - it makes me learn them instead of just mindlessly sightreading them. But I did have to relearn one or two of the works - as Peter says, finding notes laid out differently between the hands somewhere in the throes of a big fugue is surprisingly fatal! Actually, technically you can beat Dover for VFM: this edition is freely downloadable from several places on the web.

er...from the rest of your comments, did you mean to write 'breakfast'?..."the DB's" is generally used as a term of approval, up this end of the M5 anyway. ...still hoping for that Board Open Day to be announced...

Glad to see that the Sw is marked as "enclosed. Always good to avoid the risk of needless confusion.

I know it's bad manners to keep adding "me too" in a forum, but in this case - it's great to be back. Thanks.

oops posted twice

or how about this?. Just the thing for the village church.

I suppose if there are folk who can - or even, (and at the very least) want to - play something with three manuals and a conglomeration of reeds, then that's something to be happy about?

Billing, surely? Highwood would be O Perfect Love.

Whereas in the US, you record your recital at a local venue, under exam conditions and supervised by a local 'proctor' (eg FRCO?), and it is then assessed anonymously by the examiners.

By contrast, look at what they get in the US.. http://www.agohq.org/docs/pdf/AGOCert.pdf http://www.agohq.org/docs/pdf/2007Requirements.pdf The first dozen or so pages of the former are particularly interesting (in terms of attitude), for example: How is that in the UK, with far fewer organists, we've managed to come up with a hodgepodge of local Organists Associations, (which might equate to AGO Chapters) and the RCO with no local presence, while the US has managed a single, federated, national organisation, which - heaven forbid - encourages its Chapters to set up programmes to support and encourage its members through the qualifications.

Very true, but my beef is not the difficulty of what is asked, but its usefulness. If I'm going to make and spend a couple of hundred hours or whatever studying and practising, I want to feel before I start that, whatever the outcome of the exam, I'll be able to go on using those skills and that knowledge afterwards - and this is the reason I'm more interested in the ABRSM diplomas than the RCO ones. Every hour I spend avoiding consecutives in Bach harmony is a page of a Bach Fugue not learned...simple as that.

Thou Who art beyond the farthest mortal eye can scan, Can it be that Thou regardest songs of sinful man? Can it be that Bob the Builder, can he fix it? Yes, he can.

The difference is, that the above are required to undertake ongoing professional development to keep their knowledge. Laws, building materials, medical science etc constantly change. Practitioners need to be kept up to date with these, for obvious reasons, and the quid pro quo is that they pay their subs and their professional bodies keep them updated. As a non-member I don't have first hand experience, but it sounds from others here as though the quids would be easier to pay over if there were a little more pro quo. And also, David Saint still hasn't given me as an adult, amateur organist, a reason to join. Maybe there isn't one - maybe the RCO is, and should be, mainly concerned with professionals. That's fine by me - I'm interested in canals and railways but have no intention of joining the Institute of Civil Engineers (railways, not trains) - but that's not really how the website portrays the RCO. Paul Hodgetts

possibly the only one anywhere to contain a brand new, four manual, tracker instrument of mid-European origin

Me, I never realised it was a joke..

Yes and every time I decide to brush up on it and play a few hymns up or down a touch, a very strange thing happens. I suppose it's because it involves forcing the brain to break the reflex links between particular lines/spaces and particular places on the keyboard (links I've been trying to make for the last 30 years), but I then find myself, when playing pieces or hymns at written pitch, worrying about where each note should be, exactly as I do when transposing. This is not a comfortable feeling!

which is fair enough - my point was about the ARCO, which I think I could get on the playing side, would need to work on the tests, but would need to take a very deep breath before deciding whether, as a non aspirant-pro, the paperwork was worth my while starting (never even did O-level music, so it'd be a long slog from G5 theory). The CertRCO is branded (inter alia) as an 'end point' for the amateur, but the syllabus seems to have been written starting with the ARCO and then subtracting bits to get the required standard without worrying too much about whether the end result is a useful skill, rather than starting from a consideration of what might be useful skills for the candidates to learn. EG1: transposition of a 2-part Bach Chorale, (RH+Ped). Useful (perhaps) as an intermediate waypoint en route to somewhere else, but what the hell use is that skill to anybody in itself? ABRSM G7 requires 4-part transposition manuals only and G8 4-part w/pedals, both of which are more useful than 2 part as 'end points', and I'd have thought that most people looking at CertRCO would likely have G8 anyway, so what's the point in testing a skill lower than they've already got? Answer (it seems to me), 4-part with pedal is ARCO, so CertRCO has to have something less demanding. We're organists, so we should have pedals in it. Why not have the G7 requirement instead, of 4 parts manuals only? EG2: to play from an open score in 3 parts, treble, transposing tenor and bass. Now then, the keyboard player only normally encounters the transposing tenor clef in the context of a choir, and in today's world, 3 part music is much more likely to be S+A+Men than ATB. But again, ARCO has the really useful (4 part w/transposing tenor), so Cert gets a cut down version which makes little sense as an end point. Why not have SAB and complex music to make up for not having the transposing tenor clef to worry about? So, coming back to the comment in my previous post, what is the RCO offering to me, and those like me? Why should I be interested in it?

Well.... So it seems fairly certain that that should be the case

Go on then, we've all thought it, somebody just post it...

All very interesting - I'm currently wondering whether to go for ARCO or the Assoc. Board diplomas, which focus much more on performance (which is, strangely, what I like to do) and don't require an annual subscription. The syllabus content of the RCO diplomas is kind of straying onto another topic so I won't go there - except to say I have no intention ever of attempting to learn to score read 3 C clefs - but as a keen and serious, but very much "non"-professional organist, I can't see that the RCO is offering me anything, except, as Barry says, the 'recognition' of the brand.

V. true. But I'm sure we could fill a whole new thread with 'An unfunny thing happened on the way out of the church at 10.30pm', and unlike JSB, we're discouraged from wearing swords around town.