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contrabordun

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Everything posted by contrabordun

  1. With all due respect to the fact that drd asked for what other places charge, I think it would be reasonable for him to pass on also the fact that the actual cost to the church of said practice would be pence per hour, at least one order of magnitude less than people might tend to assume, very relevant if the vicar's objective is simply not to be out of pocket.
  2. Yeah, I insisted on O Perfect Love to Highwood (am a great fan of RR Terry's hymn tunes) despite herself's pointing out that nobody knew it and was duly rewarded with the sound of the unaccompanied organ, despite a church full of people who could read music and the melody printed in the service sheet. Can't win, sometimes.
  3. and that nobody who has not been a student (at whatever level) is able to do so
  4. Tell 'em to be grateful that there are still people prepared to learn the damn thing and have them stand the few fractions of a penny per hour that this will cost them (there's a thread on here somewhere that did this calculation). It'll do the organ good to be played anyway - might actually end up saving them money in the long run.
  5. Absolutely, wonderful opportunity and thank you so much for taking the trouble to arrange.
  6. Can it create realistic pipe organ sounds, too?
  7. http://www.gillianwardrussell.com/ Her Biog page on the site also contains:
  8. Today's challenge part 1 is to complete the sentence "design a coherent scheme of no more than 3" (unless I'm being hugely obtuse?)
  9. Yes - we were welcomed as "Members of the Manders Board" - which sounded very grand indeed
  10. Well, yes, up to a point, but the physics says that the price you pay for reducing heaviness via a lever is to increase the distance you move your end of the lever and there's a limit to the acceptable depth of a key travel. At the end of the day, good design and engineering can reduce the friction and the inertia of the sticks and strings, but you're still left with the work of opening the pallets, which if you've got 3 manuals coupled up with subs- and supers- and anything more than very moderate wind pressure is going to be noticeable.
  11. There's definitely a warmer acoustic in there now: TT was kind enough to give the Birmingham Organists Association an afternoon on it shortly after it was reopened and even just standing on the stage and talking in normal voices you could hear the difference in the hall.
  12. Added (and nazard) to the OP. Apologies to all I overlooked - there were over 1000 registered member names to trawl...
  13. AlltoPedal and (stretching the rules a bit) Choir to Pub
  14. oops, yes. Have added him/her to the list. Good one, because while the Ped and Sw are fairly well provided for (to say nothing of the Echo), we're a bit short on straightforward chorus work.
  15. Typical sysprog! Doesn't justify the sweeping assertion that you made earlier though. End of the day: no users = no IT industry.
  16. Hugely disagree. Software is there to serve its users, not vice versa. If people aren't using it as designed, that usually means that either (i) the design doesn't reflect the users' needs or (ii) they are using it faut de mieux because the software that they do need either doesn't exist or they haven't found it.
  17. OK, here's the challenge: quite a few of us chose stop names when registering for the forum. What sort of an organ can we make from the results? The stops are listed below, and are available at any plausible pitch except Bombardon32 which must be 32'. TubaMagna need not be a 91' pitch.. Barpfeife Bombardon32 Celeste Célestin Clarabella Clarion Contra Tromba Contrabombarde Contrabordun Contraposaune Cornetdeschats Cornopean Cymbelstern Double Ophicleide Dulciana Dulcie Arner Dull strings Echo Gamba Fiffaro Flûte harmonique GrossGeigen HarmonicsV Hohlflute Holz Gedeckt More dull strings Nachthorn Nazard Octaaf Octave Octave dolce Open-diapason Sesquialtera Sousbasse TubaMagna91 Undamaris Voix Mystique Vox Aetheria Vox Humana Waldhorn.
  18. I don't think it's workable. We're notorious for not sticking to the advertised topic of any given thread: how is the OP to know whether to start the thread in the snug, the bar, the debating hall or the park? What might work would be a button that the individual poster could click to hide a given post from anonymous readers (and, more importantly, search engines). I'm pretty sure that Invision doesn't have that atm. Even then, you'd have to leave a "hidden post" placeholder else somebody reading the thread anonymously - or a registered, but not logged on, user would see the replies to the hidden posts without the posts themselves which could be a bit disorientating. And then you'd get people who would quote hidden posts in unhidden ones. Maybe not such a good idea. The fundamental issue is that anybody determined to cause trouble can under any system do so, simply by registering - as Patrick said, the security bar is very low indeed, so if you don't want people to know what you've said, either don't say it, or use a pseudonym.
  19. Well, according to the CRB website http://www.crb.gov.uk/default.aspx?page=2228 The difference in emphasis between this and the attitude of 'CRB the people who serve the coffee' is palpable. One is primarily concerned with protecting children and preventing abuse and the other seems more concerned with ensuring that, if the worst happens, there will be ring binders full of reams of carefully ticked boxes behind which to shelter. The page also goes on to define 'volunteer' quite tightly and I doubt that adult members of a choir would, in fact, qualify for a free check. I'm not disputing that a blanket approach may improve parents' willingness to allow children to join up - but what you're saying here is that the knowledge the everybody was checked was, in effect, good PR. I don't doubt that that is true, but what parents may perceive as making for a safe environment is not necessarily the same thing as what actually makes a safe environment. Incidentally, Birmingham Local Authority would not permit parents of cast members to act as chaperones in a theatre context (other than for their own child) unless they were on the LA's official chaperones list, entry to which is very carefully vetted. So you would be in breach of all the children's performance licences if you were to rely on a rota of (say) four or five of their mums, two on duty each night, looking after (say) 8 children - even if all those mums happened to be CRB checked teacher employees of that same LA. And I applaud this approach.
  20. But this is precisely what a CRB check doesn't do. Even if you CRB'ed the whole parish, you'd still have to behave as though you hadn't - because the "not caught yet" risk is still present. Thus, the CRB check risks creating a false sense of security - as the above comment demonstrates.
  21. But that's my point. CAS is making this recommendation, not the law, and IMHO this does not reduce the actual risk at all - because the actual risk should be far lower in the first place, through proper management of the children, not the cleaners.
  22. David - there's a significant difference between being the person in charge of children and being another person in a room with children. I absolutely support the need to CRB check - though this is only a part of a policy - adults who will be in charge of children. I don't support blanket checking of all adults who will interact with those children, partly on civil liberties grounds but mostly because it creates a false sense of security. The key to security is to know that the children are under the supervision of fit and proper persons. Focus on the children, not the adults. Continuing your 'heater' analogy: I would check the heater out more carefully if children were going to be switching it on or off than I would if it were to be on but the children were not to touch it and I had people who could ensure that they did not.
  23. The object of the law is to protect children. The law sets out some occupations in which it is mandatory to have a CRB check. Unfortunately, there is a huge amount of 'gold plating' of the actual legal requirements as successive translations of statute into policy / best practice / national / local recommendations become local working practices. At each translation, the person writing the document needs to ensure that their back is covered in the event of a future problem. This does not necessarily lead to better outcomes for children in the bigger picture: the increasingly onerous nature of this gold plating of sensible regulations is reducing the pool of volunteers willing to help out in Scouts, Choirs, etc etc and children are left hanging around on street corners where they are far more at risk. In some situations it leads to total nonsense as when the Head of the school where I am chair of governors was told by the local authority that she couldn't have the school deep cleaned in the depths of August with no children on the premises unless every cleaner was CRB checked. However, members of the public may attend evening classes held several nights a week in termtime without even providing a name or an address. I encountered a situation analagous to the choir one whilst serving as Company Secretary to one of the UK's leading Little Theatres: the same question arose in relation to the children who are members of either of our Youth Theatres, some of whom occassionally have the opportunity to perform in adult productions. There was talk that it might be necessary to CRB check the entire (400+) membership of the adult theatre, any of whom might appear in a show in which children were performing. That would have been unworkable - financially and administratively - and we would simply have had to stop having children appearing in adult theatre productions. However, having taken advice from people who knew the law, who knew what they were talking about, and who - critically - knew the difference between protecting children and protecting their own backs, and in consultation with the Local Authority (a different one to the one in the previous example), it became perfectly clear that there was no need either for blanket CRB checks of the membership or even of those who were appearing in productions alongside the children. In fact, CRB checks, other than for those in charge of such activities are a bit of a red herring and may create a false sense of security. The key is good chaperoning, to ensure that children are always in the presence of a nominated person, with all the appropriate accreditations - rather more than a clean CRB - responsible for that child's welfare. As well as being far simpler, this is also far more secure: it gets around the 'not caught yet' issue: if focusses the attention on the child. In the theatre example there are other regulations in terms of limits to the number of performances in any given period, a curfew time past which children may not perform and in any case permission for the child to appear must be sought in each and every case from that childs Local Authority. So if blanket CRB checking isn't required in a theatre I can't see why it should be in a choir. I would be astonished to learn that there was any legal requirement to CRB your choir adults. I would also be very sceptical of any claim that so doing increased your level of child protection because if you're doing the chaperoning properly, you can have a back row full of kiddie fiddlers and they won't get the opportunity to do anything and if you aren't doing the chaperoning properly then you've got a huge gap in your protection and all the CRBs in the world won't help you if, as was said earlier, somebody who hasn't been caught yet joins your choir.
  24. I think you now owe Mr Johnson €37,000,000...
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