contrabordun

yes PLEASE!

If the Grandi is performed in Latin, nobody in the congregation will have a clue about the words except for what you print as a translation - paraphrase, or just print a note to the effect that it's from Song of Songs and describes a man's love for his betrothed (which will cause everybody to assume it's too risqué to translate). You can tell the happy couple that sheep and goats were symbols of wealth at the time time the words were written and you somehow don't think it appropriate to update to "your eyes are like a fleet of BMWs"...

with "only an octave of pull-downs" available if more emphasis is required?

Yes but we'd need to get a bit of speed up cos we'd lose quite a bit getting through the trees on the roundabout at the bottom and then there's still a bit of a rise to the church on the other side. P. No, you'd be required to come and play lots of Whitlock.

Hmm, I don't suppose it would fit under a 12'7" ceiling? If not, we could follow local custom to its logical conclusion and mount the whole damn lot en chamade. We'd only need a trolley: it can't be more than a mile to move it and most of that downhill.

Think it was originally piano and voice, with the SATB coming later. Perhaps the OUP was (basically or completely) Warlock's piano score and McDonald has revised it to KM's ..er.. taste.

Thomas Trotter - whatta lotta manual dexterity and pedal celerity

Paul - sorry if my post (nb wasn't aimed at the ragtime bit) came over as a bit agressive -think I got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

I can't understand this attitude at all. We constantly complain - justifiably - that by comparison to the florist, the photographer, the dressmaker and Uncle Tom Cobley and all we are paid very little by the church for the skill we bring to our task. How then can we justify not taking as great care to see that we understand what the paying customers wants and that we provide it as would any of the other professions involved? If you don't like what the customer wants, hold your nose and think of the fee, or pass the gig on. Don't take the money and make a virtue of accidentally on purpose or otherwise providing what you want instead of what they want. btw, my experience is the same as Paul Carr's - £100 might seem like a lot of money to the clergy by comparison with their legally mandated fee (which they don't even get to keep) but to the wedding couple, punch drunk with paying for the real-world-costs-of-supplying-luxury-goods-and-services-in-a-market-that-exists-for-2½-days-a-week-six-months-a-year, it's just fiddling small change.

It's the case that they're selling: (unless anybody's got a conspiracy theory to add?)

Thanks Adrian for the generous invitation - please count me in!

And even those who get on a decent instrument may find Saint-Saëns arr Briggs to be a bit of a stretch, first crack out of the box.

No, the designer had clearly spent too much time in North America

No, it sounds from AL's post as though it is a completely new one...

cor, that brings back memories - I was at King Eds when it was filmed, and my very first date ever was to go and watch it (Ahhhhhhhh...) in the old ABC cinema on the Bristol Road (now a McDonalds). Geoffrey Palmer, Joan Hickson running around - John Cleese kept to his caravan. KES was used for the conference scene at the end where Cleese's character loses it completely and makes the conference sing To Be A Pilgrim, as used in his school's assembly. 'His' head of music who also arrives at the conference is confounded by the lack of a piano at the front (tho' we could have told him there was a fairly knackered baby grand under the front section of the stage). I think the school's II/P Willis III, a WWI war memorial is shown at one point - Peter King, who dropped in on Wednesday afternoons to teach organ was on record as saying it was the worst instrument he'd ever played. I don't know about the organ at 'Thomas Tomkins' school (although as others have posted, it is Menzies in West Brom). There was a coda to this a couple of years later, when the Chief Master (sorry, it was that sort of school) of KES became for a year the chairman of the Headmasters' Conference, ie, the role that Cleese's character was to become. We were bussed down to Cambridge one day to sing Evensong to them and somebody had had sufficient sense of humour to put To Be A Pilgrim down as the hymn.

St Paul's Square in Birmingham boasts The Rectory, which has caused bemused expressions when visitors are invited to join us over in the rectory for a few pints afterwards

No, I've always thought it rather splendid.

they all fell down between the pedals

Put it like this...I used to quite enjoy the sound that comes out of the actual speakers (a fairly large L+R pair plus a bass bin), but after hearing the same sounds through the 595s the speakers don't get much use these days. Also, they came with a very nifty little holder that clamps on to that little shelf space (don't know what the proper name for it is - the one between the key cheeks and the stop jambs that (on proper organs) holds pens, drawing pins, the tuning book, Mrs Boggins' funeral booklet, box of mints, order of service for Midnight Mass 1986 etc). One word of warning - they do leak quite a bit of sound.

I think he was laughing at Babelfish et al, and if so, I thought it was funny, too.

At what pitch would a Ception normally sound?

this is why your mobile phone needs a camera on it...

Does that mean the player can surf the web during the sermon?

organist...sailboat You're not the late Ted Heath come back to haunt us are you?

But you would though, wouldn't you?