Colin Pykett

I wonder what the service life statistics of the action were designed to be in terms of MTBF (mean time between failures) and, indeed, total service life itself? And whether any precautions have been incorporated to limit the effect of damage due to nearby lightning discharges?

If I understand you correctly, I think what one is hearing is the newly-played single note beating transiently against the reverb of the previous one. On the occasions when he held the note for longer, the reverb, and hence the beat, died away and thus so did the apparent out-of-tuneness.

"Exceptional" in what sense, I wonder?

It elevates passive smoking to an entirely higher plane. The clip also reminded me of Hoffnung's Bricklayer's Lament, so I was pleased to see that the thurifers had sufficient weight on their end of the rope to prevent a repetition of that saga. From a physics viewpoint, they were also impulsing the swing of the thurible at about the correct point - as horologists know, a pendulum should be impulsed by its escapement as near to its lowest point as possible if its timekeeping is to be optimised. According to folklore, Galileo was led to uncover the basic laws of pendulums having observed a swinging censer (in Pisa cathedral IIRC).

If I understand your query correctly, it's a similar problem to that met by those who want to make tall standard lamps in which the power cable runs through a long hole. There are several techniques for this - just do a web search. One is indeed the method you suggested in which the beam is made from two parts in which the groove/hole is first routed before they are glued together. In the case of the lamp standard it is then turned up to be cylindrical or whatever curvy shape is desired, but often it is made up of several shorter lengths. It's not something I've tried, either for organs or lamps, and (not surprisingly) there appear to be various pitfalls to avoid ...

And don't even think about what such things do to the organ ... And also to people - I was told by a doctor that she sometimes sees patients who have an allergy to certain types of incense. She could not quite pin it down scientifically, but said that it most likely affected those who reacted to benzoic acid. This was during a consultation when I presented with an awful rash which had developed overnight after visiting a certain cathedral. She said she had never seen such a well-developed case of urticaria - otherwise known colloquially as hives or nettle rash - and she took a picture of it. It did not take her long to enquire whether I was a churchgoer. She certainly knew her stuff. The malady took upwards of a painful week to disappear incidentally. So although I had thoroughly enjoyed playing their beautiful Hill organ, subsequent events were less pleasant. (And to prevent upsetting anyone, please note that although I have described a correlation between visiting this cathedral and developing the condition, I am not implying causation).

I really can't understand the reluctance to spend £17.95 on a product (Protek CLP) for easing a pipe organ action, especially as it's been recommended by a top flight organ builder and, by implication, another as well! Expense is relative rather than absolute, surely? We're talking here about fixing a high-art instrument worth 5 or 6 figures I should think. Although I've used the cheaper graphite powder option myself over the years for lots of jobs and it certainly has its place, it can be difficult to apply (depending on the job), partly because it tends to blow all over the place if you aren't careful. Being a very fine powder, the problem is in "focusing" exactly where you want it to go, unlike a liquid which can be either directed through a tube or applied, drop by drop, using a screwdriver blade. If powdered graphite gets onto wood you can't remove it easily, leaving the surfaces a messy-looking grey colour. If you do decide to try it, make sure all traces are off your fingers before touching the keys, because it might also permanently discolour these otherwise.

I'd caution against WD40. It's not a long-term lubricant, being intended mainly as a short-term fix to free seized and corroded metal parts if it's intended for anything at all. In any case, nobody really knows what's in it. Keep it firmly locked up in the cupboard and well away from organs! (Some people use it for "cleaning" electrical contacts in organs. Heavens above!). I don't think your question can be answered without knowing what the articulating surfaces are. For example, is there a pin at each end of the roller? If so, what is it made of? If the pin is plated, e.g. chromium-plated steel, is there any sign that the plating is wearing through? What material is the journal (bearing) into which the pin fits? Is the journal bushed, and if so, with what material? Is there any sign of corrosion on the articulating surfaces of pin or journal? Long term reliability of moving parts due to lubrication failure can cause headaches, particularly where the forces involved are fairly low as in organ actions. An oil-based colloidal graphite paste is sometimes used when assembling the action. Being sticky, over time this attracts dust and general atmospheric muck which eventually turns into an ever-hardening thick sludge which can cause seizures of the type you mention. This form of failure can also arise in motorised stop key units in which the armature pivots were lubricated this way. Its onset is often advertised when stops gradually begin to fail to respond to the pistons. Similar problems can arise with the lever arm magnets used in electric actions which might have the same type of pivots lubricated in the same way. Remedying the problem can be expensive on account of the labour costs alone if the problem is widespread and affecting more than just a few pivots. These problems are made worse if the organ is in an environment where people smoke, or where incense is used. A different type of problem can arise at the point where a tracker is attached to a roller arm. Traditionally this is done using a tapped (threaded) wire attached to the tracker, with a pair of adjustable buttons made of leather, plastic etc to locate the wire in the roller arm. Over time the buttons can swell, or they can rotate slightly. This can make the joint stiff, resulting in the problem you mentioned. A bit of careful adjustment of the buttons to reintroduce a little more free play is all that is necessary here.

Contact the BBC?

Yet another - like the previous three on here from me, I've actually played them all and in some cases at services too, so they've stuck in my memory as very fine and serviceable instruments in my estimation. You will note that they are all by top flight builders (Frobenius, Harrison, Tickell and - this one - Hill, Norman and Beard). St George's, Dunster, Somerset (on the edge of Exmoor) Hill, Norman & Beard, 1962 https://npor.org.uk/survey/N05562 This is somewhat of its time, the mid-20th century. In a few words I can best describe this organ as perhaps like a two manual version of the Royal Festival Hall organ - maybe trying to be just a bit too eclectic, but no cavils about using electric action, detached console and a bit of extension and borrowing (though there isn't too much here). Oh, and a stop key console! The OP was interested in a beefy sound, and this instrument can certainly provide that when needed, especially with the subs and supers all over the place. And that's before you give into temptation and use the Trompette en Chamade! But it also has a wealth of quiet colour available as well. But when I first came across it in 1980 I was pretty much swept away by it and have remained so. So much so that I simulated it in my virtual pipe organ at home where I've had years of pleasure from it since. If you fancy a short break down to Exmoor why not pop in and have a look? HN&B at their very best in my view.

Sorry, me again. I'm slightly cautious about mentioning this one because another member of this forum is the titulaire at this church. However since he very kindly invited me to play it, I'm going to draw attention to it in case he might be too modest to do so. St John's, Westbourne, W Sussex. Tickell, 2001. https://npor.org.uk/survey/R00477 I'll say no more beyond that the swell Open Diapason only goes down to tenor C, employing a helper arrangement below that with no pipes longer than 4' speaking length. This is so successful that you absolutely cannot 'hear the join' as you descend into the bottom octave. Far better than just grooving the bass notes into a stopped flute as so many lesser builders would have done.

Here's another, quite different, but equally ravishing example to compare with the Frobenius at Lancing. St John's, Weymouth, Harrison 1927. I think it's been in their care ever since and has an Historic Organs certificate from BIOS. https://npor.org.uk/survey/N10008 Like the Frobenius I mentioned above, the stop list on paper alone gives little clue as to how versatile it is. I played it at a wedding where, at the rehearsal, the couple and their family chose Widor's Toccata among other items. The bride-to-be's father was almost in tears after hearing it (no, I don't think I had played it quite that badly), and thereafter he was a total convert to the organ, installing one in his house not long afterwards. It was surprising that in a piece like that you almost don't miss the lack of a pedal reed somehow. Like the Frobenius, it was perfectly matched to the acoustic of the building.

The little Frobenius at the east end of Lancing College chapel, W Sussex. Utterly ravishing, to the extent I had to be prised off it the last time I played it! https://npor.org.uk/survey/N09169 Perfect mechanical action, perfectly sited acoustically so that it fills this big space. But if you need more you can play the big west end 4-decker from it electrically (though I found the latter considerably less attractive than the Frobenius for many reasons). Far more eclectically-capable than it might look on paper. Apologies if someone else has mentioned it above - so many instruments have now been mentioned that I might have missed it.

Personally, I don't see this as too much of a problem. My circle of friends and extended family are not, by and large, anything like as attracted to the organ as I am but I've never had any problem in making them just sit down and listen to the damn thing from time to time, on the basis of "how can you say you don't like something if you've never even tried it"! Poulenc's concerto seldom fails to work its magic, on one occasion leaving a 20-something youngster open-mouthed in astonishment bordering on rapture - admittedly, he was a bass guitar player in a pop band as well as running his own recording studio, so he had an educated and innate feeling for music beyond the organ. It helped that I belted it out at realistic volume on big speakers though - one has to be immersed in a realistic acoustic for pipe organ music to work properly in my view. Some time afterwards he received a commission to make a CD for a quite well known pop client, and persuaded him to include some riffs and other background snippets made on a big Compton theatre pipe organ. Beforehand I had no idea he was doing this until he invited me along to the recording session so that I could have a go afterwards! So his previous introduction to the organ via Poulenc had obviously made an impression and resulted in positive consequences. The Poulenc is a case in point in other ways as well. Written to a commission from an aristocrat, I believe this was his first composition for the organ and that he himself was not an organist. Perhaps these are reasons why the work seems to speak so powerfully to other non-organ music buffs? On a similar occasion I did the same thing with the final movement of the Saint-Saens organ symphony, and learnt something myself - the guinea pig on this occasion told me that one of the themes has been used by a pop singer, which I did not previously know. In so many words, she also said how much she enjoyed the sheer simplicity of nothing but scales in C being used in a masterly manner to weave such powerfully-emotive music, together with the integration of piano and organ sounds with the orchestra. The Saint-Saens also came into its own when I was conversing with a psychologist (another non-organist), and we veered towards the interesting psycho-acoustic phenomenon that our perception of musical pitch seems to go flat as volume is reduced fairly rapidly. Interestingly, I had already noticed exactly this effect on the same Saint-Saens recording after the final tutti chord is released. As the reverberation dies away on this particular disc, the effect can be heard distinctly. I played it to him and he made a note of the piece and the CD so that he could use it as a future object lesson. So perhaps the moral here is that the organ can speak at many levels to many people if the circumstances are propitious enough. Maybe one lesson which can be taken away is that arranging various types of interactive events, or informal lecture-demonstrations of the sort hinted at above, might be more effective than merely expecting people to file meekly into church and sit silently through a "recital" (what an awful and out-of-date image that word conjures up!) where the player says nothing and might not even be seen from start to finish. There's nothing new in this idea of course, but such events don't seem to be staged often enough in my view. Sorry for yet another over-long diatribe.

I shouldn't imagine the BBC has anything against the organ per se. Rather, it probably has more to do with meeting the interests of the majority of listeners. The BBC quite likely thinks that there wouldn't be much point wasting even more hundreds of kilowatt-hours of RF energy by broadcasting to an R3 audience which is already tiny enough as it is. The organ just isn't up there at all when it comes to matters like this. Example - how many people actually knew it was International Organ Day yesterday? It's not just the BBC as I listened to a good few hours of Classic FM on and off throughout the day and it never figured at all. Then there's its repertoire - although large, much of it is regarded as absolute rubbish by an educated musical public, and they have a point. The majority of people I meet deride things like Franck's L'Organiste even if they've come across it, Elgar's Vesper Voluntaries, S S Wesley's later output consisting of endless Andantes etc, and so on. Even some of the latter's finest pieces such as the Larghetto in F sharp minor or the Andante in F are in the 'slow and funereal' category which typifies much organ music in the mind of many, and bores them to death. And, of course, a definite downside is that you have to go to church more often than not to hear live performances. And so it goes on. At the time I thought the BBC did us a favour by broadcasting a homage to the organ, lamenting the way it is vanishing, at Christmas 2022. What a bitter taste arises now that we know more about the man who presented it, himself an organist, though the blame for that can hardly be laid at the door of the BBC. But from time to time, programmes like this show that they do at least try. I'm not saying that I hold or support these views myself, but I can understand to some extent those who do. As I've said before on here more than once, until the organ world starts to comprehend the mindset of the 'customer' for the organ in its broadest sense, things are unlikely to get better, and they might even get worse.