Colin Pykett

Er, well, I seem to recall that someone once told me a guy called Saint-Saens did exactly that but I never believed him ... But seriously, S_L, I am grateful for your interesting and scholarly comments. And although my subjective opinions count for nothing, I also find the organ entry even in Cockaigne to be pretty stunning, regardless of the fact it's only 14 bars long. I miss it dreadfully when it's not there, in fact I won't pay for a concert ticket if no organist is billed. I also kicked myself once by carelessly buying a CD containing Cockaigne sans organ. But your comments regarding the commercial realities of the situation are well taken - those 14 bars must be pretty near the top of the list of the most expensive performer in the repertoire on a per-bar basis. However mention of money brings us back to the topic - how much has been spent developing these bizarre orchestral instruments (and there are many more besides those mentioned here)? And where has the money come from - physics and music departments in universities persuading governments to fund the R&D programmes from public funds perhaps - i.e. you and me, the unwilling taxpayers? (Wot, no, never. What an outrageous suggestion ... )

I have never quite been able to fathom what sort of sound people (instrument designers and players) want from extreme bass orchestral wind instruments. Acoustically they are very different to organ pipes. Because a single tube of fixed dimensions is being asked to work over some relatively large frequency range, the timbre and power will vary considerably across that range. Also the player is often being asked to shove an impossible amount of air into the thing. Therefore, in the bass there is bound to be relatively little fundamental compared with the harmonics because the impedance match to the atmosphere, and hence power transfer, of a single tube of manageable dimensions reduces with decreasing frequency. It's just the same as why large-diameter loudspeakers are needed to radiate extreme bass. But with a rank of organ pipes one can optimise their scales so that the timbre and power remain subjectively more consistent across the rank - never perfectly of course because even with organ pipes there are practical limits to size, but it's an easier design situation than for orchestral instruments. Of course, the orchestral musician might argue that an ever-larger bassoon is just what the doctor ordered and that nobody in their right mind would consider the pipe organ as the exemplar of good acoustic design. That's fine if they then aren't disappointed by the necessarily buzzy results as they play ever lower notes, rather like one would get with an excessively large regal or vox humana stop. It's also disappointing (to me) that the beautiful sound of the chalumeau register of a clarinet gets lost in any of the excessively large experimental clarinets I've heard. The suppression of the even numbered harmonics relative to the odds characteristic of that register seems to disappear towards the bass, whose notes just become progressively more characterless as the even harmonic amplitudes start to rise again, destroying the tone in the process. Again, this is something that doesn't (or shouldn't!) happen across a clarinet-type organ stop of whatever pitch, since the pipes are all individually designed and voiced to suit the single pitch they have to radiate. The orchestra is sometimes deficient in bass, but I'm unconvinced that importing ever more bizarre and expensive large instruments will solve that problem for reasons of simple physics. The traditional approach has been to employ a pipe organ when necessary, and it grieves me when the instrument is omitted by some conductors who think works such as Gerontius, Cockaigne, Enigma and the Pomps and Circumstances can get away without it. Good old Elgar knew what he was about when it came to orchestration and mixing a good sound palette ...

Very likely. There is a large and well known church in the south of England which has both, and they have timers. It is instructive to read them! And the tracker console does literally gather dust. It's a great pity, not only because of the obvious neglect of an asset which cost a great deal of money, but because its mechanical action was very good when first built (I would go so far as to say astonishingly good) for a large instrument. Having said that, its position is far from being attractive from the player's point of view in terms of hearing the instrument in a balanced manner, and in seeing what's going on in the building during a service. But if one opts for just a detached console, why not make it moveable and take advantage of the fact by wheeling it about frequently to exactly where one wants or needs it on any given occasion? Nowadays there is no need for any physical connection to the action - it can be wireless - so the only thing one needs to do is plug the console into the nearest mains socket to power the combination action and the other internal electronics. Even in pre-wireless days I have never been able to understand why detached consoles were so often more or less fixed in position owing to the connecting cable being confined to under-floor ducting or similar, leading to the problems outlined by Tony.

Sometimes it can assist the projection and impact of a piece if one plays what people already know. If transcriptions are acceptable here, three of Grieg's pieces might be considered. 'Death of Ase' is marked andante doloroso, which at a pinch could therefore be read as adagio, although personally I feel it never really gets anywhere and it slightly bores me so I tend to play it faster - indeed, at a walking pace. However that's just my opinion, and it seems to go down well in my experience on the right occasions. Of his Two Elegiac Melodies, 'The Last Spring' (marked andante but often played slower) moves me beyond words. I find the other one, 'Wounded Heart', less intense somehow. It's marked allegretto espressivo but is also often played more slowly than that.

The Magle forum seems to be alive and well. Yes, it is a useful and well-established one. Did you mean you can't register as a new user, or can't log in as an existing one? I've just tested whether I can log in and it was trouble free, for what it's worth.

Here's the music hall song about an organ blower displaced by electricity which I alluded to above. Music and author unknown (at least to me) but c. 1920. Apparently it was supposed to have been sung in a west country accent (e.g. Somerset). It's an interesting perspective on social history that the church organ was still so much part of everyday life then that it could figure in a popular show. How things have changed. 1 When I blows the organ for our mister Morgan Who plays at our church every Sunday so grand! The wind in the bellows makes music like ‘cellos And fiddles and trumpets – it’s just like a band! 2 At weddings I pumps while the other chap thumps And the choir sings a hymn if they knows it. The organ’s a treat but without me it’s beat ‘Cos I am the fellow what blows it! 3 But now times are changing, at least that’s what they say For things are all done in a new-fangled way. And yesterday Vicar he says to me “Joe, At the end of the year I’m a-feared you must go!” 4 I asked him what for, and he said with a sigh, “’Cos the new organ’s blowed by electriciteye”. But p’r’aps when I’m gone all the folks will say “No, It don’t sound the same now without poor old Joe!”

This sounds like a good solution, though I prefer to have my phone switched off during a service. But I should admit that my predilection for mechanical pocket watches is because I just like them, and sometimes they actually come in useful!

Wender's little 2/21 Arnstadt organ has no less than five 8 foot flue stops on the Oberwerk (the main division); there were only 6 manual flue unisons on the entire instrument. It would probably be pretty pointless using more than a couple of them in the pleno because any more would add next to nothing to the loudness while at the same time run the risk of annoying the organ blowers because of the substantially greater wind demand. And they would probably get even more annoyed if you played too slowly using too many unisons ...

One frequently comes across differing opinions about the speed at which organ music should be played. Bach is a case in point, with some players exceeding any reasonable speed limit in my humble opinion, whereas at the opposite pole are those who prefer the 'slow Bach' style. It struck me that perhaps one aspect of the matter concerns contemporary organ blowing practice at the time the composer put pen to paper. Prior to the 19th century when hydraulic, steam, town gas, oil and finally electric blowing entered the arena, everything depended on human muscle power and the relative awkwardness or otherwise of the organ blowers one happened to have. Frequently these would hang around in churchyards while waiting for an organist to appear, who would then toss them a few coins in the hope of having enough wind for the duration of her/his practice session. They would often be village boys or old men with few other employment opportunities (my late father was one such in his youth in the 1920s and he told some amusing tales about pompous and irascible organists), and Elvin's book on organ blowing has some similarly delightful anecdotes about the touchy relationship between the performer and the blower(s). There is also a popular (fictional?) song written apparently in a Somerset-like vernacular bemoaning the arrival of electric blowing at the singer's church and his consequential loss of employment (lyrics in another post below). Then there is that wonderful photograph of the motley collection of blowers at Notre Dame in Paris who were not pensioned off until the 1920s when electric blowing arrived (paid for at least partly by public subscription here in the UK). Against this background, would it be unreasonable to suggest that composer-organists in those days automatically bore in mind the problems they might face if they wrote music which would either be beyond the physical capabilities of their local blowing community, or at least might annoy them? And as part of this, would they (perhaps unconsciously) play at a speed and with relatively economical registrations (defined in terms of wind demand) intended not to arouse too many skirmishes or objections? A possible example of music which could have verged on the unacceptable from the blower's perspective might be Bach's Piece d'Orgue (BWV 572). Its extended allabreve section is usually played loudly today, and sometimes very slowly and ponderously. But I really do wonder whether the poor organ blowers would, or could, have put up with it very often if rendered in this manner! A recording exists of Gottfried Preller playing this piece on the restored 'Bach' organ at Arnstadt where, although played loudly, he takes it at a fair lick. Although today's Arnstadt organ has its manual blowing apparatus, it also has an electric blower, and on Preller's recording I suspect the latter was used as there is no audible vestige of the 'live' winding which one might otherwise have expected to detect (even though he begins and ends the CD with the calcant bell to the blowers!). The bottom line of these musings is this: might an appreciation of contemporary blowing practice shed some light on likely metronome speeds and perhaps registrations also?

How astonishing, both that the vicar declined to lead such an important occasion and that somebody should grumble about the odd few seconds here or there. Regarding accurate timing though, it's possible to buy new Chinese analogue wrist or pocket watches very cheaply which almost invariably have a sweep seconds hand. Either quartz or mechanical versions are made, and they can be found online or even on market stalls at prices starting from around £20. They are usually identical to the much more expensive ones in retail jewellers' shops but tend to be the rejects from the factory's quality control system for one reason or another, often simply that the mechanical ones don't keep time to better than a few minutes per day. Presumably it would be more expensive to regulate them carefully than to sell them on. (Their movements are also identical to those often sold today under former 'posh' brand names such as Rotary). Like others here, I have found watches useful in church services generally but tend to carry a cheap one around in case of loss or damage. I also sometimes use one with a sweep seconds hand to time beats when tuning an unusual temperament by ear. One feels an empathetic connection to the tuners of yesteryear when doing this, rather than using an electronic tuning device or phone app!

I am grateful to those forum members here who have put so much thought into their Remembrance services - as I myself have done in my time when at the console. Yesterday, though, we were at a local McDonald's for lunch as part of a day entertaining one of our little grandsons, and my wife and I were touched to find that they also had observed a two minutes' silence just prior to our arrival (though one wonders quite how 'silent' a place full of youngsters would actually have been!). But the aspect of Remembrance I always recall most strongly is having been part of a family which lost members during both world wars, as so many families did, yet I was never really able to find out much about what had actually happened. I am old enough to recall the devastation and austerity of my early childhood in a coal mining area, and can dimly remember an uncle who died in the early 1950s essentially from his experiences sustained working on the Burma Railway. I also knew vaguely that another uncle had died during the war a few years before I was born. He was 21, the son of my grandfather who himself still carried shrapnel around in his leg from the first world war. He was also in the Home Guard in the second. Yet nobody scarcely spoke of it, and this troubled me as a child and into adulthood. I definitely knew I was not supposed to ask questions, so I wonder whether others experienced this in their families? It was obvious that, to their dying day, the subject never lost its rawness for my parents and others. It was only a year ago that I finally discovered what had happened, decades after my parents and grandparents themselves had passed on. Thanks to the internet, I found that my uncle had been shot while on guard duty in the small hours of the morning at Cultybraggan POW camp in Scotland which was reserved for particularly vicious nazis and is now a museum. He was taken to the nearby Gleneagles Hotel which had been commandeered as a military hospital where he died some hours later. I was even able to find a copy of his death entry dryly noted by the duty doctor doing his ward rounds, with my grandfather's so-well-known signature confirming his identity. He and perhaps his wife must have travelled by blacked-out train all the way from the midlands to get there and back again, and I can only guess at his state of mind during that dreadful journey. The next week a funeral notice appeared in a newspaper in his home town (a paper where the boy himself had been a Linotype operator before the war), together with another a few days later thanking friends and relatives for their expressions of sympathy. This information was also turned up on the internet, together with a picture of his grave where he had been buried with full military honours. Its beautiful headstone still looks as new as the day it was made, all wonderfully maintained to this day. I am not sure who does this - it might be his former regiment, the Royal Artillery, or the British Legion - but I am grateful to them, and to a lady I've never met who keeps it tidy especially at Remembrance tide. As I said, until last year I knew none of this, but it is the sort of stuff that matters about Remembrance Day for me and countless others, and I am so pleased that we still celebrate it so that those who were lost are not forgotten. I realise none of this is directly about the organ and its music, but it is the backdrop of much which is about the organ at this time of year.

As well as the pieces mentioned above, another one I have used on these occasions is 'Sunset', as often played by the Royal Marines band (Green's arrangement for full band plus solo). It seems to go down well as a fairly gentle piece at the beginning or end of a service, and not too difficult to play on the organ either. Be aware, though, that people tend to stand up when they hear it, so don't get taken by surprise!

I played both the large partly Edwardian Walker and the smaller Frobenius choir organ at Lancing some years ago. At that time the Walker had an unusual mix of actions ranging from mechanical through pneumatically-assisted through tubular pneumatic through electropneumatic to electric couplers. This is not to disparage a basically exciting playing experience, but when I then transferred to the smaller Frobenius I was overwhelmed by its tonal beauty and the precision of its meticulously conceived action. One can also have the best of both worlds in that the Walker can be played electrically from the Frobenius console. (Still nothing to do with Rouen, I'm afraid, though my excuse is that I'm clearly not the only sinner here in this respect ... )

I was speaking to Alan Thurlow after a recital by Roger Fisher at Chichester in the early 2000's when he said that the Allen was still in situ and at the west end. Sorry to be taking the thread further away from Rouen though.

One aspect of installing a house organ of anything more than the smallest size are the problems involved when you (or your beneficiaries should you have moved onto higher things) want to sell the building. The vast majority of prospective purchasers simply do not wish to see an organ of any sort when they view the place - ask any real estate agent. I've even had to hide a digital organ in the garage in order to get rid of a property on the advice of the agent!

I would have hesitated to suggest that pedal tones could be obtained using digital techniques were it not for the fact that the method has been resorted to by some of the best pipe organ builders in some of the most prestigious venues such as Southwell Minster. Even if Niccolo might not like the idea as a permanent solution, he might try it as a stop gap while trying out various other options using pipes. But beware that radiating the lowest frequencies is a quirky business at the best of times regardless of whether one uses pipes or electronics. Quiet flue tones are often more difficult than reeds in terms of things like 'not-spots' within the room, and commercial subwoofers if using digital techniques can be disappointing considering their cost. A successful quiet 16 (or even 32) reed can be obtained in a smallish room using free reeds, with or without resonators. These can be obtained from old reed organs. So there's a lot of scope for experiment for those with the inclination to try various options. Also Damien's posts on patents were extremely useful - thank you for that guidance.

Thanks Steve. I hope you can resolve your problems. That's possible John, though I think they are of the 'open' type which let ambient sound through. Must check this though - good point. Thanks for the kind remarks John. Since becoming a member of the hearing aid generation I've come across instruments which were distinctly different to what I had been accustomed to previously. In one of them the treble (penultimate) octave of the great 15th was excessively prominent whereas this was not so without the aids. My first thought was that the frequency response of the aids produced a peak in that region when combined with that of my ears. However when I checked the top octave of the 4 foot principal, which sounds at the same pitch of course, there was no problem. So I assumed the artefact was probably genuine and related to the organ itself rather than the aids. It would be instructive to take a young person with some musical experience along to see what their excellent ears tell them about experiences like this one.

Having looked back through the posts above, some points seem to have been made several times and it might be worth summarising them: 1. Since hearing aids are mainly optimised for speech they may not work as well, or as expected, for organ music. Several posters have remarked on the peculiar 'celeste', 'warbling' or 'fairground' sound imposed on organ music (as well as other sorts). 2. Better results for organ sounds might be obtained if your audiologist provides you with a separate, user-selectable, setting or 'program' for music. This can be done on the cheapest aids and those offered by the NHS as well as the more expensive ones, but it seems that you might have to ask explicitly for it to be done rather than assume it comes as standard. 3. In some (most?) hearing aids the music program seems to turn off some or all of the clever automatic processing used for speech, in particular the 'whistle block' facility to prevent acoustic feedback. 4. The above means that when you switch to 'music' mode, your aids might start whistling (mine do). This can be stopped by turning down the volume, though it means that the amount of compensation the aids can then offer is more limited than in 'speech' mode. But all this must depend on the type of hearing defect you have. The list above applies to me, and no doubt my type of hearing loss has unconsciously coloured what I've just written (I have moderate bilateral presbycusis - age related hearing loss in both ears with a moderate and similar amount of hearing still remaining). Therefore none of it is written in tablets of stone and you would be best advised to take the advice of your hearing professional. Having made this necessary disclaimer, I nevertheless think it's fair to say that we have jointly made useful progress here. I've never seen anything like this before, and should therefore like to thank all those who have contributed so positively by sharing their knowledge and experiences.

Thank you for reminding us of this, and I apologise for not having remembered it and starting this one which has covered some of the same ground - though it's been most interesting all the same and I have found it valuable. I do have difficulty finding out such things on this forum though - sometimes the search facility seems to work better than at others. Am I missing a trick here? Maybe there's a better method for turning up previous related topics or messages than using search? Anyway, apologies again.

Rather similarly to Rowland's story above, I heard a radio broadcast a very long time ago in which John Lill said that the one instrument he really envied and wished he had learnt was the organ. He said something like 'it's singing ability is so sublime, so different to the transient sounds of the piano'.

Over 10 years ago I put together an article about age-related hearing loss (the most common type which eventually affects many if not all of us) and its relation to the sounds of the organ. It's at http://www.colinpykett.org.uk/arhlandob.htm if you are interested. It includes mp3 clips of how organs might sound to people having varying degrees of ARHL and these have since been used quite widely as demo pieces in educational, musical and audio circles. That was around the time I realised I would probably benefit from hearing aids at some point in the future, but I wondered how they would cope with my musical interests. Subsequently I did get them and found that the answer to the question is 'not very well' at least for me. However, for everyday purposes where speech is important, they seem to be amazingly good. I recently got a new pair of NHS aids (Bernafon JU7 C) with the optional 'music program' I mentioned previously. Although still experimenting with them, so far they don't really improve the major features of my musical hearing defects in that (like John Robinson) I still can't hear much beyond top A on a 2 foot stop (7 kHz). That's because it's been made abundantly clear to me several times that if your hearing has gone, then it has gone and no amount of amplification can compensate for it. So although I was naively expecting them to restore things like the sound of a cymbalstern in a particular recording, they either don't do it or they do it unsatisfactorily. For me, the best solution for recorded (not live) music so far is simply to use an old fashioned hi-fi amplifier incorporating adjustable tone controls (EQ in modern parlance). So I still use my old Linsley Hood amp from the 1970s which has the rare luxury of switchable corner frequencies for the tone controls, and I suspect this provides as much compensation for my hearing defects as I'm likely to get. Like Owen Turner, I've found audiologists (and even ENT consultant surgeons - whom I have paid to see privately at no mean fees) seem unwilling or unable to engage with one at the level of music or acoustical physics. Maybe they feel at a disadvantage with patients who know something about Hz and the dynamic range of orchestral brass. Whatever the reason, they either don't know the answers to questions I should like answered, or they retreat into a defensive shell. Also the whole subject of hearing aids involves some degree of pressured selling and commercial secrecy about what the aids actually do with audio signals, so going into your local high street provider can be like going to your local car dealer for a new vehicle in terms of the very expert selling pressures you encounter. On the basis of what various acquaintances have said, I'm not sure paying for more expensive aids would necessarily achieve much where music is concerned. They certainly offer more in the way of things like bluetooth connectivity, or being able to adjust them from your iPhone rather than fiddling about with awkward physical switches on the aids themselves, etc. So I haven't yet tried them myself.

I wonder whether it might be worthwhile to have a discussion about the merits of the many hearing aids which are available in relation to their effectiveness when playing or listening to the organ. They range in price from nothing (the NHS types in the UK) to several thousand pounds, though it is far from certain whether paying more will automatically result in better performance where the organ is concerned. There are also several other matters, such as whether one's audiologist knows enough about music rather than speech (for which all hearing aids are actually optimised). S/he might provide a 'music' program if you ask for one, which can be selected manually, but quite what this might do on a particular product is shrouded in mystery. Generally it does little more than turn off most of the clever processing used for speech, so that (for instance) the things can be prone to burst into oscillation and thus produce that annoying feedback whistle which used to be so common with older types. Not the sort of thing you want to happen at the Albert Hall I suggest. And then, quite what is meant by 'music' to the aid itself? Does it mean the aids when switched to this mode are better for attending a mega-decibel pop concert rather than for the organ or going to a classical orchestral concert? And the effect of different aids on different types of music can be dramatic, since the sustained tones of the organ are interpreted by some of them as the onset of feedback and so they do the most peculiar things in trying to prevent it. For example, you can suddenly find the organ you are playing is apparently full of warbling celeste stops as the aids attempt to prevent what they think is feedback by modulating the frequencies or phases of the signals several times a second! On top of all this sort of thing is imposed the type of hearing loss you might have. I could go on to describe my own experiences in more detail, but preferably would like some reactions from other members before doing this as it might be of little interest. In any case, it's only polite to invite others to step up to the podium first!

At one church where I played regularly earlier this century I tried to fit myself round the likes and dislikes of as many factions (if that's the right word) which I identifed in the congregation. There were those who plainly were traditionalists and enjoyed having the organ, and sometimes my introductory music was simply a segwayed medley of hymn tunes played quietly rather than pieces from the organ repertoire. This clearly worked on at least one occasion when a very elderly lady came up to the console after the service, supported by her daughter, who said touchingly with tears in her eyes how much she had enjoyed hearing the old tunes which her father used to play on the reed organ at home when she was a little girl. On other occasions I would sometimes play the piano rather than the organ, such as for an impromptu Evensong when so few turned up that the vicar thought it would be better if we all occupied the chancel. On that occasion only the hymns were accompanied. That went down well also, the lay reader commenting afterwards that "my word, an organist who deigns to play the piano. We must have him stuffed!". (I knew her well and it was said and meant entirely kindly). Or sometimes I would willingly give the whole service over to a worship group who then did their own thing. Despite all this, though, there were obviously some at that church for whom nothing would have been enough and who probably regarded me as a 'snowflake' - though I consciously did nothing as far as I am aware to encourage this view. Some of these people were even in the choir, among those I would normally have regarded as friends and allies! So in the end I gave up and left. Yet even after that I got calls imploring me to come back for services such as weddings and funerals when presumably they couldn't get anyone else, which I turned down because I disliked being at the beck and call of those who thought they could use me as a convenience. I suspect this story will resonate with some other members of the forum. It's nothing to do with octave couplers but it does have a connection with the original poster's remarks above.

Isn't history wonderful! I was present when the 1953 coronation was broadcast live on television, which itself was a rare and expensive novelty what with sets retailing at around £80 at a time when the average working man brought home perhaps £7 per week gross. The new Sutton Coldfield transmitter had only brought single-channel BBC TV for the first time to the heaving unwashed north of Watford a few years earlier, and we were thus able to enjoy (?) it on a 405-line monochrome 9 inch screen in the largest room my extended family could find in one of their dwellings, so that as many friends and neighbours could squeeze in as possible. (Nerd alert - even though it was only a few years old, that TV tube was then showing signs of the central bluish ion burn which eventually rendered it useless. A common problem then before the days of ion trap technology. However an aunt remarked that it proved that "they were obviously experimenting with colour", bless her). It was actually great fun from my point of view because of the party atmosphere, though I must admit to having been bored stiff by the broadcast itself, except for some of the music and the sound of the organ emerging from that tiny loudspeaker which even then impressed itself on my juvenile mind. At junior school we had had the benefit of a special edition of the New Testament handed out to every pupil, as well as a 'Coronation Mug' of the sort which even today still spills off the shelves of the lesser antique shops. But I'm afraid I can't shed any light on whether Latin was used. What a philistine I must seem ...

When I kicked off this topic I was only too aware that I was having a self-indulgent rant. So it's interesting that some others seem to incline in a similar direction all the same. In particular, VH's thoughtful and professional remarks summarise exactly what I meant. Although I find the music of Bach and his contemporaries is at its most attractive when played on the instruments which were around at the time, this is only a personal opinion and I certainly wouldn't want to impose it on anyone else. In any case, some harpsichords sound better than others, which were amusingly described some while back on this forum as sounding like a 'drawer full of cutlery'. I can't recall who said that but I love it as it can be so true! On the other hand I've heard the most sublime, golden and warm sounds from some of them both on recordings and live. I think there can be more mileage than might sometimes be thought concerning the pitch (as distinct from the temperament) they are tuned to. The so-called 'Baroque pitch standard' (if there can be such a thing) of A415 is a semitone flat from today's almost universal A440, and it results in a gentler timbre to my ears on at least some instruments, if not the majority. It's a totally different matter to merely switching a digital instrument down a semitone, because in that case there's no timbral change at all since exactly the same samples are used at both pitches. But it's not straightforward to retune any acoustic keyboard instrument, as the thing needs time to settle down to the new set of string tensions. It can easily involve several retunings over a period of some weeks or even longer before you can assess the result properly, and it definitely needs to be done by an expert. Therefore it's not surprising that people are unwilling to retune on a whim, since it takes just as long (and it's just as expensive) to put it back again if you don't like it. It obviously couldn't be done for a piano which might be needed the following week for a concerto performance in which the orchestra would be expecting an A440 instrument.