Colin Pykett
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Posts posted by Colin Pykett
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You have two 8 foot flutes, so would you be willing to forego one of them in favour of a 4 foot flute as an alternative to an octave coupler? The majority of the new rank could perhaps be made up from the sacrificed 8 foot one in the hands of a sufficiently skilled voicer, so that it matches the remaining 8 foot flute. Or perhaps forego the Dulciana, although two 8 foot flutes strike me as a bit extravagant in such a small instrument and I imagine the contemplative quietness of the Dulciana is something you would not want to lose in circumstances such as during Holy Communion. I don't know of course, not having heard or played the instrument, so these suggestions might well be ill-founded.
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Not exactly an organ topic, but do others find Bach and contemporary composers' works played on the piano as much as a turn-off as I do? I've just this minute switched off BBC R3 when they started playing (aka advertising) a recent CD of (D) Scarlatti thus rendered. It's not so much the blatant anachronism of using an instrument that barely existed at the time, but the fact that the romantic excesses of a powerful modern concert grand plus the exaggerated antics of some executants verge on the revolting to me. (I'm not all that keen on it for some of the 19th century repertoire either ... ) Plus, of course, the major issues of temperament and even pitch. One cannot really know what temperaments would have been preferred in view of the whole subject boiling around in a melting pot at the time, though the probability of equal tuning would have been low I suggest - but don't start me on that. And as for A440? It would have resulted in a lot of snapped violin strings, and wouldn't have done the wooden frames of harpsichords and early Silbermann-type pianos much good either. I wouldn't have minded quite so much if they had had the grace to use an actual or ersatz fortepiano tuned to some reasonably 'authentic' temperament and pitch, but no - not on this CD at least.
I'm not expecting any replies. But thanks to the forum for letting me get it off my chest.
And, on a barely related topic which concerns attendance at concerts, I discovered a dreadful thing about my mobile phone yesterday. If you have set an alarm call, you still get the alarm even if you have switched off the actual phone - at least, on mine. I think the only way to be absolutely safe is to physically take out the battery prior to the commencement of the concert. Thank goodness I discovered this the easy way (in the kitchen as it happens) rather than the hard way at the RFH or wherever ... Anyway, I now realise why this seems to happen so often at live events. Doubtless this is well known to those who've made the transition into the 21st century better than I.
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I too was very saddened by this news. David was one of those whom I never managed to meet but wish I had, and he was one of the members who made it so worthwhile belonging to this forum. It's certainly true that his knowledge of the instrument was encyclopaedic as others have said above, and I thought it might be worthwhile posting this link describing his researches into the organs of East Anglia where he obviously had a special interest:
http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/norfolkorgans1.htm
His family and friends are in my thoughts.
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" ... I'm not suggesting the traditional console's days are numbered ... "
I'm sure much of what you suggest could be done fairly readily in principle. But in practice I have yet to see what I would class as a 'cheap' organ console which would appeal to a wide enough range of customers (i.e. players). Even at the bottom end of the market, the stripped-down skeleton designs offered by turnkey suppliers of virtual pipe organs are still pretty expensive. You can easily exceed the £10k-plus mark without hardly thinking about it. And that certainly wouldn't cover motorised (or perhaps even non-motorised) stop controls, only touch screens. This is no criticism because they are usually made to order since the market is so small, they must needs use keyboards of reasonable quality, plus they require standard pedal boards and all the other things an organist expects to find. And they need to look the part in the sense of being moderately attractive as a piece of furniture. So I do wonder whether the traditional organ console will ever really disappear as long as the organ (pipe or digital) exists at all. Costs can only be brought down to rock bottom if you are content with a couple of cheap plastic MIDI controller keyboards balanced on a pile of books sitting on the dining table, with a manky umpteenth-hand pedal board shoved underneath. Don't laugh, I've seen them, as no doubt have others who might read this. It's one way to go, especially if you are at the early experimental stage of things. But I doubt it would be a solution which would offer satisfaction to most players.
But, as you said, we digress ...
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On 08/08/2019 at 12:03, Zimbelstern said:
... The aspect of the Orgelbewegung that all its adherents subscribed to was that on a 19th century Romantic organ (Schweitzer, however, exempted Cavaillé Coll from this criticism) the inner parts of a work by Bach were to all intents and purposes inaudible. The ‘discovery’ that they sounded as clear as a bell on an instrument by Schnitger was therefore a revelation. But you are clearly the expert here in explaining why.
I'm unsure of the 'expert' bit of what you said! All I can offer are some perspectives derived from having made various measurements on organ pipe sounds over many years. Regarding the point you made about the inner parts, this relates to what I (in common with many others I think) call transparency. I haven't been able to investigate Schnitger's registers yet in the detail I undertook for those of Silbermann, but I suspect the two builders would have produced much the same type of transparency using much the same techniques. In Silbermann's case I found that he seemed to somewhat throttle back the loudness of his Principals (at least the unison and possibly the 4 foot ones) over the middle two octaves or so of the compass compared with the bass and treble regions above and below that. This is an aspect mainly of regulation of course, though it might have also involved niceties of timbre to do with the relative strengths of the first (the fundamental) and second harmonics - in which case scaling would also be relevant as well as aspects of voicing practices beyond regulation. Whether he did it unconsciously or by design, I have no idea. This isn't really the place to elaborate the matter further but there's an article which might be of interest which describes the work in more detail:
http://www.pykett.org.uk/silfluewk.htm
If I am right, these master organ builders of the past must have had the most exquisitely acute hearing coupled with an intuitive understanding of what we would call the physics of music to achieve these results. Well, that's nothing new of course because we know that they did. What interests me is to ferret out how they did it, now that we are in possession of greater knowledge and sophisticated analysis techniques to be able to find out more about it.
It's interesting that you referred to Schweitzer's opinion that Cavaillé-Coll's Montres were also transparent, unlike the majority of romantic Principals. The article above also analyses these two types of stop in the same way as a Silbermann Principal, and the differences emerged starkly - to the extent that it became obvious (at least to my possibly biased judgement) how the differences you alluded to relate to how quite simple parameters of the three types of register vary across the compass. One of the most important parameters is the acoustic power of the stop, which is an outcome of how the voicer regulates it, thereby shading its loudness across the keyboard. This might suggest that even unsatisfactory romantic diapasons could become more transparent and thus better-suited to Bach's music merely by re-regulating them to emulate Silbermann?
Note that these are matters of regulation, or varying the tonal balances only by adjusting the acoustic powers of the pipes. I have long been of the view that this relatively simple matter is at least as important as adjusting tone quality or worrying about more complicated things like pipe scales, and moreover it can be applied to an unsatisfactory-sounding organ even after it has been built. Maybe Ralph Downes was one of those who showed the way here in relatively recent times, after he was 'converted' to this view by the well-known voicer Anton Gottfried early in his (Downes's) career. After watching Gottfried in action Downes wrote that he 'began to learn truths that were so simple that one could wonder why one had not thought of them before'. Although not really a matter for this particular forum, poor regulation is without doubt one of the reasons why some digital organs are so unsatisfactory. It is well known that one of their more mysterious defects is why they often sound so awful when many stops are drawn, when the individual registers do not sound too bad in isolation. Poor regulation is sometimes the cause (though not the only one). But although regulation sounds a simple matter, it nevertheless requires skill and experience and a highly educated 'ear' to get it right. It is quite possible that the better builders of yesteryear such as Schnitger and Silbermann knew all this and therefore regulated their organs to optimise their transparency.
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The issues raised here are important in a more general sense, and to my mind they can be summarised as the need to relate the subject of interest to the politics and socio-economics of its era, together with other major events at the time. Otherwise we get that distorted perspective of history which is so often presented in terms of nothing but monarchs, dates and battlefields. I find it unfortunate that historians themselves frequently encourage this - we all know of eminent academics lecturing us endlessly on television while striding pompously about on some undistinguished patch of grass which once had to do with some skirmish or other. Sitting through an hour of this sort of thing frequently tells us little of the real story behind events. It's not much different to a historian telling us that Marconi invented radio. Well, he didn't, in fact the very phrase is meaningless. No single person 'invented' it, and that is true for much else as well.
Closer to home as far as this forum is concerned is the history of tuning and temperament. Some of what one comes across in recent literature is quite wrong (aside from arithmetical errors, which is another and altogether regrettable aspect). Andreas Werckmeister, for example, had a career shaped by the consequences of the Thirty Years' War when he was young. Were it not for this he would quite possibly have done something completely different. As it was, he was largely self-taught in some aspects of what he wrote about because he missed out on the chance to study more formally, and as a result was unaware of the parallel work of important contemporaries elsewhere in Europe (and they of he). This is not to underrate what he achieved, but his work does need to be read against this backdrop. It is particularly important not to presume that he and others at that time had our understanding of things like frequency, beats and harmonics for example, topics which are second nature to us but which were only hazily understood by Werckmeister and others - which is no criticism of course. And the appalling difficulties of doing arithmetic in those days is often ignored by today's authors with a calculator handily stuffed in a back pocket. Yet another issue is the dichotomy between the philosophical and empirical approaches to acquiring knowledge which exercised a controlling influence until the 19th century. Ignoring such matters renders some modern work on temperament anachronistic and of limited value.
The relation of all this to Zimbelstern's posts is to emphasise how important it is to understand events in a broad context, and that can be facilitated by codifying the knowledge at the earliest opportunity. In other words, write down what might seem today to be humdrum and trivial matters. The longer we leave it, the harder it becomes for historians to derive an unambiguous picture of what happened. This is certainly true of tuning and temperament. Another example is the joy we experience when coming across some scrap of paper which illuminates what some long-departed organ builder was doing 150 years ago and how he was doing it. So for Zimbelstern to propose doing this for the fairly recent Orgelbewegung is laudable, while the information is still relatively fresh and available. I regret I can offer no assistance on this specific topic, but I applaud his approach and wish him well with it.
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5 hours ago, Vox Humana said:
In the case of Germany, I'm pretty sure that it's because they are very aware of their fine musical heritage and take music education much more seriously than we ever have. I think it must be "in their bones".
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I have no idea about anywhere else.That has to be true of course. It probably applies to the Netherlands as well. I guess I'm pretty much as well travelled as most though, if only because of my former job shoving me all over the place, and the phenomenon (of apparently greater awareness of and interest in the organ beyond the UK) seems quite widespread in my nevertheless finite experience.
France - well, presumably it has to do with its organs and their music in the later 19th century as much as anything else, but surely there was a similar situation over here at that time, though probably for different reasons? Then, the organ was tremendously popular - Alfred Hollins in his autobiography refers to congregations of hundreds or even thousands at churches (mainly non-Conformist ones and the Kirk it would seem) who would listen raptly to his playing at quite ordinary services, let alone his recitals. Plus of course other players like Best performing on organs just as famous (like their builders) as the contemporary French ones. So why isn't there more residual evidence of this today in Britain when there apparently is in France, judging by the attendances they get at their recitals, at least the major ones?
Then dear old Italy, where everything is so much more laid back and informal! I've observed people, many of whom are young, attracted in their droves off the street by the sound of an organ being played. They stand there for a while (because there aren't any vacant seats) before casually leaving again. Nobody notices or seems to mind, including the player. The place is continually heaving and in motion. (It's the same at their church services, even at cathedrals). I just love this relaxed attitude, so different to stuffy old UK!
North America, especially the USA - I suppose the greater involvement of the population with the church still exerts a strong influence there which is beneficial to the organ, even though the effect is said to be somewhat on the wane now.
And so on.
So maybe there just isn't a simple answer to the question, but instead several different answers which apply to the various countries one considers.
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Like others here, I'm just as stumped as to why the organ doesn't press the buttons of the concert-going public in Britain. If the various very cogent reasons proposed are to explain it, why do they not seem to apply as strongly in other countries where the organ attracts a greater following (a phenomenon also remarked on above)? I realise this question has been posed several times before on this forum, but the dichotomy has existed for most of my remembered lifetime and I have no explanation for it.
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I too do not understand why this recital is scheduled for a Sunday morning. When I was working in London a long time ago now in the early 1990s, I attended many concerts including the Proms (I was fortunate in being able to live in Notting Hill just across the park from the gasworks, to which one could walk after an early dinner and get there in time for the event to begin). During those years there was always an organ recital, it was scheduled early in the evening (typically 6 pm as I recall) which meant that the main concert could begin afterwards - and I usually stayed for that as well. The audiences were not huge for the organ events but nevertheless respectable. The main problem in those days was the somewhat parlous state of the organ. It is therefore a great pity, now the organ has been so splendidly restored, that it seems to be so relegated in importance relative to other musical events at the Proms.
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There is an extract about 10 minutes long from the BBC radio 'Desert Island Discs' programme featuring Noel Rawsthorne at:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009n9xh
It was broadcast on New Year's Day 1973. None of his music choices are included though they are listed on the web page.
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It's not the first time the organ has had problems with its electronics, though the background was different then:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14619731-800-notre-dames-organ-falls-silent/
Then things got even worse:
Though M Boisseau's reported jest at the end of this piece now sounds particularly unfortunate.
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For various reasons of no interest here I get involved in copyright issues quite often. The most recent arranger of a work will frequently be the copyright holder, or her/his estate if deceased. I assume the arranger you are referring to here is Clifford Harker, in which case the remaining copyright will probably have many years to run. One can encounter difficulties if one does not remember this. Another example is the 'Largo, Allegro, etc' variations by Festing arranged by Thalben-Ball. While Festing died in the 1750s, GTB's copyright will not expire for nearly 40 years yet. Therefore those who blithely upload their performances to youtube or other popular websites seemingly have no idea of the problems they will encounter if the copyright police (who continually and aggressively comb the internet for infringers) decide to take action. It is particularly vicious because, even if you take down an item should they contact you, you will quite likely still be taken to court if you refuse to pay them an arbitrary penalty for the period during which you were the infringer. The same can apply to those including it in recitals or on CDs etc without prior agreement.
I'm not a copyright lawyer but one doesn't have to be. The rules are pretty simple and aggressively enforced as case law shows. If a plaintiff provides evidence that you infringed, the court will simply find against you with no further argument, and of course add costs on top of a fine or other penalty.
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There's a photo of the Christchurch polyphone here (source acknowledgement: NPOR):
https://www.npor.org.uk/cgi-bin/XMLFunctions.cgi?Fn=GetPicture&Rec_index=D06714&Number=3
If you look carefully you can discern the separate wood covers to the various chambers.
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I believe the Compton diaphone at Christchurch Priory was retained at the 1999 Nicholson rebuild. I played it at that time, and if my recollection is correct it survived as the 16 foot Contra Bass on the Nave pedal division. It certainly was not of the 'foghorn' variety, having a quiet grip and definition which many flue registers at that pitch could do well to imitate. However, if you prefer something of a more visceral (even if not quite foghorn) nature, you could try the well-trodden Hope-Jones examples at Pilton, Devon and Llanrhaeadr, assuming they are still there - I haven't been near either for some while now.
There is also an 8-note Compton polyphone unit at Christchurch as I recall, forming part of the 32' Sub Bass pedal stop.
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Both this and the photo on the front cover are of St Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, NYC. Funnily enough I had the issue near at hand as I'm considering compiling an index for the several decades' worth I have amassed. There's an awful lot of highly interesting and in some cases important information which is, unfortunately, very difficult to access even in those cases where one can recall (usually vaguely) that something or other was once written about a particular subject way back in the mists of time. I don't think OR itself offers such an index, though I might be misinformed. If I'm correct though, it seems a great pity that so much information and, in many cases, scholarship, is so difficult to access.
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When I was an impressionable teenager I attended an Anglican evangelical church, and on one occasion my father decided to accompany me to a service. On entering he was asked by an earnest elderly lady whether he had been saved. "From what?" he replied, much to my mortification. During those years though I myself was "saved" by a rather fat though pale imitation of Billy Graham called Eric Hutchings. Looking back I can only cringe at my memories of what an utter load of rubbish it all was. How embarrassing it now seems. Actually I now realise that the only reason I went to church at all was because the buildings contained organs, and that particular one had quite a respectable three-decker which they allowed me to practice on. I doubt that would have been the case had I not agreed to be "saved" ...
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Something like this which relies on digital electronics will be at the mercy of everything which afflicts digital electronics, both its hardware and software. One issue concerns repairs if it goes wrong, at which point a consequential matter often arises concerning obsolescence. On the hardware side, will the necessary parts such as replacement printed circuit boards or the integrated circuits they contain still be available? Will the manufacturers of the system still be around to do the job? How rapidly will obsolescence take place - in the computer world it is difficult to have one repaired which is more than five years old for example, and even this figure is optimistic. Replacement rather than repair is the name of the game, and this is extremely expensive. And what causes the system to go wrong? In large, tall buildings one cannot rule out lightning strikes. We see all these factors arising so often in organs today that we are almost inured to it. I could go on, especially as I haven't even mentioned the software side of things.
These are technological facts of life. It is entirely possible that they were taken into account before the instrument was designed and procured because they form part of the through-life costs of systems today ranging from washing machines to cars to, well, you name it. While they work they are great, but when they go wrong it's an entirely different ball game.
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Thank you, Zimbelstern. Yes, I came across this back in 2017 and it is indeed a most useful paper. I have to be careful not to hijack this IMSLP thread, so will limit myself to saying that one has to be very aware of historical milestones across several disciplines to properly interpret writings on tuning in this era. It was only towards the end of Werckmeister's life in the late 1600s that knowledge of the mere concept of absolute frequency, so casually taken for granted today, was becoming widespread and even vaguely understood - as witness the demonstration by Robert Hooke to the Royal Society of a piece of card held against a rotating toothed wheel. Lo and behold, it emitted a musical note! This was startlingly novel at the time (if it hadn't been it would not have taken place in front of that august gathering), and snippets of information such as this are essential to set the work of early temperament theorists against their proper background. Otherwise it is all too easy to look backwards with the benefit of today's hindsight and generate 'research' of which far too much is hopelessly anachronistic and thus of poor quality.
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I agree with much of the above, as the points made impinge negatively on my own research in both physics and music. Regarding the latter, I envy Zimbelstern's ability to read the old German texts which are almost impenetrable to me. I have to rely on the modern scholarship of others to unlock their secrets, though even here much of it remains untranslated and difficult and expensive to access for the reasons Zimbelstern mentioned. But as just one example of the importance of persevering I might mention Andreas Werckmeister who seems to be routinely deified, at least by Brits, as one of the most far-sighted thinkers of all time in tuning and temperament. But this received wisdom starts to look a bit skewed when you discover things like how his early intellectual development was stymied for life by the Thirty Years' War, that he was a musician rather than a mathematician or 'natural philosopher', that nowhere in his writings is there mention of other European temperament scholars from Galileo to Newton and beyond, that hardly any of them had even heard of him, that he didn't really like his own Werckmeister III temperament, and that although he listened to beats while tuning he almost certainly did not understand what generated them nor their genesis in physics and mathematics. So does this diminish his status? Not a bit of it, because he was a self-taught prodigy whose hard-won knowledge was based on practical experiment and musicianship which was immediately comprehended by other practical tuners and musicians within a limited geographical area including J S Bach who owned at least one of his books. He was one of them rather than the theoretician living in an ivory tower so often pictured, anachronistically, by writers today.
So it is indeed faintly ridiculous that we have to work so hard and spend so much time and money trying to get really quite basic information even in today's digital age.
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@Tony Newnham:
Many thanks indeed Tony. This is most helpful. I thought you might be able to illuminate the darkness!
Colin
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This is merely to enquire whether there's a market for reed organ bits and pieces. I don't know the answer since my interests lie with pipe organs rather than reed organs. However they sometimes become an email topic, and it seems a shame that virtually unobtainable items like reed sets, keyboards, vox humana motors, 16 foot reed units and all the rest are mostly sent to landfill (not by me I hasten to add but by their owners, who usually give me little time to reply before the organs are scrapped). I'm speaking mainly of instruments which are in such poor condition that the amount of work involved in restoring them would not seem to be worthwhile, owing to things like major vermin and worm damage, wood rot, etc. I've looked at the Cambridge Reed Organs site but couldn't see any contact info given there, and other avenues such as the Fluke's museum at Saltaire are now sadly gone. Of course, those I come across are mostly run of the mill suction instruments and probably of little value even as a going concern, but as I said, maybe the components would be welcomed by somebody.I guess the obvious answer is ebay but thought other forum members might know of other options.
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The discussion here, as with virtually all others I have ever come across, seems to assume that the attributes of various temperaments are independent of the instruments they are set up on. This is quite untrue. The organ is unique among all other keyboard instruments in that different registrations can dramatically influence the aural effect of whatever temperament is in use. The following clip is of the same hymn tune played on an Open Diapason stop using ET and then quarter comma meantone. Note that the key of A flat was chosen deliberately to illustrate the sheer awfulness of the Wolf fifth:
http://www.pykett.org.uk/OpenDiap-ET-4thComma.mp3
Now listen to the same hymn using a Stopped Diapason:
http://www.pykett.org.uk/StopDiap-ET-4thComma.mp3
This time the fast-beating Wolf has virtually disappeared, and this key in this temperament, while not necessarily to everyone's taste, has now become more or less useable. This could hardly be said for the previous Open Diapason rendition.
Why is this? I'm afraid you'll have to read the whole article to find out because the explanation is too involved to give here.
http://www.pykett.org.uk/temperament-and-timbre.htm
Something to take away from this is that, in the days when unequal temperaments were the norm, it is quite likely that organists were fully aware of this and were perhaps (or probably?) capable of ameliorating the worst effects of the poorer keys by selecting their registrations carefully. In the article I have gone further to suggest that Bach might even have teased us in his output by writing at least some of it in such a way as to highlight the direness of the worst keys, or not, depending on how skilful the players were at disguising the dissonances with a suitable choice of stops. Obviously this is highly speculative, but I couldn't resist mentioning it. It is a phenomenon that someone of his intellectual mightiness must have come across. I mean, if I as a mere amateur musician have noticed it, surely he would have done without scarcely thinking about it?
I must also apologise for having recorded these examples using a virtual pipe organ rather than the real thing. I regret not being in a position to have undertaken the necessary retunings on a pipe organ just to make these demo recordings of a few seconds in duration. However the historic instrument which was sampled (St Mary Ponsbourne, Walker 1858) was fully restored not long ago by our hosts, so I hope I might be forgiven to some extent for this heresy. I should also like to thank the organist there for having recorded the raw samples - he has written articles about this interesting instrument in Organists' Review, and he as well as these articles are acknowledged more fully in my web article referred to above.
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5 hours ago, Zimbelstern said:
Am I the only member of this Forum who does not feel any enthusiasm for unequal temperament? I’m afraid I can’t work up great excitement for pure thirds and fifths. It seems to me that Bach regarded well tempered tuning as a great improvement over what had gone before ((I know it may not be quite the same as equal temperament). And I’ve never been able to understand how it relates to the intervals produced by other instruments, such as strings, or wind, the tuning of which is not fixed, as well as by voices. I’d be fascinated to see some statistical research into the precise intervals sung by choirs performing unaccompanied, say, a motet by Palestrina.
If some keys in a particular temperament are 'better' than ET in the sense of having purer thirds or other intervals, then as night follows day there will be other keys which are worse than ET. This is a problem which cannot be worked around if we are to retain keyboards with only twelve physical notes to the octave. If the problem could be fixed easily, there would be no temperament issue worth discussing in the first place. Although I'm sure you will know this, it might be worth mentioning. So adopting an unequal temperament means that, yes, you might get some purer-sounding keys which some people might find attractive, but there will also be some which are less so, and some of these can be unusable in certain temperaments.
It's largely subjective as to how people judge the importance of these matters. In my opinion everybody is entitled to their view, and they shouldn't be criticised if they decide that unequal temperaments are not for them and they are quite content to live with ET. Or, on the other hand, others might really love the differences in key colour which a particular temperament offers and which can be exploited deliberately by composers. So don't take any notice of those who might badger you to forsake ET - just tell them to live and let live (politely, naturally ... )
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He (and the others) are in good company. George Thalben-Ball apparently used to do it.
Octave Coupler on a One Manual Tracker Organ
in Nuts and bolts
Posted
Thinking a little more about converting one of the 8 foot flutes into a 4 foot one, I assume the Claribel uses full length (not stopped) pipes down to tenor C. It would, in theory, be possible to convert it directly into an open flute of 4 foot pitch by boring nodal holes approximately half way up each pipe - in other words, convert it into a 4 foot Harmonic Flute. Some careful regulation (adjustment of power across the rank) would almost certainly be necessary to get the desired tone as well as, more importantly, proper blend with the Stopped Diapason. An advantage of doing things this way is that no transposition of pipes would be required, so the amount of messing about with the sound board and rack boards would be minimal or zero. But as mentioned in my previous post, you would be well advised to put the job into the hands of an expert. And if it didn't turn out well, the holes could be plugged and glued again if the pipes are of wood, returning the organ tonally to where it was previously and without having done much mutilation to the pipework. If of metal, the holes could be re-covered by a simple soldering job.
Some 8 foot claribels are of harmonic construction themselves over at least part of the compass, implying that they use double-length pipes, though I'd be a little surprised if such extravagance applied here with this baby organ. But if it is the case, then delete everything I've just said.
But I emphasise again that all this is entirely theoretical. I haven't seen, heard or played the instrument so it's all just armchair musing on my part.