Colin Pykett

I've just had a look at the stop list of the Fredericton organ and found it most interesting (http://cccath.ca/tour/organspecs.html). For example, in the context of this thread there does not appear to be a 16 foot swell reed. Other interesting aspects include there not being a Solo organ but an Echo instead (thus no Tuba!). Of course, I might have missed something in my reading of it. And yes, I've often thought the full set of couplers is perhaps something which ought to be used more widely outside North America. The wealth of unison stops together with the couplers must offer an almost limitless variety of soft and mezzo-forte effects, many of which I bet are very beautiful especially in that spacious acoustic. Fairly makes my mouth water! Has it been recorded, e.g. on youtube? CEP

I'm sorry to have to say this, but I have had most unsatisfactory experiences in dealing with this firm in the sense of never getting any sort of reply regardless of the medium used - no reply to emails, the phone never picked up, etc. I had begun to wonder whether it was no longer trading. It would certainly be nice to know what the situation is. And all I wanted was for them to take money off me ... !! CEP

Yes, this was often done in the pre-digital days when artificial reverberation options were limited and universally pathetic - consisting of steel plates or springs, etc. OK for pop 'echo chambers' but anathema for classical usage. I recall one recording which I probably still have somewhere was re-recorded in Walthamstow Town Hall which I think was one of the favourite venues in those days. CEP

Most of the questions posed cannot be answered in anything like an unequivocal fashion. However the one abstracted in the snippet above, concerning the type of acoustic, lends itself to some interesting armchair experiments which might be undertaken if you have a spare hour or two over the Christmas period perhaps. You will need two items. One is a recording of the RFH organ, preferably as 'dry' as possible. But do not use one which suggests that it has been edited or processed to sound artificially 'wetter'. The other is a means of adding artificial reverberation to it, either a stand-alone processor box or software which can be downloaded readily from the internet and run in a PC. In both cases you would have to route the signals from your player via the reverberation system before they reach your amplifiers and speakers. It is fascinating to do this and observe how the subjective effect of a recording changes when you twiddle the reverb settings to simulate rooms of different sizes and characteristics. CEP

The NPOR confirms that the organ is in a bad state and also says that an electronic is used instead. However I know nothing of the musical orientation of the church and its clergy in terms of worship bands etc, nor whether its finances reflect the 'wealth' of the area as suggested above, so I feel that commenting on these aspects would be improper. CEP

Some while ago I mentioned the discovery of a large scrapbook compiled personally by Robert Hope-Jones which he had entitled 'Electric Organ and Testimonials'. It consists mainly of contemporary press cuttings relating to his work in Britain in the 1890s, many of which are annotated in his hand with pithy comments which are fascinating and often amusing with today's hindsight. The book came to light when it was gifted a few years ago to the Lancastrian Theatre Organ Trust in Manchester, and since then they have compiled a smaller book of edited highlights which is now available for purchase. This work has been undertaken by Roger C Fisher. The book can be ordered from the Trust's website at http://www.ltot.org.uk/page20.htm If this seems like an advertisement, I might mention that I have no connection with the LTOT beyond an interest in their work over many years, and certainly no financial involvement of any kind with them in general or this book in particular. However, having purchased it recently and been enthralled, I thought it might be worth bringing it to the notice of members of this forum. CEP

I'm wary of entering a discussion about an organ I do not know, but from what you say I agree it does sound rather monstrous. Is it an Anglican church, and if so, how was a Faculty obtained, and what did the DOA think about it? Incidentally, your description also comprehensively demolishes the perception (put about and encouraged by some of those who promote them) that virtual pipe organs are cheap. But let's not go there ... CEP

This very good point has been responsible for some erstwhile buyers who had won an auction on ebay suddenly losing interest, resulting in the organ having to be re-listed. Moving anything is unbelievably expensive today. Only this week I engaged a local firm to demolish and dispose of an old and small garden shed. The only tool they used was a sledge hammer, the job took about 20 minutes and it cost over £250. I considered myself lucky to have found anyone to have done it at any price. So amplify that figure by the several days' work required to carefully dismantle and stow an entire organ in a removal van, transport it, and then re-erect it somewhere else. Those property developers who frequently list organs on ebay could quite easily dispose of them themselves - they are builders when all said and done - but they know full well how much it would cost to do so legally (i.e. to pay proper landfill fees etc). So they hope some unsuspecting punter will come along and put money in their pocket to do the job for them by bidding for the instrument. CEP

The question is not at all 'basic' because it raises some subtle issues relating to the psycho-acoustics of aural perception by the ear and brain. The acoustic power of a principal-toned stop is spread over a number of harmonics, typically 15 or so, whereas that of a more fluty tone (as produced by a wider pipe of the same pitch) is concentrated in a smaller frequency bandwidth represented by fewer harmonics. This means that, for equal subjective loudness, significantly more power is forced into the fundamental frequency of a flute than a principal. In turn this means that the frequency receptors in the cochlea and the subsequent neural processing circuits in the brain are handling higher power levels at this frequency for fluty tones. This has several consequences. One is that these high powers result in greater masking of tones at other frequencies so that we perceive them less easily, and another is that the nonlinearity of the ear and brain generates stronger sum and difference tones which we can detect, even though they are not present in the original signal arriving at the ear. The net result can be a loss of what is often called 'transparency' or a loss of clarity in the sound as perceived subjectively if one combines higher-pitched flutes with lower-pitched principals. It results in a degraded ability to follow the individual melodic lines of a polyphonic composition such as fugue, or to detect which notes make up a chord in homophonic music such as a hymn tune. Of course, there are exceptions to the generalisation sketched above, and basically the dictum is "if it sounds OK, it is OK". There are also other subjective issues involved, about which other forum members will be able to respond better than I. CEP

Presumably played by one player at the Frobenius rather than two? When first confronted by this arrangement (being able to play the Walker seemingly miles away at the other end of the building from an essentially mechanical action console - using an auxiliary electric action of course) I was initially somewhat amazed, but soon found it exhilarating once I had sorted out how to set the switching system correctly. However, as separate instruments rather than in 'combined' mode, I far preferred the little Frobenius to the Walker, which seemed clumsy in comparison with its curious mix of action work, and also tonally inferior. The touch of the Frobenius was perhaps the finest of any mechanical action organ I have ever come across even when coupled up. But I digress. CEP

While at school in Nottingham I recall the music master (an unforgettable personality called W V Todd) regaling the class with an amusing tale about what had happened the previous evening. He had been engaged to play the organ part in Elgar's Cockaigne overture on the Binns instrument at the (Nottingham) Albert Hall, accompanying the Nottinghamshire County Youth Orchestra (ah, that delicious pedal entry - and how outrageous that so many conductors perform the work minus the organ even though it is ad lib). The occasion in question was the final rehearsal at which an eminent guest conductor appeared for the first time (Muir Mathieson as I recall). As half the players had not turned up when he wanted to begin, he got rather cross and asked Todd to play some of the orchestral parts throughout the piece as well as the organ part at the end. Todd was a fine musician, a professionally qualified organist and exceptionally capable at the keyboard, so he would have been quite in his element doing this. At the end Mathieson apparently said something like "well done Toddy, and at least the right notes were being played as well" - probably a jibe at the missing instrumentalists who no doubt were trickling into the hall by then. But doesn't this just illustrate how the often-invisible organist is called on to come to the rescue in so many ways and with no notice at all, employing skills in sight reading, score reading, transposition - and often improvisation to fill in the gaps. What a pity this is seldom realised and acknowledged by more than a very few. It also illustrates how flexible and useful the instrument itself can be in the hands of a good player. CEP

I've just done a quick check with Abebooks, a firm I use fairly frequently in situations like this, and they do it for USD 25.35 + USD 3.99 for shipping to the UK. Maybe worth a closer investigation to make sure I didn't miss something in the small print or whatever? CEP

With apologies, I can't answer this question, but there is a characteristically interesting take on the organs at Tewkesbury by Stephen Bicknell at: http://www.stephenbicknell.org/3.5.3.php CEP

It is singular that the problem of distributing the sound of an organ satisfactorily throughout the volume of a large building still presents difficulties when so much effort has been devoted to it over so many years. Presumably one reason is that there is no single solution to it - each building throws up a different set of problems. There was a time towards the end of the 19th century when electric actions seemed to offer a panacea, and a famous example of this was Robert Hope-Jones's organ of 1896 at Worcester cathedral which allowed pipes in the original quire and transept cases (plus a new one in the quire) to be played from one console rather than the previous two. And if one digs below the superficial layer of scorn still sometimes directed at the instrument, apparently it was both reliable and successful if one believes people such as the then Dean who wrote to Musical Opinion to say so. Since then there has been a move back towards separate organs, including at Worcester itself where several have been employed, including an early digital in the 1980s. Whether pipe or digital these, or at least their consoles, are also sometimes moveable. But in view of the continuing difficulties, I wonder whether there might be mileage in doing experiments with digital organs before committing to the stoplist and final placement of the pipes of a new or additional pipe organ? I am not for a moment encouraging the permanent installation of such instruments, but useful information might be obtained by placing their loudspeakers in different locations so that the effects could be judged in the building in a range of conditions (size and spatial clustering of congregations, nave versus quire effectiveness, etc). It might also be possible to gain some useful pointers to voicing and regulating the eventual pipe organ. Other than the time involved, it should not cost all that much because the digital organ could be sold on afterwards. Some purchasers like the cachet of a digital instrument that 'used to be in such-and-such a cathedral'. And manufacturers obviously love being able to say that one of their products is even temporarily in a cathedral, judging by the ads and the recordings which are sometimes issued. Presumably these commercial advantages would not be lost on the Dean and Chapter when they negotiate a hire or purchase price for the digital with the firm concerned! CEP

St Peter's, Eaton Sq, London: Viola Felix I have a lurking memory that this is something to do with somone's cat, though I did play this instrument shortly after its inauguration and it didn't sound particularly feline as I recall. Maybe it had been doctored. St Anne's, Moseley, Birmingham: Flauto Magico CEP

Re Tony's post, I think Alfred E Davies and Son of Northampton built similar small instruments in the mid-20th century. The concept was that of a limited number of extended ranks of contrasting tonalities which could be extended using couplers. Somewhere I have example stop lists, unless they have got lost during life's travels. They also marketed electronic organs under the name "Gregorian" which used a similar system. These were designed originally by the late Peter Walker who founded the QUAD high--end audio firm, famous for its amplifiers and electrostatic loudspeakers. He was an amateur musician who played the flute I think, though not the organ as far as I am aware. The Gregorian electronics did not have much of a reputation though, even by the poor standards of the day. CEP

I was glad to read this because I've held the same view ever since I first came across this instrument many years ago. It's good to see that an expert confirms it (I think I'm right in recalling that VH has studied the music of that period in depth). CEP

No, you are not. It grabs me in exactly the same way! The predictable thing about temperament is that hardly any two people agree on anything, which indicates the breadth of the subject. Therein lies its appeal I guess. CEP

Thank you for your response John. At first, I spent ages looking at the instructions and could only spot explicit references to ten fifths. So I wondered what one was supposed to do about the two 'missing' ones because there have to be twelve fifths in any temperament if all the notes in the octave are to be tuned. But then I saw two major thirds as well. At this point my head began to spin and so I decided to just sit down with a digital synthesiser and follow through the instructions one by one. This synth allows one to specify the frequency of each note by giving it an offset in cents from equal temperament. Somewhat to my surprise, all twelve notes of the octave were accounted for at the end of the exercise, which seemed like a minor piece of magic at the time. Therefore, because all notes had been tuned I had obviously tuned all twelve fifths by default as it were. However, some of them were not flat whereas the instructions specify that they must be. So I did a few sums and then repeated the exercise more carefully, and this time it came out right. By 'right' I mean that all fifths were flat and all major thirds were sharp (both as per the instructions). To be fair, the constraints in the tuning instructions are perhaps arguable. I think some authors have taken the phrase "all fifths must be flat" to refer only to the ten fifths which are explicitly mentioned. In that case, one can do what one likes with the other two (provided the two thirds which are mentioned are also treated properly), and one of them could indeed be a sharp Wolf in that case - leading to a variation of the meantone tunings which (as you said) were common in England at that time. However I have taken the view that "all fifths" means "all twelve fifths". When you do this there is much less room for manoeuvre and the possible outcomes are really just so many variations on 'mildly unequal' - a very different proposition to meantone of course. Whether my reading of the instructions is right or wrong, the results of my labours have produced a temperament which pleases me at any rate. That is partly because I'm a fan of mildly unequal ones anyway. (I invented another one, called the 'Dorset Temperament' which is also on my website). I find them much more subtle than grossly unequal ones such as meantone, which to my mind are too crude for words, standfast the fact they have historical importance. In my opinion it's more important to be able to use all keys than to take some (macabre?) delight in historical authenticity which prevents one from doing so! Although meantone was indeed common in Britain at that time, the influence of equal temperament or close approximations to it had been creeping over the Channel for some time by 1780. I like to think that this might have led to what one might call a 'mildly unequal culture' entering the tuning craft, and the 'Handel' temperament might have been an instance of it. After all, what would have been the point of simply giving the well-known meantone tuning instructions in this publication when everybody would have been familiar with it? I therefore conjecture that the intention might have been to persuade people to tune in a more subtle manner. Colin

I apologise for being a bit of a self-publicist here but it might conceivably be of some interest. Around 1780 a method for tuning a temperament was published in London and attributed to Handel (though this can probably be ignored). What is perhaps most interesting today is that it is sometimes offered as one of the temperaments included in electronic tuning devices and apps, and at least some people use it as their temperament of choice when performing music from the late baroque and classical eras. I can't claim to have seen every last one of these ETD temperaments, but those I have seen are all wrong. The original tuning instructions are crystal clear that all fifths must be tuned flat (as in equal temperament) whereas these modern realisations include some pure fifths. As well as this, some authors have asserted that the 'Handel' temperament is nothing more than a variation on the meantone tunings which were common in Britain at that time. This, too, cannot be so because of the very sharp Wolf fifth in these temperaments which also goes against the instruction for all fifths to be flat. I have therefore posted an article on my website in which I attempted to tune the temperament according to the detailed (though nevertheless frustratingly imprecise) instructions.from the 18th century. It turned out to be a pleasing mildly unequal temperament in which all keys are entirely useable, but it also has hints of key colour which give it more interest than ET. If you have an instrument at home such as a clavichord, harpsichord or organ (pipe or digital) perhaps you might like to give it a go next time you tune it. The article is at: http://www.pykett.org.uk/handels-tuning-temperament.htm Even if you are not interested in doing this, thanks for reading this anyway. CEP

Nice one Choir_Man! They seem not to have used multiplexed transmission for the voicing console, judging by the several multi-pin plugs each with its own fat cable. But this will make interfacing the console to a range of different organs more flexible, regardless of the type of transmission used by the instrument itself. And anyway, there's nothing wrong with conservative technology in general when it comes to organs. It has several advantages and it can be a sensible approach. This sort of publicity can help promote the pipe organ by raising the profile of what goes on inside, something which I have found can stimulate the interest of today's younger tech-aware generation even if they are not particularly musical. I have an ordinary cheap and cheerful MIDI music keyboard sitting on a stand in my studio, just like those which pop bands use on stage. It's used for creating 'classical' digital organ sounds but in functional terms it's no different to H&H's voicing console in these clips. It's amazing how interested younger visitors are in this one item when they glimpse it while passing by the door - presumably because it provides an instant link to things they can relate to. It's also amazing how little people in general, not just the younger ones, know about the organ, yet how interested they can become when their curiosity is aroused. A senior colleague some years ago, a physicist by background, once interrupted me when holding forth about organs. I had said something about moveable consoles and he couldn't understand how that could be done - he had never imagined there was any such thing as an electric action. Thereafter I had to spend ages describing almost every last detail of them! He was entranced, not to put too fine a point on it. So H&H are to be congratulated for posting these fascinating videos. They can't but help enhance the profile of the instrument. CEP

Old chur

Extraordinary! Any couplers? It makes Hope-Jones's work look quite normal. At least there are choruses going up to mixtures and mutations which his didn't have. Speaking of whom, here must be just about his smallest opus at All Soul's, Cardiff Docks in 1896, the same year his monumental Worcester Cathedral organ was completed. Talk about chalk and cheese: Pedal: Bourdon 16 Diaphonic Horn 16 Manual to Pedal Manual: Contra Tibia 16 Open Diapason 8 Phoneuma 8 Viol d'Orchestre 8 Manual Octave (this was a coupler not a 4 foot speaking stop. It would not have coupled through the pedal coupler) The organ no longer exists and I never saw or played it. But judging by the similar tonalities at Pilton (Devon) and Llanrhaeadr which do still exist, the Pedal Diaphone would have been overwhelmingly loud and even the Bourdon too loud for soft combinations. The Open Diapason would also have been by far the loudest manual stop. It was probably not leathered otherwise it would have been called a Diapason Phonon. The Viol would have been excruciatingly edgy (bottom C pipe typically around an inch in diameter). But the Pilton organ is fun to play even if one ignores the later non-HJ excrescences which have been added, and it would have been a serviceable church organ in most respects. CEP

I am not a musician in the sense of having gained any qualifications beyond grade exams, but when I retired I toyed for a while with the idea of aiming for ARCO - though other blandishments of all that newly-gained freedom rather pushed out that laudable aim. But I did notice at that time that some of the keyboard tests did not attract many marks, even the difficult (to me) ones. I seem to recall that transposition at sight only accounted for 9, suggesting that it didn't really matter if you even declined to do it provided you were able to make up the shortfall elsewhere. I could probably have done that on sight reading for example. But it was drummed into me that, although the set pieces might seem to be fairly straightforward on the face of it, the standard of performance expected was very high, which ties in with what Vox Humana said (#3). But sorry, this has drifted rather away from the original question. CEP

Same here. The issues of maintainability, repairability, obsolescence and limited lifetime all arise with digital electronics. At one extreme are PCs and the like which are lifed to only about three years nowadays - anything more is a bonus. This is driven largely by the need to replace the hardware fairly frequently to keep up with the insatiable demands of software which require ever-increasing resources to run at a reasonable speed (which is why your 3+ year old PC starts to struggle when opening web pages, doing virus scans etc, etc). This is unlikely to affect things like pipe organs as strongly though. Software upgrades will presumably occur, but not at the same breakneck speed as they do for PCs, phones, etc. So lifetimes will depend more on how long the hardware itself will survive. But when it goes wrong, will it be possible to repair it, or will it involve replacing the whole shooting match, internal computers and all? From the evidence of what happens to electronics generally in organs (e.g. solid state transmissions) this is exactly what does happen - the whole system needs to be replaced because obsolescence often dictates that replacement parts cannot be obtained after a few years. However there is a reasonable prospect a system will last 10 years or more before this is necessary. I agree with VH's other remark that a firm of the stature of Klais will have factored this into the maintenance agreement with the client, and the client will therefore be aware of it. Still, it's very different nevertheless to the conservative technology which used to characterise organs. Good old fashioned electromechanical draw stop or stop key units have hardly changed for half a century. They are still readily available and replacements can be dropped in as required, and that doesn't happen very often anyway. Quite different to touch screens. It's today's electronic control systems which make the electromechanical stops pop in and out which are the weak(er) link. As an aside, I feel saddened that organ builders sometimes seem to forget the needs of the visually handicapped player in their enthusiasm for the latest control technology. I might well be wrong, but I can't help thinking that it must be easier for such a player when s/he can physically feel the stop controls and detect whether they are on or off. CEP