Colin Pykett

John Robinson asked (#6) "what are they doing right, and what are we doing wrong?" A fascinating question for which I have no answer, though (like many on this forum I imagine) I've pondered about it for longer than I can recall. Like John, I've been in Dutch churches (e.g. St Laurens, Alkmaar) where exactly the situation he described unfolded itself each time. It probably isn't that our churches are locked most of the time, because so are many of theirs. In any case, even when open, the proportion of time that the organ can be heard informally if one happens to wander in is not large in either country. Nor is it that they make organists particularly welcome - one gets rebuffed after making a polite enquiry just as often on the continent as one does here. I once asked a verger in my best French who was shimmying around if I could just go up to the gallery to look at the console of a Cavaille-Coll organ in France (not, repeat not, play it) . "Non, non, c'est defendu" he replied, unnecessarily aggressively I thought. (Sorry not to have included the accents here but I can't easily find how to do it!). Perhaps the answer is simple though. If you are brought up in a country where JSB lived, or where the great organs of his day were to be found, then maybe it's somehow etched into your consciousness. We just do not have that backgound here, after all we are supposed to be "The Land Without Music" aren't we? Even with those composers who have made it to the top of the British tree - the likes of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Delius, etc - we still seem to spend far too much time in my opinion navel-gazing and asking whether they were really "great" or not, rather than celebrating them for what they were and are. This is indeed an unfortunate national trait, so maybe John hit the nail on the head when he concluded it is "just a national characteristic". CEP

I once read a piece by a well known organ builder/consultant in which he said that 32 note boards were introduced partly to improve the appearance of organ consoles. Because of the 'middle D' rule (middle D of the manuals has to be above middle D of the pedals), 30 note boards have to be offset from the centre of the console, which apparently offends the eye of some. But adding an extra two notes means the pedal board then sits nice and symmetrically in the middle - just as the manuals are. This did indeed turn out to be the case in the console I mentioned above (#10), which I designed using a 32 note ex-Compton board. However I was speaking more recently to another organ builder who said 32 note boards are difficult to get today and extremely expensive. He quoted the story of a customer who was insisting on one and the console supplier (who shall be nameless here) had to specially tool up to make it, including having to re-program his CNC woodworking machinery. I must admit I had not realised this. In the light of the recent posts above, I guess my previous question (are 32 notes ever necessary) ought to be recast to ask - is the additionale expense worthwhile? CEP

I don't wish to sound pompous, but I wouldn't do anything at all to ALL the pipes on an organ, or even those of just one stop. Tinkering with the odd one or two is a different matter and is sometimes necessary, but first rate organ tone in terms of timbre, regulation and blend is so subtle that it isn't worth the risk of doing it on a larger scale in my opinion. Even if everything went well, there is also the risk of damage, both to the pipework and to oneself if one is susceptible to the (largely unknown) ingredients of a typical metal cleaning compound. Nasty stuff on the whole. At the very least I would consult an organ builder first, and probably get him to do the job as well. If I couldn't afford it, I'd leave well alone. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! Pipes are the sound generators of the instrument, and I always treat them with the greatest respect. Sermon over. CEP

I once heard someone on 'The Organist Entertains' a few years back pointing out that much of Eric Coates's output was surprisingly 'samey', though not in a particularly critical way. This meant one could play various of his works two at a time! He demonstrated this by a rendition on a theatre organ of 'The Dambusters March' and 'Calling All Workers' (the signature tune to the radio programme 'Music While You Work'), and the two themes did indeed fit together remarkably well. I don't know whether he had had to tweak them to fit, as it were, but if he did it wasn't immediately obvious. I can't recall who the artist was, possibly Richard Hills. If not, it was someone with a comparable fabulous technique. CEP

The tuning of organ pipes is strongly temperature-dependent - that's a fact. But it's an equally plain fact that the solution to the problem is simply to tune the instrument often enough in the majority of cases where the environment is not closely and continuously controlled in terms of temperature and humidity. The large and expensive organs in cathedrals, concert halls, etc are (on the whole) tuned often enough, so no problems there other than things like orchestras having to make minor adjustments during a concert. But this strategy - frequent tuning - costs money. Local churches and other cash-strapped owners of pipe organs cannot afford frequent and thorough tuning, so they will and do suffer from the problems under discussion here. That will always have been so during the long history of the organ. It certainly did exercise organ builders from the 17th century onwards when most of the written records we still possess began to be compiled. A famous example is Andreas Werckmeister who punned c. 1698 "Schnarrwerk, ist unterweilen Narrwerk" (reedwork is the work of fools). His near-contemporary, Gottfried Silbermann, also seems to have disliked reeds so much that he did not include them in the manual divisions of many of his smaller instruments, presumably because he anticipated their owners would not keep them in proper tune. He compensated by including the most wonderfully complete flue choruses going up to 1 foot pitch, thus allowing the included mutations to be used for synthetic tone building (ersatz reeds). He followed this strategy in just about all of his 'small' (actually quite large by our standards) two manual village organs such as those at Reinhardstgrimma, Fraureuth, etc. This was in a region of Germany which was subject to pretty extreme temperature variations over a year, so presumably these flue-only organs stayed tolerably in tune with themselves without needing excessively frequent tunings. But because the actual pitches of these instruments would have fluctuated one from another, this is one reason why there is so much perplexing variation between the so-called pitch standards of those days. Another issue is that travel was so difficult, therefore there would not have been nearly so much travelling between churches as there is now - many people would simply not have been aware that there was a problem. I appealed above for organ builders' perspectives on these matters, so while waiting for it, an excellent survey of the subject is given by Dominic Gwynn (of the firm Goetze and Gwynn) at: http://www.rscm.com/assets/info_resources/Gwynn_article.pdf Section 4 is particularly relevant, and it confirms the points made in the current discussion. However there is also much else of interest in this article. CEP

A lot of questions here, so it depends on how detailed you want the answers to be! Trying to be brief: Yes, the numbers above do imply that on the face of it. However the temperature coefficient of sound speed varies with absolute temperature, so the sum you did isn't quite that simple. And the compensating effect of the thermal expansion of the pipes will be a factor over such a large temperature change. But there will still be a pretty dramatic change of pitch with a 30 degree temperature change. A saving grace is that, although the outside air temperatures can easily vary by 30 degrees, those in most buildings will not because they are heated. Even if they are not, the massive thermal capacity of a large stone edifice such as a church means that it will be somewhat warmer inside than the outside air in winter, and cooler in summer - this is highly noticeable because many people make a beeline for a church if they see one on a hot day when they are out for a walk. Maybe that's because a tuner would have descended once or twice between the depths of winter and the height of summer, and he might have tweaked the fluework as well as the reeds if it was that badly out of tune. The tuners I have worked with have done that, though they didn't if they thought they could get in and out quickly, and onto the next job. (This is not being rude to tuners, but they are hard-pressed, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it ... Such a mindset is attractive to the customer too, because shorter tuner's visits cost less.) Correct. No, because sound speed in both metal and wood pipes is affected in the same way and therefore their tuning will drift together - not by identical amounts, because over such a large temperature change (30 degrees) the differences in the thermal expansion coefficients of wood and metal, though small, will start to become noticeable. No, it's the other way round. Reeds are usually more stable with temperature. A qualified "yes" to both questions. However it's not that that the reeds don't drift at all, it's that they drift less than the flues. But because there are fewer reed stops than flues, it's quicker for a tuner to adjust them rather than the flues. Metal and wood flues drift similarly (apart from minor differences associated with differences in thermal expansion), so they remain tolerably in tune. The reeds drift differently to both metal and wood flues, so they become unplayable with both types if not tuned from time to time. As there are several if not many professional organ builders on this forum, besides its owner, perhaps their perspectives might be of interest? (Well, not "perhaps" at all - "definitely" is a better word!) CEP

It is true that the laws of physics are difficult to buck, though for organ pipes the uninitiated can sometimes be taken by surprise. Prepare for a sermon. As temperature rises the pipes get longer because the metal expands, therefore it is a common misconception that organs go flat in hot weather. In fact they go sharp, because the speed of sound increases, and the frequency (pitch) of a flue pipe is directly proportional to sound speed. Simple arithmetic shows that the pitch variations due to sound speed are far more pronounced than those due to the metal expanding. For a flue pipe, pitch changes by approximately 3 cents per degree Celsius (a cent is one hundredth of a semitone), therefore a 10 degree temperature change results in pipes going out of tune by about a third of a semitone. This is a significant amount of course, and it is only because the pitch of all the flue pipes changes in about the same ratio that an organ can continue to be used at all. However the reeds are a law unto themselves and predicting their behaviour is more difficult, which is why they often cannot be used with the fluework until the tuner next arrives. Unfortunately s/he then often just tunes the reeds (not the flues), and often just at the wire, and over time this can throw them badly out of regulation and off-speech. This is because a reed needs to be tuned both at the wire and at the resonator so the tube continues to resonate at the correct frequency. But this a time-consuming and more expensive procedure. And the longer the tuning process takes, the more likely it is that the wind temperature goes up anyway owing to the blower getting hot or the ambient temperature rising. And so it goes on .... The pronounced sensitivity of pitch to temperature also explains the need for other instruments playing with an organ to retune several times during a concert of extended duration, particularly as a large audience can cause a hall to warm up. Several practical implications follow. One is that frequent and thorough tunings are necessary to keep a pipe organ in tip-top playing condition. Once a month is not unusual for those in the more prestigious venues. Another is that the electronic sound generation gubbins of hybrid pipe-digital instruments must track these pronounced variations of pipe pitch with temperature. This is especially critical because the pipes in such instruments are often flues rather than reeds (reed sounds are often delegated to the electronics), and it is the fluework which is most strongly affected. Manufacturers of such instruments usually claim that they have solved this problem, so it is valid for one to enquire how effective the temperature compensation process actually is, perhaps by asking for a live demonstration, before committing to a purchase. CEP

Going back to organ music and reverberation time, it's possible to do some quick experiments simply by sitting at the computer. For example, by importing some of the recent fairly "dry" iPlayer recordings of the RFH organ into an audio editing package such as WaveLab, one can try applying different amounts of reverb. (WaveLab is a professional product and rather expensive, but it might be possible to do the same with a free one such as Audacity. I don't know because, possessing WaveLab, I haven't tried). I have mastered and added a smidgeon of additional reverb to several hundred almost "dry" organ recordings in this way over the years, and have found that 2.0 to 2.5 seconds reverb time is pretty optimum - to my ears and for my tastes of course. This confirms what others have said above. I have only heard the iPlayer recordings of the revamped hall and instrument so far, but it still sounds a bit too "dry" to me. However, I would be the first to admit that one should not judge an instrument until one has had the opportunity to hear it live in the building it occupies. One should bear in mind that reverb time usually defines the time for a sound to decay by 60 dB (a factor of one thousand in sound pressure level - SPL), though there are alternative definitions in use. However the ear can follow the decay of sounds of moderate to high SPL to far lower levels than this, so the quoted figures do not usually indicate the significantly longer time for which a decaying sound is actually audible. CEP

Post deleted (voluntarily). Too trivial. CEP

The following snippet appeared in the Financial Times back in 1971 relating to an organ concert at the RFH: "There are plenty of organs whose fuses could be expected to blow if fed with Ligeti's 'Volumina', but the Festival Hall is the last place you would expect it to happen; absurdly it did last night. 'Volumina' began with a deafening bravado - a huge tone cluster using every stop in sight. Then silence, but for the glances - positively vocal in their astonishment - between M Daresse and his two assistants. Explanation: the current had been overloaded and caused a sudden flood when all the notes were released, blowing the fuses for the electro-pneumatic contact between notes and pipes. Apology: no Ligeti." (Note to Moderators: This is posted merely for its topical entertainment value in view of the current focus on the RFH organ. It is not intended to cause embarrassment to the builders of the organ nor to anyone else. If you consider it should be removed please feel free to do so!). CEP

Some musings on what has been posted so far: As some posters have pointed out, not all pianists are mystified by or antipathetic to the organ. I recall a radio interview with John Lill many years ago. I think it was broadcast on Classic FM a year or two after it came into being in 1992. He said words to the effect that "he wished he could play the organ - it SINGS so!". They then played an organ recording of his choice. It clearly seems not to be well known that the original Tender Specification for the RFH included two Tubas - a Tuba Major 8' and a Tuba Clarion 4' on 15 inches of wind. I suggest members might like to refer to Ralph Downes's book 'Baroque Tricks' for a very detailed discussion of how the organ came into being under his guidance, and (inter alia) why the Tubas disappeared. A much shorter though equally informative brochure was available in the RFH foyer for many years in the 1960s. Simply entitled 'The Organ in the Royal Festival Hall', it also was by Downes. From the above, readers might correctly infer that I was fortunate enough to be able to attend many of the original '5:55' Wednesday recitals in those days. I was doing my PhD at King's College just across the river, and it was pleasant to pop across before returning to the lab for the usual late evening stint ... CEP

I was interested to see this question posed (whatever is the use of a Unison Off?), as it has also stumped me for decades. The answers above seem to confirm that it's always possible to 'invent' a use for it if the question is asked, but otherwise how often is it really used - is it just a solution looking for a problem most of the time? Exactly the same type of things illustrated above are done by organists trying my instruments when I pose the question to them - they come up with nothing more than a combination which can be obtained anyway, but which might (conceivably) place the hands in a more convenient playing position. If it were that useful, why does it not appear on all divisions? (That's an issue which also applies to intra-divisional super and sub octave couplers!). Having designed several consoles myself, I have never included a Unison Off in one for my own use. I am only too aware of how wasteful and expensive it is to include draw stops or stop keys that will be seldom or never used, especially if a motorised combination system (magnetically-operated moving stop controls) is employed. CEP

If this were so, I agree it would be sad. However there might be a reason for an apparent lack of interest. If a topic is important, its cause might not be helped if too many of those in favour of it remain anonymous. I've just done a quick tally of the posts on this topic, and out of a total of 14 different posters, 7 chose to be anonymous. (These numbers might not be quite right as I only did a quick skim). Irrespective of the merits of what a forum member says, there is an argument that they could give added weight to their case if readers know who they are. Ordinarily this does not matter very much, but in this case it might be relevant. So despite the perceived problems, it was OK in the end - excellent and well done. Can't but support you on that. CEP

Definitely off-topic Tony - there's another thread opened just recently about going down the pub (!) CEP

Interesting. If one is left handed, does it mean that achieving independence between left hand and pedals is easier? In fact, does the problem then become one of achieving it between the right hand and pedals? I'm right handed (otherwise I wouldn't need to ask these questions). CEP

I should have said that the ex-piano pedal board I mentioned above had an interesting feature which was probably quite important when it was used as a piano attachment. There was a lever which, when raised, prevented any of the pedals moving if you stood on them while getting onto or off the bench. Otherwise I guess it could have thrown excessive force onto the hammer mechanism inside the piano. As for the Ellingford-Willis pedal board, it eventually went to landfill, something I felt rather sad about at the time but one can't keep everything. In its turn it was superseded by a very swish one from a Compton Electrone which was of 32 note compass. At the time I thought I might as well use it as I had already cannibalised the console for the beautiful Herrburger Brooks keyboards Compton's used in the 1950s, though I cannot recall a single occasion when I've needed the top two notes over the last 25 years or so that I've had this instrument at home. So, another question for the forum - are 32 note boards ever actually necessary? Thanks to everyone above who have contributed such interesting information to this thread - fascinating. CEP

It is true that one does have to be a bit careful about the pedal boards on pedal-pianos (though I know nothing about this one). When I was making my first electronic organ (wash my mouth out) as a lad, someone gave me a pedal board from such an instrument. It wasn't too bad and quite useable for the purpose. Compass was 30 notes, but the top F key was deliberately made with a neatly-mitred crook half way along. I have no idea why - presumably so it engaged properly with the mechanism. But it looked most peculiar. Subsequently I replaced it with another one that had also been donated. Although it's nothing to do with the subject under discussion, it was the most comfortable I've ever played. A visiting organ builder said at the time that it was quite rare and probably an Ellingford-Willis board, as described in Ellingford's book "The Science of Organ Pedalling". Has anyone else heard of or come across one of these? CEP

A 2 manual and pedal piano is cropping up on ebay at the moment. See: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/PRACTICE-ORGAN-/121290871951?pt=UK_MusicalInstr_Keyboard_RL&hash=item1c3d7fd48f#ht_201wt_1190 (If the link doesn't work, the item number is 121290871951). Although I've seen such things from time time in old print journals, mainly as ads, I've never been able to try one. Nor do I know what rarity value it might have. It doesn't seem to be attracting much interest as I think it's been advertised before. CEP

Yes, it is sad. Alan Spedding was also Associate Editor of Organists' Review at one time, and I recall with pleasure and gratitude his kindly and patient attention to my occasional contributions in the form of letters and articles from someone he had never met. People like him in the 'front row' of the IAO do the organisation a great though often unremarked service. From time to time I come across pieces by a J D Spedding from about a century ago, and have wondered whether this composer might have been a forbear of Alan. On the whole I find them definitely useable, as they rise above the tedium of much output from that era. CEP

I think he might have written more than one book about the organ, including a short monograph on the hydraulus. However this does not answer Denis's question related to his musical life. I seem to recall from somewhere that he worked for one or more organ builders in Britain at some stage(s) in his career. Not much to go on I'm afraid. CEP

There are at least some organ builders on this forum (!), so far be it from me to suggest what you might do. I am a mere physicist. However you do deserve some sort of reply to your valid and interesting question. As an experimentalist at heart rather than a theoretician, and when there are so many imponderables at issue (*), as here, quite honestly the best thing to do is simply to try it in my opinion. That's what I generally do rather than continue to agonise for ever. I realise this will probably involve you having to cut into the chest to make a new entry for the wind, but this could be done quite neatly. If it doesn't work, you could seal off the opening again with a blanking flange screwed over it against a leather gasket. But if it does work, you will have to do the same for your current aperture, so either way there will be visible evidence of the intervention. So in that sense you will not have lost anything. Best wishes with it! CEP * The imponderables mainly centre around the fluid dynamics which determine how the wind enters the pipe during the first 50 milliseconds or so of its speech. This can be affected considerably by quite minor changes to the winding system, such as those you are contemplating, and they are next to impossible to model theoretically. They can result, for example, in audible changes to the attack transient the pipes emit - and these changes can be for better or worse. One cannot really know until one tries it for real. Then there might be changes to the steady state phase of speech, as you have already observed.

A droll thread. One thing I have always wondered about the 7 manual at Atlantic City Convention Hall (or should I now say Boardwalk Hall) is - where the blazes does the player put his/her music? And, once they have found it, why doesn't it just fall off anyway? There was an artlcle on it in the IAO Millenium Book by an organ builder, and I wrote to him asking this very question. Unfortunately I didn't get a reply. Maybe he thought I wasn't taking the whole ridiculous thing seriously enough - which I wasn't. I have never been able to! CEP

This is not a forum for discussing electronic organs and I respect that, but I hope I will be permitted to add my two cents worth in the hope that it might persuade those entrusted with procuring a new instrument to look again at a pipe organ, possibly redundant or otherwise second hand as Contrabombarde suggested. If the financial ceiling is £20K, they might like to ensure they are satisfied with the standard of the console they will get, and the number and quality of loudspeakers which will be installed. This is because it is these items which dominate the price of a digital organ. Many 'top of the range' electronics cost very much more than this, and there are good reasons for it. Reverting to redundant pipe organs, I know of more than one instance where the total installed cost was in the region of £10K for a very satisfactory instrument indeed. If I have interpreted the brief information in the above post correctly, it implies that the church has about £15K already. Therefore I would urge that they spend a little of it now to retain the services of an organ adviser (such as one from the AIOA) to make sure they have left no stone unturned if they do finally opt for an electronic. It would also assist their application for a Faculty as well if that has not been done already. CEP

Apologies if I add yet another Toccata (actually it's billed as a 'Carillon') to the list, especially if somebody has already mentioned it, but what do people think of Mulet's 'Tu es Petra'? It doesn't seem to make it to the top of the playlists very often, but I love its dark pulse and thematic material, especially as it starts (unusually for its genre) at pianissimo and doesn't rise above mezzo-forte for quite a long time - full Recit with box closed and Pedal flues down to 32 foot. I understood it better having realised that Mulet always refers to it by its full title of 'Tu es Petra et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus te' (Matthew 16 v18 I presume) - and you can't do much better than that for a text! It appeared rather fearsome at first sight but I found it yielded quite well to a bit of practice. Then of course there's his 'Carillon-Sortie' if one wants something a bit jollier, but after Tu es Petra it seems somehow a bit trite. Just a personal opinion of course. CEP

If one is going to include Guilmant's 1st Sonata in the list of possibles, why not play the whole wonderful thing - maybe one movement at a time to suit the occasion? The first movement is almost as "toccata-like" in its excitement as the last, but of course one really needs a Cavaille-Coll console to play it on - the detached chords on the Solo/Bombarde organ written on the 4th and 5th staves of the score demand the spring-loaded hitch-down pedal controlling the manual coupler which Guilmant specifies in a footnote. (Otherwise one will probably need to descend to the indignity of using an assistant. I always feel a musical instrument which needs more than one person to play it isn't really a musical instrument at all. But now I really am going off-topic ... ) CEP