Colin Pykett

Noel Rawsthorne wrote an alternative harmonisation to Melita which might be marginally useful (number 97 in his '200 Last Verses'). Also it might be worth mentioning that I spent many years during my career working closely with the Royal Navy and I used to play regularly (and still do occasionally) at a church with strong military and naval connections. At more than one funeral there, one for an Army officer and another for a Naval one, the family requested I play Nessun Dorma. I am not sure whether this has specific military connections but its translation, None Shall Sleep, is appropriate. (The actual libretto to the opera is decided twaddle and perhaps not suited to a church setting at all, but if we let libretti put us off most of us probably wouldn't listen to much opera at all). CEP

Thank you, MM, for the welcome and those kind words. I'm not sure I can describe myself as a fully fledged Compton expert though. My interests in that direction start rather narrowly with Robert Hope-Jones's work at an engineering level, and moving on from that, I have been interested for some years in how some of his technical ideas were transferred to Compton (because they surely were), and what Compton did with them subsequently. It's an intriguing thread to follow, though I still cannot see it in its entirety yet. Some of HJ's tonal ideas also got transferred in a diluted form, though in my view that is a rather different matter - it was the fashion then to make organs sound like they did in Britain around 1900, a trend that was taken up for a while by several others including Harrison. CEP

My limited intellect has encountered difficulty in trying to understand why Denis O'Connor's enquiry about getting hold of 19th century copies of Musical Opinion is mixed up with the attractions of Buxtehude's daughter. However it might be of interest that the Westminster Music Library near Victoria Coach Station had them some years back. I agree with him that the correspondence columns were very lively then on subjects including Hope-Jones which was the subject I was researching at the time. Maybe try this link: http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/libraries/special/music/ Careful though - the paper from 1895 or so was yellowed and extremely fragile and I had to own up to having torn some pages slightly as I was turning them. The staff were very kind though and let me out without a fine. CEP