Colin Pykett

It might be worth mentioning that S S Wesley's father, Samuel, was at least as interested in the subject of temperament as his son later became. He gave a lecture in February 1811 entitled "The most eligible method of acquiring a command of keyed instruments - tuning - old and new method - equal temperament". He recommended players to become proficient in all keys, and went on to discuss the respective merits of unequal and equal temperaments. During the lecture he had an organ at his disposal which had been specially modified for the occasion (at a cost of £5), enabling him to demonstrate at least two different temperaments, 'old' and 'new'. Presumably a few of the stops had been retuned temporarily. Can we further presume that 'new' meant equal temperament and, together with his desire for proficiency 'in all keys', that he himself preferred it? Regardless of the correctness of these presumptions, might this interest in temperament have continued, and might it have planted a seed later in the mind of his son (who only attained his first birthday in the year of the lecture, but whose opinions developed in maturity seemed to diverge considerably from those of his father as we have noted in posts above). (See 'Samuel Wesley: the Man and His Music' by Philip Olleson, p. 110 et seq).

Oh dear, yes. Thank you. Maybe I should have replaced 'hare' by 'red herring'. Could I then have said that they should be kept firmly in the net (hence the term 'keep net')? And Wesley was a fisherman too ...

No he doesn't, and as an expert organ designer and builder he would never have confused the two either. But I'd be the first to admit that the issue can be confusing and it crops up repeatedly in these sorts of discussion. But lots of hares will be set running if honourable forum members don't keep them firmly in their warrens!

The sustained tones of the organ tend to emphasise the properties, both good and not so good, of all temperaments simply because the ear has more time to dwell on them, except perhaps for music taken at the quickest pace. The beats between the notes of impurely-tuned intervals are largely responsible for whether keys are deemed 'good' or otherwise. The more out of tune an interval gets, the faster and more noticeable the beats become until they eventually end up being intolerable, as with Wolf intervals. Conversely, if the intervals are tuned pure (no beats) that, too, is highly noticeable on the organ compared with the transient tones of the piano, clavichord or harpsichord. So differences between temperaments are aurally far more obvious on the organ than on other keyboard instruments. There is also another effect for the most out of tune intervals, which is that the absolute frequencies of the notes start to deviate noticeably from what a musically educated ear expects to hear - the individual notes sound 'out of tune' in fact! This effect is also most noticeable on the organ because the ear has more time to analyse what is going on before the notes cease to sound. This is why it is a mistake (though a common one) to assume that a temperament which might work well on the harpsichord, say, will also work well on the organ (or other keyboard instruments for that matter). Temperament is not a one-size-fits-all subject. Yet another factor is that the effect of temperaments varies with the registration one uses. This is because the strengths of the beats depend on how many harmonics are available to the ear - flutes have few harmonics whereas strings and reeds have far more. So if beats are strong (as with reeds and strings), they can sound more objectionable than if they are weak (as with flutes). This means that a temperament which sounds intolerable with reeds and strings, or even principals, can nevertheless sound quite docile with flutes. Listen to this file, which is exactly the same as the one above in that it consists of the tune 'Charity' played first in ET then in meantone. This time, however, it is played on a Stopped Diapason (very few harmonics) rather than an Open Diapason (considerably more harmonics). In this case even the final chord in A flat sounds tolerable because there are not enough harmonics to generate strong beats. So the Wolf has now been tamed! www.colinpykett.org.uk/StopDiap-ET-4thComma.mp3 This is another example of why temperament is not a one-size-fits-all subject, because no other keyboard instrument has the range of tone colours that the organ enjoys, so there is no comparable effect possible on other instruments.

I entirely agree, and that is what led me to open this thread in the first place. I've never understood it at all. Like so much to do with temperament, there is a lot of talk but little understanding or aural experience of what unequal temperaments, especially extreme unequal temperaments like meantone, actually sound like. I am not being disrespectful, but it's a fact. When one does hear them, it can cause one to question one's previous assumptions, either for better or worse. There is an interesting quote from Wesley's pupil Dr Francis Edward Gladstone (1845-1928): "There is one thing which I have never been able to understand, and that is how Wesley could endure the sound of his 'Wilderness', or of the beautiful service in E, when the organ was tuned to unequal temperament" (in 'Samuel Sebastian Wesley', Musical Times, July 1, 1900, p. 456) It would be trite to say that I rest my case, but Dr Gladstone confirms exactly what it has taken us all many hundreds of words to say here. Using Rowland's words, it remains a mystery apparently without a solution. But I have found the many hundreds of words very helpful nevertheless.

This is a long reply to the above posts - sorry. Temperament and pitch are independent in terms of which are the good and bad keys. If you lower the pitch of an organ by a semitone, for example by tuning it to A = 415 Hz instead of the usual A = 440 Hz and then re-set a temperament such as meantone, the good and bad keys are unchanged. This might seem counter-intuitive, but it's because whether a key is good or bad depends on intervals - the relative frequencies of two notes played at once - rather than on the absolute frequencies of single notes. Looking at it another way which might be easier to understand, if you lower or raise the pitch of an organ, that does not mean you have changed anything in terms of scale or key. Thus F# minor is still F# minor regardless of what pitch you might have tuned A to, and therefore if you are using meantone then F# minor will still be a bad key. Or if you are in an exam and the examiner asks you to play a scale of C major (or anything else), s/he would not adjust the requested key simply because the organ had been tuned to some unusual pitch! What does influence where the good and bad keys fall is something usually called 'key centre' - in the case of meantone this means where you place the Wolf interval. Conventionally it has been placed for centuries between A flat and E flat, but if you decide to put it somewhere else then the whole pattern of good and bad keys is rotated, for want of a better word. They are all still there but they occur in different places. It is unlikely, though one cannot completely rule it out, that Wesley's organs would have had a different key centre. If this were the case he would have been using a form of meantone where the commonly-used keys with relatively few sharps and flats would lose the pure thirds which are a feature of this temperament - these would have been shifted to the more remote keys. So on the whole such a move would make the amended version of meantone less useful to the practical musician. So this hypothesis scarcely seems credible. Some digital organs, besides having selectable temperaments, also have selectable key centres. They are useful for doing experiments, though I suspect the additional flexibility confuses most people. I once had a correspondent who was despairing about not being able to get the pure thirds in C major which he expected when using meantone tuning. Eventually it dawned on me that he had inadvertently twiddled the key centre setting. Fortunately there was a 'factory settings' control, which returned things to normal for him! More generally, there's always scope for experiments as Rowland suggested, though I would counsel anyone wanting to undertake them that they are extremely time consuming to implement, to say nothing of making a decent recording of the results and then posting it on the web for all to hear! And that's after you have sat with a wet towel round your head for hours (nay, days sometimes) while being slowly driven to distraction by the maths ... I mention this aspect because it is worth remembering that the early theorists such as Werckmeister in the 1600s had no calculators, computers or all of today's trappings of digital music technology to smooth their path. All they had were quill pen and ink, a monochord and (if they were lucky) printed log and antilog tables which were full of errors. So these are the people I really take my hat off to.

I should also like to add my thanks to Bruce Buchanan for his contribution above. I also thought it might be interesting, or at least entertaining, to give an idea of what a 'Wolf' key in meantone tuning actually sounds like. The audio clip below is of Stainer's hymn tune 'Charity' played on an Open Diapason stop using both equal temperament (played first) then quarter-comma meantone (played second). It is played in A flat, one of the worst keys in meantone. F# minor and F minor are pretty much as bad - Wesley wrote a Larghetto in each of these latter keys. I've used this clip simply because it's already available on my website. Making a special recording of the Larghetto in F# minor, discussed frequently above, would be a significant undertaking. www.colinpykett.org.uk/OpenDiap-ET-4thComma.mp3 (The recording was made using a digital simulation of a real stop on a pipe organ).

Not rude at all Rowland! On the contrary, thank you for the additional background - most interesting. I use a Novello edition of 1947 'edited' (perhaps meaning 'arranged'?) by H A Chambers. I think this might be quite widely used, judging by sundry performances I have on CD (including one recorded at a certain Cambridge college chapel) as well as some youtube ones (the one by Diane Bish springs to mind if I'm not mistaken but I haven't listened to it recently). But I'm told there are other editions around where there are some small differences, e.g. in tied, or not tied, notes here and there. There is an edition on IMSLP which I have but don't play from, mainly because it is awkwardly laid out with the left hand split between the bottom two staves together with the pedal notes. This also suggests different registrations to the Novello one. As far as I can see there is no indication of its provenance on the IMSLP download I have printed out, in terms of which publisher it was or who edited it or even when it was published. But as to differences between the editions in the actual notes printed, which might feed through into dissonances or otherwise, I haven't detected any of these - though I haven't gone through the pages with that intention I must admit. I agree that a definitive scholarly pronouncement on these matters would fill a gap here. I think there are at least two substantial Wesley biographies, neither of which I've read, though I wonder if they (being biographies with so much else to talk about) would go into the level of detail necessary about each and every organ composition? There are also a number of lesser works, including one entitled 'A Centenary Memoir' dated 1976 by Betty Matthews which was on sale in Winchester cathedral around that time. But this is little more than a pamphlet, interesting and readable though it is, but it does not address these detailed matters of course.

I said above that "I've just tried playing his Larghetto in F# minor in meantone ... it's just awful." Well, sorry, but it is - you hit the most dreadful dissonance as early as bar 3! It hurts the ear. Those who enjoy poking around in the arithmetic will know why. So although I love Wesley's contribution to Victorian culture, I can't understand how even he, attuned as he might have been to a temperament which we seldom encounter today, could have justified it as robustly as he did. I wonder what his listeners thought of it? Why didn't he just notate it up a semitone in G minor? This is one of the 9 very good keys in 4th (quarter), 5th and 6th comma meantones, all of them intonated far better than in equal temperament. If he wanted to demonstrate the beauty of an unequal temperament, surely this would have been one way to do it? (But don't ask me to transpose it at sight, or even with practice, please ... ) I think the answer to this question is that it is actually meaningless. In a piece such as this with its richly varying harmonic texture, with keys constantly coming and going as it modulates continuously and evanescently through one to the next, even rooting it in G minor would still expose some of the poor keys in meantone from time to time. But you can play it more successfully in F# minor by selecting one of the less extreme unequal temperaments ('well temperaments') which I listed above, such as Werckmeister III. By doing this you will then get the benefit of the spectrum of key colours which this temperament offers while not offending the ear overmuch. Wesley might not have been familiar with such temperaments, and if so, it merely confirms how far behind continental Europe we in Britain were at that time. He seemed to view the temperament issue as consisting solely of temperaments with Wolf intervals (the meantones) at one extreme and the blandness of ET at the other, with nothing inbetween. But notwithstanding all this, his Larghetto is sublimely beautiful, to me at any rate. That's all that matters. Thank you, SS!

Dafydd and Rowland - describing yourselves as pedants underestimates the value of what you have said! The whole point is to get as near to the truth as possible in a subject which (like much musicology) is necessarily 'soft' rather than 'hard' - and this is not a criticism. So it is valuable to identify and marshall as many facts as possible, and I'm grateful that you and other contributors to this thread have taken so much time and trouble to do it.

Continuing to grind away at this, there's a brief reference to Wesley in the article 'Temperament and Pitch' by Christopher Kent (in 'The Cambridge Companion to the Organ'): "Apparent opposition [to the increasing use of ET] came from the mature S S Wesley (1810-76), in whose organ music there are some harmonically ambitious contexts that may arguably be related to an irregular and unrestrained temperament. Examples include the Prelude and Fugue in C# minor, Larghetto in F# minor, and bb. 57-65 and 85-8 of the Andante in F." It is difficult to make more of this remark without further explanatory detail, however. Later on he continues: "However, it was typical of Wesley's contradictory personality to write passages in his early anthems ... which suggest that he may have been acquiescent towards equal temperament, as in The Wilderness (bb. 122-7), composed in 1832 for the re-opening of the organ in Hereford Cathedral ... yet it is known that at this time the instrument had not been tuned to equal temperament". There is an interesting and readable article available on the internet entitled "Samuel Sebastian Wesley's Organ Compositions" by R J Stove, given in October 2016 at the Musicological Society of Australia’s Victorian Chapter Symposium. See: https://www.academia.edu/29170846/POST-BACH_AND_POST-MENDELSSOHN_SAMUEL_SEBASTIAN_WESLEYS_ORGAN_COMPOSITIONS_Footnoted_version_of_talk_ He also picks up on Kent's article mentioned above, while remarking "that's as maybe; I'm not myself convinced".

That's amazing, Paul. Thank you very much - it's precisely the sort of material I had hoped might be found somewhere. I'll need to reread it all, but several points stand out so far: 1. Wesley wasn't talking merely about mildly unequal temperaments but quite explicitly about those with a pronounced Wolf such as 4th or 6th comma meantone (Silbermann's temperament). 2. He wrote words to the effect that the organist should simply stop playing when things get too unbearable. (!) 3. Also that choice of key is sometimes dictated by the tessitura of the singers rather than what might sound best on the organ - fair enough of itself. Yet he also wrote solo music for the organ which, seemingly deliberately, uses the worst keys as my original post pointed out. Why? This problem remains unresolved from what I've just read in Wesley's letters. I suppose it might be simply that one's ears become more tolerant of what one has grown up with. To him it seems that Wolf intervals were part and parcel of musical life, whereas they hit us harder when we come across them today. ET is the reverse - his ear rebelled against it because he wasn't used to it, whereas we are habituated to it from childhood. I've just tried playing his Larghetto in F# minor in meantone on a digital organ. Ouch - it's just awful. But I have to respect what Wesley, as a great musician, said in those letters. It's up to me to try and understand his position better, rather than reject it out of hand. Regardless of all this, he wrote some lovely stuff, which is why I wanted to understand a bit more of where he was coming from. Thanks again to all who have helped in this.

Thank you both for taking the trouble to reply. I particularly like the two pragmatic suggestions quoted above. In the absence of more specific information I feel they pretty much explain the situation.

I don't know whether this has already been discussed - I've tried searching the forum but there are too many hits coming up to make it practical to look further. My question is straightforward though. Wesley is sometimes said to have disliked the move towards equal temperament in the 19th century, yet quite a lot of his output would sound curious (euphemism) if played on any of the meantones he would probably have come across and which some say he preferred. Take his famous Larghetto in F# minor. This comes over rather badly in quarter-comma meantone, assuming the Wolf interval is placed as per convention. His Larghetto in F minor is even worse. Things are not much better in 5th or 6th comma meantone (though these two are pretty much the same thing for practical purposes). F# minor would have been playable on the French Temperaments Ordinaires, though F minor would probably have repelled the ear. However both keys are better intonated in the following: Werckmeister III Kirnberger II and III Neidhardt I Vallotti Young (almost a copy of Vallotti, but 70 years later) What does this tell us? Maybe the key centres used by tuners of meantone on the organs he played were different in those days, so that the Wolf appeared elsewhere around the circle of 5ths? Or were meantone and other forms of unequal tuning not as prevalent at that time in England as some maintain? Or is it the cop-out answer that we we simply do not know enough about the temperaments in use then? If the latter, is it possible that studying what composers wrote would provide useful clues? Trying to answer the question is complicated in that - stating the obvious - it's not just the root key which matters but the keys into which he modulates as well. Or maybe Wesley couldn't really have cared much about temperament, contrary to what popular belief suggests?

We can all quote similar instances, such as sudden failures of electric actions, including those relying on electronics. Or CDs which, bizarrely, proclaim in the sleeve notes that somebody had to be on hand in case things went wrong during the recording sessions as though it were something to be proud of. I won't mention names or venues but could do so. And these things are by no means restricted to our shores - they happen with pipe organs everywhere. This sort of thing does nothing to enhance the reputation of the instrument, nor does it fit well with those trying to construct arguments showing that pipe organs are a more economical proposition than digital ones. I get lots of emails from people trying to do this, and it's amusing to see the lengths some of them will go to in an attempt to force the answer they want.

Yes, it is a wonderful resource. Being aware of the financial difficulty for BIOS of keeping it going, I once enquired of the Chairman why it wasn't run on a subscription-only basis rather than relying on the goodwill of individuals to make voluntary donations. Apparently the reason (or one reason) is that this would cause difficulties with the charitable status of BIOS, which has to be seen to be involved in 'outreach' activities to the community. So perhaps we need to thank the relatively small membership of BIOS for contributing to the upkeep of NPOR for the benefit of the entire world, and I believe the RCO also plays a major role in hosting the site.

Thanks for these responses. In the last analysis, what we find the best solution is personal and subjective, as was said above. But it seems to me that the broadcasting and recording industry somehow got off on the wrong foot from the start by making recordings in rooms of a type never encountered previously. Those early photos from a century ago of tiny BBC studios draped with heavy sound-deadening material say it all. It's a paradigm the industry has never really detached itself from. And then they add insult to injury by pushing microphones close up to the instruments, singers or studio announcers to produce sounds which are never actually encountered in reality. It's laughable that we are subjected to the audio minutiae of the vocal tracts of DJs between records. You can hear their respiratory and articulatory mechanisms operating in a way that you never would in everyday life - we would seldom think of pushing our ears to within a few centimetres of people's lips, and similarly for musical instruments. It's also the reason why speech seldom sounds natural on recordings or radio broadcasts because propagation distance from source to ear is important in forming perceptions, both for speech and music. Our brains evolved the means to estimate range of a sound as a survival tool, and it's therefore important not to throw the distance cues away if recordings are to sound natural. And yet the gold standard subjective test for a hifi system for many audiophiles is still to listen to it emitting studio speech according to some pundits! Hence my liking for listening to at least some recorded music using ambience modification, to expand perceived room sizes and increase perceived propagation distances to those we encounter in real life. But it's a purely personal thing.

I wonder if others find some modern recordings tend to be far too dry (devoid of 'presence' and room ambience)? On the whole, older ones seem not to suffer from the problem as much if my CD collection (built up since the 1980s) is anything to go by. I realise such opinions are purely subjective, but it might be relevant that in the past some recordings made in the studio or wherever were then replayed into large buildings, with the final master then being made from the sound picked up by microphones. This isn't done today because high quality artificial (electronic) ambience can be added so easily, thus it would inflate the cost (and reduce the profit margins) overmuch. But is ambience augmentation actually done at all today for 'classical' recordings, electronics notwithstanding, or is the current ethos not to meddle with the sound as recorded, thus leading to the question posed above? Anyway, I have an artificial reverberation box (i.e. hardware not software) incorporated in one of my hi-fi systems on which knobs can be twiddled to add any amount of ambience representing a wide range of 'rooms' to anything I happen to be listening to. It can add a wonderful spaciousness to piano or harpsichord recordings for example, and bring out an expansive warmth to string quartets which simply isn't there on the original recording. For organ music similar remarks apply, especially when the recording was done using close-miking. However I find that one has to be careful not to overdo it with the organ, because excessive emphasis of particular frequencies can arise with the sustained tones of the instrument which is (subjectively) less of a problem with the transient sounds of the other sources mentioned. - although you can usually get round this by simply choosing another 'room' on the reverb unit to suit the particular recording. I'm writing this listening to Ashkenazy playing Chopin with added ambience and, as always, it's mind-blowing. But I find returning to the original recording on this CD is most disappointing, almost as though one is listening to a microphone dangled just above the strings with the piano in an anechoic chamber! If you want to try it without spending too much, older digital reverb units can readily be obtained but, even so, they are far from cheap considering they can be over 30 years old! The Alesis Microverb models I, II or III hail from that era but sellers on ebay nevertheless seem to want a good price in the three figures for them - excessive to my mind. But I mention these because I have many of them knocking around and have used them a lot, and they will certainly give a feel for what a more modern system could do before you decide to shell out even more. I know some forum members have experience of professional recording, so I wonder what their opinions might be?

I also am one of those who would find it offensive that so much money is spent on organs were it not for one thing. This is that it is often the case that churches often 'compensate' (if that's the right word) by doing considerable good to needy members of their communities in ways that are not as spectacular or well enough known. This forum is probably not the place to get too deeply involved in these matters, but I can immediately think of one instance where the church concerned routinely opens its doors to those who would otherwise be forced to sleep outside at this time of year in the churchyard. And the former incumbent in this case is a professionally qualified organist. I'll stop now, having made a suggestion that there is sometimes a bigger picture beyond the immediate headlines which might be taken into consideration.

I don't want to concentrate specifically on the Charterhouse organ, but to reflect on what the 'value' of any organ is and what the term might mean. The latter might have some relevance to the former though. In simple monetary terms pipe organs have little value, bearing no relation to what they might have cost. This would be illustrated if, hypothetically, one put up for auction a brand new organ that had just been installed at a cost running into the seven figures. It is inconceivable that one would be able to recover anything like the cost price even if it sold at all. Similarly, if the organ were older, even though it might be musically and historically significant, it would still sell for only a trifle of the cost of building a modern replica. Yet for a Faberge egg, a Rembrandt or a Stradivarius, the sale price in each case would be astronomical. Moreover, they would sell as soon as the auction began and it would be difficult even to join the frantic bidding. Why is there this difference, considering that all the items mentioned are rare, unique, works of art? Reasons probably include the sheer size of organs, the difficulty of identifying a new venue, the cost of transporting them thither, re-erection costs, and the financial burden of maintenance over an indefinite period. So if they have little intrinsic value, perhaps it is unsurprising that they are sometimes disposed of so wantonly (though I'm not implying 'wanton-ness' applies in any way to the Charterhouse situation as I said at the outset). The value of anything, regardless of how you measure it, is largely in the eye of the beholder, and it seems that organs fall way down the list. Protecting them by statute does not really solve the problem because it merely brings them even closer to the museum status which the instrument is, regrettably, sliding towards under its own steam as we speak. It's an even more curious situation because not only are organs different to other works of art, they are also different to commodity items such as cars which populate a vigorous pre-owned marketplace. They seem to exist in a value-limbo of their own. The explanation can only be one based on market forces - that only relatively few people want pipe organs. Thus a vast difference between cost and resale value arises the moment an instrument is purchased, and I'd like to see how an accountant would handle the precipitous depreciation curve if the organ were a business asset! As I and others have said before to the point of becoming boring, the situation is not disconnected from the closeness of the organ to another institution which seems to be fading away - the church. Unfortunately the two are inextricably linked, because it is only the church which can house the majority of them and which (in the past) was able to buy and maintain them on a large scale. So it is not easy to see how severing the link could be done in practice, at least on the scale necessary to save more than a small minority of instruments. Added to all this is that digital organs are waiting in the wings to plug the gaps left by near-valueless pipe organs. Despite the advertising puffery, nobody with any integrity could argue that they are as good. That misses the point. The real point is that digital organs are seen as good enough by many purchasers. The difference is significant and that is why they sell.

I must say that I've always been surprised, well, appalled is a better word, that this is possible. Not only possible but so easy to do unless you are super-careful or not concentrating. Not even a warning message appears. So although genuine mistakes can be made, it's not really on when people decline to put things right.

Old fashioned second hand sheet music shops are almost essential if you are interested in getting items like light music from the 1920s or so which can be adapted for playing on theatre organs. Often, you just can't get such things in any other way. And as Richard said, real bargains can sometimes be picked up, such as a complete set of piano conductor scores in four hardbound volumes for The Mikado which I got for next to nothing. The big problem, obviously, is that such places are now vanishing fast.

In this short message you have encapsulated just about all of the important issues: "a church that is regularly full" - how do they do that in France when we can't? "a modern French translation" - why don't people object over there as much as we do here? "people join in" - I wish they would here. "upsetting people" - good on you, and let's have more of it. They obviously know how to run their churches better than we do. Vibrant churches mean the pipe organ is more likely to survive, which is what matters to this forum. And vice versa. Sliding towards the opposite situation, as we seem to be doing, means the end game will be that organ music will eventually only be playable on a few instruments maintained by some means in secular buildings, or in cathedrals repurposed as museums and owned by English Heritage. Together with a host of digital instruments in people's homes, much as now but more so.

The discussion has turned well away from where it began, so I don't feel too guilty about taking it further. I share the hankerings expressed above for a return to the Anglican environment in which I too was raised. It is a pity that so many today will never get to know the glories of the BCP and the music of Matins at parish level because these things remain just so beautiful, as beautiful in an absolute, objective sense as can possibly be. As beautiful as the Bible and the other Holy Books I've dipped into (and you don't need to be religious to appreciate them as great works of literature), or great art or music. 'When I were a lad' Matins (not Communion) was the regular Sunday service I grew up with, and the first at which I played while still at school on a substantial 3-decker in a large church with a big choir when the organist and all the deputies happened to be on holiday. Memorable! But I can't see that doing things like bringing Matins back, even if it were possible, would do much to encourage wider church attendance any more than playing more classical music to people would encourage its significantly wider uptake. The issues are wider than that, I would suggest. Just for starters, in my view the organ world in this country is still too closely connected to a politicised State church, which in turn is still (like the BBC with its pompous Reith lectures) rooted in the traditions of Empire and the social divisions of a century ago. As one example, the way that members of its top team seem incapable of dissociating themselves from their Establishment legacy by continuing to fawn in public over the aristocracy revolts me in this day and age. It's all so backwards facing. Don't they realise that today's population expects something different, for goodness' sake? So it is with sadness that I concluded a good while ago that there's little wonder the whole lot - the Church, organs and all - are dying these days. As far as the organ is concerned I'd love to be proved wrong though. Maybe I can't see enough of the picture and I'm being too iconoclastic. Please tell me that this is actually the case, then I'll feel better.

I don't quite see where you are coming from here Rowland. Your original post explicitly mentioned "keeping a constant ambient temperature is actually more economical" - which is to do with heating bills isn't it? - and the Daily Mail article you linked to was all about your "wider environmental issues". Yet you now seem to be saying that your post was not about "wider environmental issues, heating bills and similar matters"! But I'm sorry if I have inadvertently not followed the path you intended. (Retires thoroughly confused and calls Uber ...)