MusoMusing

I was privileged to have known Carlo Curley, and I suspect that 95% of the time, he played entirely from memory. The shocking thing was, you could throw a piece of music in front of him, and he would play as if he already knew it from memory. To hear him rattle his way through Gabriel Pierne, all from memory, at the age of what....maybe 18 or 19? Stunning! Some people are just destined to kick footballs like Georg Best, or drive a racing car like Lewis Hamilton. Carlo was like that, and admitted that he was useless at everything else. They are the sort of people who can probably never understand from where their talent comes.

I don't think it such a strange claim, because early music doesn't usually have dynamic markings, and tempi followed convention without being specified. Dynamics were usually restricted to "echo" sections, and apart from things like "Cornet Voluntaries", even the registration wasn't specified as a universal requirement. Bach's "Gigue Fugue" can be played slowly or quickly, and it would sound just as good played on flutes as it does using diapason choruses etc. Therefore, there was a great deal of "interpretation" open to the performer, just so long as it didn't stray beyond certain boundaries of convention and good taste. A century later, and specific dynamics, speed indications and registration were becoming ever more apparent, and by the time we reach the late 19th century, French music was very, very specific as to what the composer intended. Of course, there is a further (technical) point, and that has to do with the changes and developments to the instrument. Listening to the great German repertoire of the 19th century back in the day, was probably more akin to hearing it played on a T C Lewis organ rather than a war-horse Arthur Harrison, and so whatever console we sit at, it is not going to be "authentic". I find it strange that no-one ever seems to discuss "historically informed" 19th century performance practice, and most of the Liszt performances I've ever heard, are way off the mark as a consequence.

I can never understand why anyone would want to learn "Ad Nos" when there is Reger. My hobby horse is the Reubke....a far finer piece of writing, and written by someone so young! What strikes me about the German romantic school is the general domination of the pianistic style, and although there are some who claim that Liszt marks the point where the composer's intentions take precedence over "interpretation", I'm not so sure. For years, I would play the Reubke as it was written, until one day, I threw the copy to one side and played it all from memory. (I had done a lot of practise on it). It was a point of total release, and for the first time, I was being a proper musician. More importantly, it had an effect on people. You know you've got it right when you hear people talk about "Scary" and "Creepy" rather than "loud" or "fast". I can't help but think that being a very good sight reader is actually a handicap with monumental tone-poems and the like. If I were to learn (God forbid) the "Ad Nos", I think I'd be listening to a lot of recordings, and choosing what I considered the best ways of doing things. Think piano rather than organ, and don't get too hung up on the "edition" used, and with any luck, it should end up sounding horribly like the Liszt "Ad nos". MM

The next time I play a Compton organ with luminous stops, and which has been computerised, I swear I will improvise on "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do"

You wouldn't like this I presume, but at least the Viola da Gamba is at the bottom!

Is this the one when he re-counted the story of the recital and the silent Russian organ, when he had to go grovelling around the basement, only to find the caretaker drunk on the floor with the organ blower keys in his pocket? MM

I would love to be at David Briggs' recital, but sadly............ MM

To make a serious point, the availability of instant registration changes at the touch of a button, has some quite serious musical implications. I was just humming my way through bits of the Reubke Sonata (as you do) where it demands fairly rapid changes of registration. When I play it, I always have in mind`the sort of organs Reubke played, and the thought occurred, that there need to be breathing-spaces in the form of largely unspecified changes to tempo, which can add an amazing sense of drama if one uses one's ears rather than just one's eyes and fingers. Hammering through the notes and pressing a button or two, can so easily lead to mechanical and wooden performances; not to mention over-rapid ones. Sadly, I never heard Norman Strafford perform, but he had quite a legendary reputation, and people who had, talked about him in hushed tones. On the other hand, thumb-pistons and sequencers would be fairly indispensable in the attached link, behind which is a fascinating story. To be serious for a moment, Quentin Maclean had studied composition with Max Reger and organ with Karl Straube, and he was assistant at Westminster RC Cathedral under C S Terry. Obviously keen to earn a bob or two (like his father Alec Maclean "The God of Scarborough') he took up playing theatre-organ, and was probably the best of his generation. What could any of us do, when the BBC Producer yells, "Keep going.....we're under-running." Well, there are improvisations and there are improvisations. Fortunately, someone recorded it for posterity, and young David Gray learned it from the recording. I don't think he touches a single stop-tab! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZl_odkVXnY MM

There are things which beggar belief, as the (almost) complete Compton tome reaches the end. To-day, I learned that the six-bedroom house occupied by Albert H Midgley (the Technical Director at Compton's) is now the Uxbridge Conservative Club. Their web-site has the following history, but it is the last bit which really floored me:- Fairfield is a beautiful Victorian House, built in 1862 by a well to do Draper, Mr. Thomas Henry Johnson. In 1953 the house, which boasted a magnificent Chamber Organ, was then sold to Osterley Lodge Limited, a property developer. In addition to building several houses in the extensive grounds, Osterley Lodge Limited sold “Fairfield” to the Uxbridge Conservative Club in February 1954 for £ 5,000.The new Club was officially opened on the 2nd April 1954 by Lord Vansittart of Denham Place. Presumably, due to moving, Club records are disappointingly few. The President of the club is Mr Boris Johnson MP I am flabbergast! MM

It all went wrong when organists discovered how to change their combinations without moving their feet. Whatever happened to showmanship? Sequencers? Electronically adjustable pistons? Multi channel pre-sets? No! No! No! There were no finer combination presets than carefully spaced fingers. This man knew how to do it! Then there was Virgil Fox! MM

Mmmmmm! Well now, we enter into an area of some murkiness, because a number of things happened in the space of a year or two. The chronology seems to be as follows:- 1937....Midgley leaves the Compton company 1937 - J W Walker buy out a company styled as Midgley Leighton Ltd. The intention being to make the Midgley-Walker organ. The organ did exist, but under what exact name in 1937, I cannot be certain. The Midgley-Walker organ is cited in the "Grove Dictionary", and there were adverts as well as a revue of the organ in one of the musical journals. The organ was quite highly regarded.....I may have a file about it somewhere. This instrument appeared a full year before the first Compton Electrone in 1938. It's what happened after then which is interesting. I suspect, but cannot know, that Compton was furious with Midgley when he beat Compton to the draw with a half-decent electronic organ in 1937, because these organs cost as much as a house at the time! The cinema-organ market was drying up rapidly, and the electronics were a potential source of hard cash. The impression I get of Midgley, is one of a very greedy and impatient man, who knew how to move at lightning speed whenever he saw an opportunity. Like JC, I suspect that he saw huge potential profits in electronic organs. INterestingly, when Walker's pulled the plug on Midgley, he continued under another name; which I believe was the Electrophonic Organ Co. At almost the same time, Walker's also pulled out of Compton, and sold their shares to J J Broad, the Financial Director at Compton's. I suspect that Walker's realised that the cinema-organ market was dead in the water, and with it went the huge profits Compton made. The same is true for Midgley, who would have seen the downward trend in cinema organ sales from about 1937/8. The outbreak of war killed everything stone dead, and cinemas were prohibited from remaining open. Midgley, meantime, went right back to his early days at C A Vanderwell, and started up making percussion pistols and fuses for bombs; the company becoming Midgley-Harmer Ltd., which survived until 1963 or so. For their part (Mr Compton was a POW in Italy) the Compton firm started making Link Trainer Aircraft for the RAF, and rather later, bits of Mosquito multi-capability fighter-aircraft. (The plane which REALLY won the war, rather than the Spitfire). Topically, the go between Compton's and the Air Ministry was Group Capt. Foss., the father of the late Mander Disccusion Forum member, John Foss, who was also later involved with Grant, Degens & Rippin.....their accountant I believe. Combination organs? Compton did it at Church House, Westminster (destroyed quite early on by a bombing raid). The other example was the the Methodist Mission, Great Yarmouth, when a Melotone was added to the pipes of the normal pipe-organ. MM

I recall going to the Liverpool IAO Congress back in 1964 (?) and visiting the organ works of Willis and Rushworth's. It was around the time Rushworth's had acquired the Compton pipe-organ business. Both workshops had a fair number of "model" extension organs on display, and they all sounded quite decent I accompanied the Duruflle Requiem (in the days when I could be bothered practising) on a Walker extension job, and that just about provided the ways and means. I also lived with modest Nicholson extension organ, which was fine for most things, but not quite a recital instrument. These small extension jobs certainly had their uses......like Bedford Beagles, Commer vans and old Jowetts. MM

It sounds very draughty! I think I'd be wallpapering over the mouth; never mind resting things on it. MM

I was wondering where it was going myself! It seems to have become a little bit "extended" rather than "derived". Call it borrowing! MM

Thank you David. I've oft used the quote in lighter vein, and it always raises a smile, but I didn't realise it was said angrily in the first instance. Whatever happened to British spirit, and the monster in the organ loft?

The first attempt at a "space-saver" bass was, of course, the Compton Cube, which was quite a complicated beast using the ocarina principle, and not unrelated to Helmholtz resonators. Not many cubes were made, and few survive The later polyphone, with its' system of labyrinths and valve ports, may well have included "tuned" scaling which might have acted as compensators. The simple answer is, I haven't a clue, but when one considers something like a Bass Tuba, there isn't a sudden change of tone or power from one note to the next, even if a Tuba is nearer a diaphone or reed than a flue pipe. I've played Compton organs fitted with polyphones, and I've never been aware of major problems. The bi-phonic basses are very good, but being stopped-pipes, they are not over powerful. All the 32ft devices (including the Harmonics of 32ft) sound much better in a good acoustic. MM

Original console, Surrey County Cinema. You were right David! MM

I'm having the very devil of a job trying to get everything set out on the page, which has to be in two formats; one for digital format and the other for hard print. You would't believe the problems it causes! Rant over, I'll address one or two points. J Martin-White was probably the man who made the relocation to London possible. He was, at the time, a director of the Compton company, after the dissolution of the Mills & Compton partnership at Measham, (I seem to recall that Harry Smith Mills wanted to retire, but it's not terribly important). Compton left Measham and set up business in an old tin-tabernacle in Nottingham, of which I actually found a very old photograph. It was from here that the Selby re-build was done, followed by the infamous fire which destroyed all his handywork. The year after, there was a fire at the organ-works in Nottingham, so he decided to uproot and pop off to London. It all gets a bit murky at this point, and I can find no further reference to J Martin-White; either as a benevolent friend or a director of the company. What we do find, are the two Walker brothers getting involved, but not in an official capacity at that point. I think they were just dragged in as sub-contractors; their factory being only half-a-mile away from Turnham Green. We have it on some authority, that a lot of the Walker workforce just uprooted and went to Compton's, but they remained Walker employees. The cinema boom caught everyone by surprise, I suspect, and suddenly there was cash to be made in the organ business......a lot of cash! 1925 is the critical year, when the company was re-hashed. The principal directors became John Compton (of course) Reginald Walker and his brother Pickering Walker. (No sign of J Martin White at this point). The other big name was that of A H Midgley, who had already bought a 100 stop house organ from Compton's, and modified his almost new abode to the modern day sum of around £1,000,000, just to get the organ in! Midgley must have made a stash of cash when he and Charles A Vanderwell established CAV in Acton, which was bought out by Lucas to become CAV-Lucas Ltd., one of the biggest auto-electrical industries in Britain eventually. I learned something from what you wrote......always happy to learn something....every day is a school-day! Somewhere, I have a photograph of the second Surrey County Cinema console, which is definitely horseshoe style, and it was installed quite soon after the original. I didn't realise that the first one was any different. I wonder......it all seems to co-incide with Midgley's involvement at Comptons, because he had a row at CAV and left. He set up his own car-lighting company, which failed, but he had money....loads o'money.....and I think he realised the potential of the cinema organ market. He became Technical Director and revolutionised the way Compton's worked.....almost mass-production thereafter. His spat with John Compton was about the electrostatic organs, which Bourn had designed, based on Midgley's earlier ideas. I think he wanted a piece of the action, because a new pre-war electrone cost as much as a house in those days. In a fit of pique, he designed his own instrument, took the idea to Walker's, and they developed the Midgley-Walker organ. (1937?) It was never the same as the Compton Electrone which used the Melotone technology. By the start of WW2, Walkers had sold their Compton shares (to J J Broad....the Compton Financial Director). With wartime just around the corner, cinemas closed for the duration, factories turned over to war work and the odd falling bomb from time to time, Compton's never really recovered. They had a jolly time after the war for a short while, and some big jobs in the 1950's, but what they didn't have were the huge profits from cinema organs, which by that time were dead in the water. It's a bit sad really, because poor old JC was holed up in Italy as a POW, Midgley had seen the writing on the wall in 1937 when the cinema market started to contract, and Walkers withdrew when the war was obviously a dead certainty. It was really "Jimmy" Taylor who held the show together, along with Ted Rippin, Johnnie Degens and reed voicer Frank Hancock. I think, at the very end, only Leslie Bourn was still a director of the company, once JC and Taylor had shuffled off this mortal coil, and the others beetled off to set up Degens & Rippin Ltd. As for Maurice Forsyth-Grant, he had lots of whisky to enjoy, probably a shed-load of money after setting up what is now Vodafone, and all the time in the world to dabble at organ-building. (What a story that is! I'm too tired to even contemplate it). In some ways, the whole Compton story is an object lesson in "how to run and grow a company" as well as "how to kill a company." Fascinating stuff! MM PS: All the research is complete and most of the writing is over.....it's just the layout which is the sting in the tail.

Hodges may have been the first, but like all things, the idea existed long before, and what Hodges created was an attempt to replicate woodwind instruments such as the Bass Recorder (or the fingered Bass Ocarina) and apply it to a large organ-pipe. I can't imagine that it was much of a success, because the scaling for different notes would be all wrong. The thing which marks Compton out from the rest, was his amazing intellect and comprehensive knowledge of the new science of sound, which had only really got going with the work of Hermann Helmholtz in Germany. Helmholtz created quite a stir with his book "On the sensations of tone", which attempted to bridge the gap between music and physiology; even spilling over into the psychology of perception. As someone who must have spent countless hours experimenting with this and that, when everyone had gone home, J C only ever seemed happy when he was working out new ways of doing things and voicing organ-pipes. (He was quite proud of the fact that he avoided general organ-building, and seldom went to the workshop or got his hands dirty). We can thank the cinema-organs for that, because they generated big profits for the company, and made research at this sort of level possible. He was even dabbling with mean-tone and enharmonic keyboards, when no-one else even knew what they were. The Polyphones were quite complicated things, but to this day, copies of the original Compton drawings are still being sold to anyone who wants to make one. MM

I may have just solved a mystery, thanks to the Essex Organ Museum web-site, which came up when I was investigating the firm of Schmoel & Mols. Among the Essex files is a transcript of a talk given by Compton's right-hand man, James Isaac Taylor. For years and years, no-one seems to have been able to prove whether or not Robert Hope-Jones actually met John Compton, and under what circumstances. I suspect that "Jimmy" Taylor's talk gets us very near to the truth, because in 1901, Taylor blew the organ by hand, when Robert Hope-Jones inspected the organ at Emmanuel Church, Nottingham, with a view to providing a quote for a new instrument. Taylor would have been about 8 years of age at the time, which concurs with his own description of being "a small boy". So finally, there is proof that Hope-Jones visited Nottingham in 1901, just as the partnership of Musson & Compton began to emerge. It fits in, because the usual line is that Compton declined the offer a management position from Hope-Jones, because "they" (presumably Musson & Compton) had signed a contract for a new organ......probably Ratford PC. Even at this time, Compton was becoming known as a fine voicer, who followed the influence of Hope-Jones. The interesting thing is, that Musson & Compton actually built the new organ for Emmanuel Church, Nottingham, which was completed in 1904, and I suspect that Jimmy Taylor's father may have been the church caretaker there. Taylor would then be about 12 years of age, and already bitten by the organ bug. So there we have a fairly definite link between Compton and Hope-Jones, which was backed up by Jimmy Taylor's later talk, when he was the main influence at Compton's MM.

Excellent! This is what we needed at the start! My tour of the organ was about 55 years ago, and it wasn't in any way comprehensive. The big surprise was to learn that the big windchest was a slider one, because there was a lot of criticism directed at Charles Anneesens, due to the fact that on certain organs, stops were sometimes duplexed. They may have been later instruments, and if I recall correctly, the exhibition organ which was purchased and installed in St Mary's, Bradford. had electro-pneumatic action of the Schmoele & Mols patent type. (Schmoele & Mols were an American/Belgian partnership of electrical engineers. I should have read my own Compton tome, which includes the following:- The first re-build of the 1889 organ at Bridlington Priory, by the Leeds firm of Abbot & Smith, in 1909, saw the introduction of tubular pneumatic action; replacing the original mechanical action, but retaining the Anneessens wind-chests. Beyond that, I didn't investigate very much, because the Compton work was limited to e.p. action, the 32ft Polyphone, the Tuba rank and the usual extended mutations on the Choir Organ. MM

In a word....yes!

I heard an interesting snippet about the J W Walker connection with Compton, which suggested that Mrs Pickering Walker (presumably the wife of Mr Pickering Walker and Sister-in-Law to Reginald Walker) may have been connected with Smedley's Peas; one of the first really big frozen-food people. I don't expect a response from anyone, but it's worth a mention, just in case someone knows something I don't. MM

I suppose a 32ft Polyphone is better than nothing, and acoustics play a very important part. This is probably why Barry likes the 32ft Polyphone at Hull Minster. The better arrangement were the 6 X bi-phonic pipes, which sound just like a Contra Bourdon rank, as they should. MM

Quote:-.............. Walkers' were able to profit from the theatre organ boom without attaching their name to it. Not true David! An advert for the Kinestra cinema-organ included the following words:- "It has behind it the combined manufacturing and financial resources of two of the most famous English organ-building firms (The John Compton Organ Co.Ltd and J W Walker & Sons Ltd) and is of British manufacture throughout." As the company name for Compton had also changed by this time, into "The John Compton Organ Co.Ltd." it has to be post 1925, and as the first Kinestra was made in 1921 for the Surrey County Theatre, the firm also benefitted from the involvement of Mr Albert Henry Midgley of Huddersfield, who not only bought a 100-stop house organ, but put a lot of money into the Compton firm. He was the equivalent to a multi-millionaire before he was 30, and the alterations to his large detached residence in Uxbbrige, would have cost the equivalent of just under £1,000,000. He was a founding director of CAV-Lucas Ltd., and had, before his end, over 900 inventions to his name. (He may have designed the fuses for the bouncing bomb). 😁 MM