davidh

I have just come across Francesco Pagani's "Polka per dopo la Messa" (Polka for the end of Mass) at http://icking-music-archive.org/ByComposer/Pagani.php The attached comment reads: We do not know much about Francesco Pagani. He was very likely active in Milan in the second half of 19th C. He appears in the publisher Martinenghi’s catalogue from late 1850’s till 1884. He composed 24 organ masses and other small pieces, but no profane or variety pieces. According to the publisher’s plate number this Polka was published at the beginning of his activity i.e. between 1856 and 1859. His masses generally end with a polka or a march (marziale) as was usual at this time, despite the Cecilian reformers’ attempts to keep liturgical music away from secular tunes. This seems to be wonderfully bad music, and, according to modern tastes, entirely unsuitable for an organ mass, but it could be great fun. Has anyone heard any of his other music, and does anyone know if any of it or anything similar is still in print or obtainable otherwise?

I wrote in November of a proposed Dutch Organ Tour centered in Groningen. Unfortunately there haven't been enough applicants for that trip to be viable, quite probably because of the economic situation. The organiser has now proposed an alternative trip, from 20th to 25th April, centered on Elburg, at a lower cost (£575). This will include a Cavaille-Coll in the Sionserk at Nunspeet, a Knol in Hasselt, and a Hinz in the Broerkerk in Kampen, the slightly smaller brother of the better-known one in the Bovenkerk in the same town. Then there is another Hinz at Leens and the Schnitger and Hinz in the Martinikerk in Groningen, followed by a Bosch/Schnitger in the Nicolasskerk of Vollenhove, a visit to the "Dutch Venice" at Giethorn, a van Oeckelen organ in Steenwijk, a Scheuer in the Broerenkerk at Zwolle, a Holtgrave in Deventer and finally a Schnitger, Holtgräve and Oeckelen in Nijkerk. There will be demonstrations of all of the organs, and participants will have the opportunity to play most of them. Please send me a PM for further details if you are interested. David Hitchin

Foreigners, most of them, are wonderful people. There are excellent organists and wonderful instruments. They also produce many sheet music publications, CDs and DVDs which cannot be bought in this country. Unfortunately buying from foreign websites is a process often fraught with difficulties. Among these difficulties I am not including those of language; speakers of English have no right to expect that others will include English versions of their web pages, and I have succeeded in buying from websites in French, Dutch, German, Italian and even Swedish. One rather complicated negotiation went rather slowly, until I learned that the proprietor of a music shop understood no English, and that my messages to him were only translated and answered when his son came home from University from time to time. Web translation facilities such as "Babelfish" provide translations which are often adequate for understanding messages received, but risky for sending messages. The first real problem is payment. In several countries it is not expected that all small businesses will have credit card or Paypal facilities. Occasionally firms will send a pro forma invoice requesting payment in advance, but most post the goods immediately trusting the recipient to send back payment. This is not easy. English cheques are not (in general) acceptable overseas. Bank transfers are expensive, and often the only reasonable alternative is to round the payment up and to post banknotes. I have never sent these by registered post, and none have gone astray, although there were a few worrying months when a firm denied receiving a large payment, but eventually apologised because someone had filed my letter without opening it. The biggest problem is restrictive web forms. When a firm shows an email address, then an ordinary unstructured email gets round many problems. When the only access is through a web form, then it may be impossible to submit a request. There are many sites in the US which have a compulsory box for “state” and a drop-down list of American States, with no “other” or “overseas” alternative. I respond by claiming to come from Alabama or Alaska and apologising for my lie in a free text box if one exists. The next problem is the Zip code (or postcode) box. In some countries one is only permitted four digits followed by two letters, in the US the zip code is five digits, followed by an optional hyphen and four more digits. other countries have different lengths and different patterns of letters and digits. Any website which allows only codes which are valid for its own country may reject codes from another, and nor will some sites accept any message without a post code. Telephone numbers pose similar problems. The number of digits required varies from one country to another, and some websites don’t even have room for an international prefix, perhaps on the assumption that no one outside the country would want to phone them. These problems arise from several sources; web designers who are not aware of or don’t care about communications from overseas, and who spend a lot of time building in checks to ensure only valid inputs, without realising that they are substantially reducing the functionality of the websites, which are, after all, intended to sell goods. In spite of the above complaints, I have succeeded in making scores of overseas purchases, and I am delighted that ordering these is now so much easier. It isn’t so many years ago that it was very difficult to find out what music existed, and if one knew about it, impossible to find out who published it or where to buy it. For years I could not avoid the feeling that the main aim of music publishers was to ensure that no one could find about or could buy their music. Perhaps there are a few companies which still have the same aims, but the internet has made purchasing very simple, in the best of cases.

John Sloboda in "The Musical Mind" quotes Boris Godovsky about a pupil with poor sight-reading skills who had prepared Brahms Capriccio op 76 no 2. He stopped her when she played a "wrong" chord but she insisted that she had played what she had written, and on careful checking it was found that she had done just that - there was a misprint in the music (a missing sharp). The error had appeared in many editions and when Godovsky asked many good sightreaders to play the piece. All of them played what Brahms had intended, and not what was written because they had expected a chord with the relevant note sharpened and didn't notice that the accidental hadn't been printed. Many people who use Sibelius primarily for its type-setting facilities have criticised the provision of play-back facilities as irrelevant to the needs of a "real" musician, but it has the virtue of playing back exactly what has been written, which is not always what the writer thought that they had written.

For anyone else interested, see http://www.mfiles.co.uk/scores/bringing-in-the-sheaves.htm or http://library.timelesstruths.org/music/Br..._Sheaves/score/ (Second link includes the words) The composer was George A. Minor but he wrote it in the key of C major! There has been some debate about whether Charles Ives quoted this tune in some of his works, or merely another tune like it.

Guilmant makes a good point there. I am a trustee of a residential care home, and we are required to have a CRB check for a new employee FOR THAT EMPLOYMENT, even if they will be supervised full-time by another member of staff. Some applicants don't want to wait without work for many weeks before the CRB check comes through, so they go to look for a different kind of work which doesn't require a check before they start work. On the other hand, if CRB approvals can cover multiple applications or employments, they would need to remain valid only for a defined period.

It's an unfortunate fact that there has been a substantial number (even if small in terms of the total number of church-goers) of offences against children which have been proved in court, and an unknown number of offences which were not reported or prosecuted. I know children who were abused, and I am aware of people with criminal records who arrived in a district without revealing anything of their past. There does seem to me a very good reason for doing what is possible to minimise the risk of such things happening in the future. The CRB system is bureaucratically inefficient, but perhaps it is about as good as the law can do, and a potential deterrent to an offender who seeks contact with children elswhere. Clear policies and procedures within churches and similar organisations may provide far better protection for children, and protection for adults who might be unjustly accused. Legal cases in the USA have resulted in whole dioceses becoming bankrupt, and although the scale of damages is unlikely to be as high in the UK, they could be substantial if an organisation's negligence allowed offences to occur that might have been avoided. Churches will certainly try to do as much as possible to make sure that in the event of any trouble their insurance policy is not invalidated.

I have just been watching the hokum war film, The Eagle has Landed. German commandos arrive at a Norfolk village (actually Mapledurham in Oxfordshire) to kidnap Winston Churchill. One of the commandos with a spare moment in the church starts to play the organ. There's a comment about Bach, but it seems that he was playing the film's theme. He returns to the organ later as the Americans storm the church, ignoring the old advice that one shouldn't shoot an organist who is doing his best. The exterior of the church is real, but the interior was a set which isn't a close copy of the real interior, and the 'organ' looks rather like a fake. I wish that I had recorded it so that I could go back and watch the organ scenes again more carefully.

See http://www.nzorgan.com/pipeorgan/book.htm

Lots of excellent stories. It's good to be reminded of "The organ in sanity and madness" at the Albert Hall in 1966, and many of the organists that I have met since have told me that they also were there. However, the book DOES NOT include a photo of Gillian Weir in her miniskirt, which, I am sure, is a fond memory of many of those of us who were there at the time. Next edition, perhaps?

I was sitting in the audience looking through a recital programme and saw that it included Ned Rorem’s "Quaker Reader”. I was puzzled because it requires a top F# and top G on the pedals, and I knew that the instrument had only a 30-note pedalboard. I assumed that the visiting recitalist was aware of this and had thought of a way round it, but when he came to the critical point there was a moment of chaos and confusion. Afterwards I spoke to him, and he said that he was not aware of the short pedalboard until he reached for the notes in question. It would have been quite tactless for me to have tip-toed round to the vestry in the few moments before the recital started, to ask, "Do you know that you are two notes short of a standard pedalboard?”, but I still feel a little guilty for not doing so.

"Some say, compared to Bononcini, That Mynheer Handel's but a ninny; Others aver that he to Handel Is scarcely fit to hold a candle: Strange all this difference should be 'Twixt tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!" John Byrom (1692-1763) who in 1727 wrote, An Epigram on the Feuds between Handel and Bononcini:

Franz Tunder Was quite a wonder Who taught Buxtehude. His own music was cruder. Johann Pachelbel Is giving us hell. His awful canon Goes on and on and on and on and on and on.

I have his Chorale compositions and improvations recorded at Haarlem. It's excellent, but seems to be the only one of his recordings available at present.

May I refer forum members to two CD / DVD sets available from http://shop.jqz.nl/ They are both performed by Jos van der Kooy, one on the Grote of St Bavokerk Haarlem and the other on the Westerkerk Amsterdam. On one he plays the chorale preludes, "Ach Gott, verlass mich nicht", "Morgenglanz der erwigkeit", "Seelenbrautigam", "Wer weiss, wie nahe mir mein ende", "Jesus, meine zuversicht" and the "Tokkata und fuge D moll op 59). On the other he plays the "Fantasie und fuge D-moll op 135B" Neither of these instruments has any enclosed division, nor any mechanical registration aids. Op 135B in particular is full of crescs and dims. JvdK plays it with the assistance of two registrants who, as he explains, are both "fully qualified organists". Who needs a general crescendo pedal when there are two such talented young ladies to help?

I imagine that in most European countries there are churches with poor organs, poor choirs, poor congregational singing, incompetent organists (I am one, but try not to play when anyone else might be listening), good organists who occasionally have an off day, poor choice of music to perform, and poor improvisations. Of course there are many excellent counter-examples to each of these as well. I have noticed several dismissive references on this forum to the music of Dutch protestants, and to "koraalbewerking" as a musical form. My experience of music in Holland, although limited, has led me to believe that in many places the standards are extremely high. Some chorale variations aren't works of genius, but others are little gems. If enjoying Dutch protestant music is a sign of musical immaturity, I plead guilty.

On every occasion when I have found the board to be slow, I was able to load other websites without any delays. Some members might have local problems that slow down all of their web accesses, but independently there does seem to be an issue that applies only to the board. If I notice a slow response in future I'll post a message noting the time at which this was happening.

It's very slow at 7 am this morning, so it might be thought that many organists are early risers. However, at the bottom of the home page is the statement, "Most users ever online was 1 on Jun 2 2007, 03:52 PM". I'm the only one that the board thinks is online at present, so the slowness can't be caused by a surfeit of users.

Thank you for that reference. A little google searching on "Sunset" "Bugle" and "Remembrance" throws up several references. For the first page of the score, see http://www.seayourhistory.org.uk/component...29/type,search/ For an account of the man, whose initials were AC http://www.royalmarinesbands.co.uk/history/ACGreen1.html I am sure that this is a version of the piece that I remembered, appearing on youtube from the 2007 Remembrance ceremony at the Albert Hall. and also in another setting at The following setting intersperses it with the singing of "Lead, kindly light" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CobcH42nhJs However, although some of them might well have some accompanying strings (it's not easy to hear it all), none of them had the string "meditations" that I remember. I suspect that different arrangements may be used in different years. (Probably this is now way off topic, but there might well have been an organ somewhere in the background).

Have you tried http://www.internezzo-muziek.nl/bladmuziek.html or http://www.wimzwart.nl/ They both have it in their catalogues, but of course that is no guarantee that they actually have it in stock.

As a Brightonian you will know the rumour that St Bartholomews in Ann Street was built to the dimensions of the ark, so take that as a model.

Try "The Duke" - Den Hertog! http://www.hertog.nl/TradePoint/CategoryBa...goryName=Muziek where you will find some scores and some CDs for J K Mulder. I think that an earlier contributor who advised searching on "Klass" probably intended to write "Klaas".

Many years ago I heard music from the Albert Hall at the ceremony of remembrance, which consisted of the Last Post played as short phrases, each interspersed with a "meditation" on strings. Can anyone identify this, please?

I'm posting this with the permission of the Mander Organs webmaster - just to be sure that it doesn't fall foul of the guidelines. In 2007 and 2008, in the company of at least one other contributor to this forum, I spent six days touring parts of Holland, listening to and playing many different organs. If I had known about them at the time I would also have gone on the 2005 and 2006 trips. So far the visits have included Almaar, Amsterdam, The Hague, Dordrecht, Tiel, Zaltbommel, Nijmege, Boxtel, Naarden, Purmerend, Aarderwijk, Amersfoort, Zwolle, Kampen, Zutphen, Utrecht, Leiden, Gouda, Delft, Maassluie, Middelburg, Oirschot, and 's Hertogenbosch - among others. In 2009 the trips will be centered on Groningen, with several very old instruments, and finally the 1883 Nicholson organ in Schagen, originally from Worcester. The maximum size of the group is 18, and as only about half are players, everyone has an opportunity to play most of the instruments. For partners who are not quite so interested in organs there will be a visit to a manor house and a seal breeding centre. At present there are 11 applicants, and the tour will only take place if another 7 will need to come forward - which is why I'm trying to ensure my own trip by posting this message. If you are interested, send an email for further information to dutchorgantours@kpnplanet.nl There is a website, www.bussand.nl/dutchorgantours but it's offline at present - I hope that it will be back shortly. If you would like further information, from the point of view of a participant rather than from the organiser, please post an enquiry here or send me a pm. David Hitchin

If I could only take one PICTURE with me it would have to be of St Bavo's in Haarlem, and I think that I would choose the same instrument for my discs. In spite of what Marcussen did it's a beautiful instrument and there are many excellent recordings of a wide variety of organ music. There is an instrument which I like even better, at the Evangelisch-Lutherse church in the Hague, but there are few recordings available at present. If there are enough new disks available before I'm marooned, I would choose that instrument instead.