davidh

The final programme was about Bach, with an excellent account of his predecessors, Senfl, Luther and Buxtehude. The "famous toccata and fugue in d minor" was described as "attributed to Bach" with a brief discussion about its parentage. I was surprised at several references to "Buxtehude's organ" in the Marienkerche, with a wonderful console full of electrickery, but eventually it was said explicitly that "Buxtehude's orginal organ", as once tuned by the present elderly tuner, was "severely damaged" during the war and replaced by a new instrument in the 1960s. As is compulsory in suchc programmes, we were told the number of pipes, the size of the smalles, and the length of the largest. "Thirty metres"! I'dd like to see this pipe, although I'm not sure that I could hear it. In spite of such niggles, a wonderful programme.

Toasted to perfection. Yes, the musical(?) toaster can produce stops which are wonderfully even, just as pipe organ voicers for perhaps the last 150 years have produced very even reeds. I wouldn't swap any of these for the baroque reeds of Germany, Holland or France. Even? No. Extremely beautiful? Yes.

It may be observed that the correct way to make toast is to cut slices of bread by hand, to impale them on a toasting fork (there is some dispute about whether this should have two, three or four prongs), to rake over a coal fire until exactly the right combination of glowing coals is visible, and then to hold the bread in the correct position until it is toasted to perfection. It is physically impossible for any electric or electronic device to produce authentic toast, and no connoisseur of toast would ever consider that the product of these substitutes deserves to be called food. People who cannot afford coal fires or do not have sufficient space for a proper grate may be forced to use these inferior means, but they should not pretend that the results are real toast.

Here's a clue from another device. In the early days of computers, say up to 25 years ago, mainframes were huge and had large power supplies which ran very hot. The operators on one night shift were in the habit of bringing in pies and putting them into the power supply cabinet to heat them up. One night they dropped a foil tray which shorted out the power, and in the morning they had to explain why the computer was out of action. Early electronic organs also tended to run very hot, often to the detriment of the tuning. As for organists' culinary habits, I can't answer.

Father Willis had damaged (I think) the third and fourth fingers of each hand in a yachting accident, but he still managed to play effective demonstrations.

I have just been playing a Copeman Hart toaster. There were several couplers on the stop jamb, but no 16' stops on Great or Swell, and no Pedal to Great or Pedal to Swell couplers. After a while I noticed a small button at the back of the keyboards marked Great to Pedal. With this button illuminated the pedal stops were available on the great, as expected, but to my surprise, the pedals were off. Am I right in thinking that this was provided for the manuals-only organist, with pedals off just in case one was trodden on by mistake? Are such couplers common?

I was once going to play it, but when I found that the piano was out of tune I had to cancel.

That reminds me of Terry Jones. Is this board ready for naked organists?

See http://www.fnac.com/ for their website, and down on the left-hand side "trouvez un magasin" which lists all of their many branches, 8 in Paris alone.

I'd like to disagree with this opinion. They are far superior to the majority of organ photos that I have seen on the web.

Ok Pierre, you want to see one, but do you really want to hear it?

Colin Harvey is entirely correct. Rip out those expensive blowers and wind chests; you don't need them. Olof Spiral, the Technical Manager, told me that there were only two technical problems to overcome, first developing piezo-electric devices of sufficient dynamic range, and the other was achieving efficient acoustic matching. The second quote of course is about the Diaphone, which is another effective way of getting energy into an air column. Euclid in his Theory of Intervals or Section of the Canon, wrote, “Consonance (symphonia) is the perfect mixture of two sounds, one higher and one lower. Dissonance (diaphonia) is the failure of the two sounds to blend, when they cannot be combined, but turn out unpleasant to the ear.” Mr Paril assures me that his devices are entirely "symphonia", although with a small change in programming they can be as "diaphonia" as anyone would wish.

Paril Organs announced today their production of the first windless pipe organ. Pipes are conventional except for the absence of the foot and mouth. Instead each has at the base a piezo-electric resonator which is driven in different modes to imitate and exceed the whole range of conventional voicing techniques. This means that a small and relatively cheap instrument can produce the whole range of tone-colours only available previously on the largest winded instruments. Electronic adjustments to the resonators make it possible to maintain the correct tuning however much temperature and humidity may vary. Folo Paril, the managing director, said that conventional pipe organs were too expensive and all discriminating organists were agreed that an electronic instrument generating its sound through loud-speakers could never match the sound of a pipe organ, but he believes that a windless pipe organ is more than a match for any conventional instrument.

There are two propositions there: 1. Franck wrote truly "great" organ music. 2. No one else other than Bach wrote truly "great" organ music. May I respectfully disagree with both.

It's just dots on pieces of paper, and musicians are free to interpret them however they wish. Nevertheless, many (but not all) of Bachs' chorale preludes match the music to a mood suggested by the words, or use devices very closely matched to the words, and so it may be very helpful to know what the words mean. Most of us find our emotions stirred by many dramas and can enter into them imaginatively, whether Hamlet or Hogwarts, even if we don't believe in the literal truth of them, and perhaps we might empathise even more closely if we did believe that there is some truth in them. It's as well to know a little about the underlying text. I was once criticised for playing a choral on Christ lag in todesbanden (not a Bach setting) and not making it sound like a dirge all the way through. The critic knew that the first words (in translation) were "Christ lay in the bonds of death" and was unaware that later words "and now he lives and now he reigns" entirely change the mood of the piece. O Mensch, Bewein' does seem to match the sense of the underlying words very closely. It can be interesting to play this on a toaster with a choice of different temperaments. With some, the increasing chromaticism towards the end produces progressively more stress, something that Baroque composers knew very well, even if it is debatable whether Bach intended it at the end of this prelude.

Do you know if the pedal action is still pneumatic, and when the tuning was changed to equal temperament?

A few years ago many people assumed, and some wrote, that Bach had "discovered" equal temperament, while more assumed that even if he didn't invent it, he was responsible for popularising it. That is now very much a minority view. The theory of equal temperament has been known for a very long time (ancient Chinese?) but there were several reasons that delayed its almost universal use. The first was that people didn't like the sound of it. They knew what pure thirds sounded like and resisted any new system which lost that purity. We are so used to ET thirds that we don't easily notice how bad they sound. The consequence for organists is that ET made third-sounding ranks in mixtures intolerable, hence the almost total disappearance of the traditional English cornet stop. ET was also the most difficult temperament to tune, and until 100 years ago most attempts to tune ET were way out, and it seems that few tuners even now get very close to true ET, either from preference or from lack of technique, if they don't tune with an electronic meter. Of course ET has some advantages, not so much that all keys can be used as that so much modulation is possible. If it weren't for enharmonic modulation we wouldn't have Cocker's Tuba Tune. We don't know for sure which temperament Bach used, but we know a lot about the several competing schemes in use at his time. The "Well temperings" other than ET have the advantage that different keys have different sound colours, something that Baroque composers knew and exploited. While there is little evidence for or against Lehman's proposal, it certainly is possible to play the 48 without hitting any wolf intervals, and different keys sound different. Why did Bach bother to write in C# major if it only sounded like a transposition of C major? On the other hand, many of the pieces in the 48 are not in their original keys, but had a former life and were transposed to fill gaps in other keys in the 48.

Bach didn't specify an instrument, so all that we know for sure is that he didn't intend a modern piano. Robert Levin produced some useful recordings, choosing what he thought was the most appropriate instrument for each piece, including Harpsichord, Clavichord, several organs and fortepiano. Bach almost certainly didn't specify equal temperament, but used a "well temperament" about which one may speculate. It appears that different preludes and fugues work better on some instruments than others, where the sustained notes of an organ would show up any temperament problems more than other instruments would. It is almost certain, too that Bach didn't expect legato playing throughout with careful finger substitution to avoid breaks between notes. Few of his manuscripts have any fingering at all, and his admirers noted that his fingering was unconventional for the time. However, many treatises of the time make it clear that the "normal touch" was slightly detached, as can be achieved on a harpsichord, clavichord or good tracker organ, but not on a modern piano. If you have found versions with fingering, you need to consider whether this is modern fingering intended to impose an unhistoric legato on the music, or whether it follows Baroque principles, where the breaks which occur when you don't use finger substitution would occur at the points where the composer expected breaks. If you are tempted to get David Ledbitter's book be aware that most of it deals with the history of the pieces and their manuscripts, and theoretical analysis, all admirably done, but the practical advice about performance, while there, is a little hard to find.

Not old enough to have been around when most organs were tuned to mean-tone - and with a wide variety of different pitches in different places. Old enough to have heard organs live and recorded in several different temperaments, and with quite a lot of experience of different temperaments on other early keyboard instruments. So, (ignoring discussion of what Marcussen did), when the pitch and temperament were changed we lost something of the sound experienced by many earlier hearers of that instrument. Of course there are arguments in favour of preserving historic instruments in as close to an earlier state as possible, and updating them so that they can play a wider repertoire. What would many of us give to hear organs as Bach and Buxtehude played them, even if we had to go elsewhere to hear later compositions.

Yes.

Following Pierre's suggestion I wrote, and have arranged to buy the DVD for 32 euros and the booklet for 7, with the total cost of postage to the UK of 6 euros.

Whenever one of the fugitives from Ephraim said ,"Let me go over," the men of Gilead would say to him, "Are you an Ephraimite?" When he said "No," they said to him, "Then say Shibboleth," and he said, "Sibboleth," for he could not pronounce it right. Then they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. [Judges 12:5-6] So the real question under the heading "Shibboleth" should be "Can you correctly pronounce the names of composers?" I hope that we will be a little more merciful to those who offend than the Gileadites were.

The Albi website offers several CDs, a booklet about the organ, and what appears to be a very interesting DVD. Unfortunately at the top of their web page is frame containing a message in very solid blue print, saying that purchase by correspondence is ONLY possible in France. That is extremely frustrating, as they don't seem to be available anywhere else. Is there any way of getting hold of them that doesn't require a visit to Albi?

I visited Firle church in East Sussex recently, and the organ there had the same inscription on the case at the side.

I have just been watching a DVD, a recital by Everhard Zwart on the organ of the Grote Kerk in Dordrecht, which includes a "Basso Ostinato" attributed to G F Handel. Does anyone know the source of this piece, and also a publisher? I suspect that it may be an organ arrangement of a vocal from one of his operas. It appears to be in B flat.