Barry Jordan
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Posts posted by Barry Jordan
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E T - phone home.
What's small, old, wrinkly and fat, and signs itself "ET"? Why, Elizabeth Taylor, of course.
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I am sure that an enquiry to the President, Sir Michael Scholar ARCO at St John's would invoke a helpful response.
Barry Williams
E T - phone home.
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For a word on Wiedermann, see Janacek!
Cheers
B
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Many thanks to you both! I'm very grateful for the information
Hello all,
I received an e-mail from Bedrich Janacek's widow. Excerpt:
First of all I like to thank you for presenting Bedrich´s two Chorale Preludes
on OUP. Only it might have caused some trouble for the person who was
looking for them that the one he listened to as a choir boy in Coventry
Cathedral has the name Built on the Rock. The second one is O Jesu Christ,
thou fount of grace, commissioned by C H Trevor at the Royal School of Music
in London, and we heard that he liked to use them in his teaching.
Bedrich´s list of compositions, mainly for organ but also brass and organ, choir a s o, is now quite long. His works are printed mainly in Sweden, USA, and Norway. As he was ill for many years, he gave up his concert playing in the autumn 2003. It gave him much time for writing music, and he was still proof reading until about a fortnight before he died on June 3, 2007. His compositions in the USA are published by API, Fish Creek, in Sweden by various editors, such as TRUMPH in Trelleborg, and in Norway by Cantando, Stavanger.
There was an important tradition leading from Wiedermann to Bedrich Janacek.
I saw that somebody, on the same Mander Organ sight, was asking about
"Weidermann". Bedrich edited Wiedermann´s Notturno in 1954, published by UMP, and the Berceuse in 1955, also by UMP. But even Henderson´s dictionnary has quite a list of Wiedermann compositions. Together with Jiri Ropek Bedrich was the best known Wiedermann pupil.
Cheers
Barry
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John, the link does not work.
May we have it again, please ? This seems interesting indeed.
Pierre
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I'm afraid, Pierre, that Belgium must be much better served by its organbuilders than we have been if you cannot sympathise with a situation where an organ is quite simply musically inadequate. I completely accept that one should not spoil an organ which is in any way already complete and coherent as a musical instrument, but where the case is one of an organ by a (let's be kind) middling-ability builder with an inadequate specification - no proper chorus, for example, I think small changes can make a huge difference.
Indeed. It is vital that we learn to sympathise with good instruments whatever their style, but at the same time to remember that there have always been bad organ builders building terrible organs.
I am confronted over and over again when wearing my consultant's hat with the situation of a cash-strapped parish deciding to "restore" -meaning repair, more or less - an instrument which has often not been playable for decades, spending (for them at least) a good deal of money on it, and then finding that the action is so terrible that no-one wants to play the thing (in this part of the world the action is usually worse than the sound....). Often one can see straight away that they aren't going to have more than a few years joy with it - and you can bet the won't be doing it again, but will buy a toaster.
Chuck out the warped trackers and use new ones.....or whatever it takes to get the organ really playable; and if the shortcomings are tonal ones, be very sure that they aren't just possibly real ones. Nothing is gained by the assumption that the impression that an organ sounds terrible is in fact a reflection of personal prejudice.... it may be, but it may equally not be. Self-reflection is hard to learn, is it not? But the reflex judgement that the builder of the organ always knew best is actually no more worthy than its opposite.
Cheers
B
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That's interesting to know. What happens when you turn the Walze on again? Does it return to the fff at which you left it, or does it re-set itself?
You have time to reset it to wherever you want it! If you leave it open, you can of course use it as a sort of Tutti-combination.
B
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The trouble with the German Romantic organs I have heard - and, I imagine, the reason why the Widor was a non-event - is that the seamless dynamic gradations rely on having stops that blend and this blend is achieved at the expense of individual colour. Individuality of colour is suppressed because the more colourful a stop is, the more it will draw attention to itself when added to the ensemble. So, although the sound that these organs make can be very splendid, there is essentially only one sound and, personally, I find it quickly becomes wearying. One longs for the more sharply edged colours of a Willis or a Cavaillé-Coll.
Our IV/P Rushworth & Dreaper works on the same principle. In my view this monochrome style of organ represents a cul-de-sac in the instrument's evolution. There have been more viable avenues elsewhere, notably the neo-Baroque, which did at least aim to address the issue of producing music as opposed to mere sound.
I wouldn't disagree with you, actually. I don't think you really have to love the organs in order to admire them.
Though I must say that the R&D's I know are considerably duller than anything I have ever heard by Sauer!
B -
As far as I know it is a facsimile of an older engraving, reproduced by Kalmus (and sold under the Belwin Mills label). I do not know which publisher produced the original engraved version, though. For the record, it looks very similar to some of the Breitkopf & Härtel scores of Reger's organ works which I also possess.
The original edition was by Aibl, which was taken over by Universal in 1904. These are reliable scores. The Breitkopf (complete) edition by Hans Klotz has to be taken with caution, as many passages have been reinterpreted in the light of late neo-baroque tendencies.
But the fugue of Wachet auf is a case in point. Looking through it I have found no hair-pins at all but plenty of "poco a poco crecendo's" and yes, these are all very much a case for the "Walze". Reger facsimiles show that he was fond of writing "cre -- - - - - -scen - - - - do and spreading it out over 10 bars or more, but this has not been reproduced in the Breitkopf complete edition. The "other " Breitkopf edition (Köhler) is even more unreliable, incidentally.
By the way: it is possible to turn the "Walze" off by means of a pedal. So that going from fff to pp instantaneously is easy; you don't have to close the Walze, you just turn it off, and you are left with whatever stops you have set up manually.
Cheers
B
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I agree regarding Michael's Sauer (lovely though it is in other respects). I also agree (to an extent) regarding the Reger - although I would suggest that a number of his large-scale works contain subtle differences in the registrational scheme. For example, the Fugue which forms the second half of his Chorale Fantasy on Wachet Auf. I currently have the score in front of me at school (since I may play it after our Carol Service, this year). There are a number of crescendi and diminuendi - although in this case, not in the vicinity of pp to mp; there are some which direct the player to go from ff to pp. Are you certain that these also refer to the use of the Rollschweller? In fact, this is the only example of such a direction in this fugue. For the other dynamics, they seem more to resemble block - or terrace - dynamics, with ff and above being employed frequently - even quite early on in the fugue.
Before I answer, may I ask which edition you are using?
B
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Well, I do play some Reger (and Karg-Elert - and some Liszt). I do not think that these composers use crescendi in quite the same way that I believe Pierre means. HOwever, I could have mis-interpreted what he has written.
I think that this organ reveals the distilled essence of Reger! That is precisely how he uses crescendi - just sit at a (later) Sauer and open that "Rollschweller" - forget Michael's lovely Amsterdam Sauer - it's too early and doesn't have a Rollschweller!
The very weak third manual is a middle German tradition going back beyond Ladegast. Even very large instruments have a third manual with just a few quiet stops; the trend in later years was for this to expand again a little, but the dynamic difference remained very clear. There was a soft manual, a medium manual, and a loud manual. The swell was of the "open or shut" variety, mostly not easy to reach. Reger distinguishes clearly between "hair-pin" markings (swell-box) - always in the vicinity of pp to at the most mp - and the words crescendo or dim, meaning (always) adding or subtracting stops.
Cheers
Barry
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....And Liszt, and Reubke, and...
So weit, so gut.
Others comments, Ladies and Gentlemen ?
Pierre
Well, Pierre, I'm not quite sure about those. The essence of a Ladegast instrument is different, and the crescendo is not quite as seamless as it becomes in the instruments of Sauer.
But I think that there is a very valid general point to be made: that the effect of a crescendo made by adding stops of increasing dynamic level is a very different one from that achieved by using the same stops, but shutting them up in a box. This doesn't only apply to playing Germanic music on a French or English style instrument, of course, but also the other way around - I recently heard the Widor "Romane" on a Sauer - it was a total non-event, especially when the "caged rage" effect of Recit reeds closed was called for.
On the other hand - Reger fares better on an English organ than Vierne does on a German instrument!
Cheers
B
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I think that there are some general observations which can be made about this scheme.
In the first instance, a seamless crescendo is not a vital aspect of much standard repertoire. There is plenty of organ music in which crescendi and diminuendi are requested at various times by some composers. However, I think that what you refer to here, is the ability to grade the tone from almost nothing to the tutti, with no audible jumps. I cannot immediately think of anything other than Fiat Lux, by Dubois which requires a steady crescendo throughout the piece.
Almost anything at all by Reger and quite a good bit of Karg-Elert requires precisely this, although of course it doesn't go up only, but up and down, like the proverbial w's d's.....
As regards the "case", these designs were of course the height of fashion between the wars. Some are better, some are worse; very few are worse than the typical English pipe-rack!
Cheers
B
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Hans Chemin-Petit, Concerto for Organ, strings and Timpani, 1963 - a magical piece.
from the British Isles: Alun Hoddinott, Organ concerto Op. 51, 1967.
B
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How strange that no-one has mentioned Gillian Weir.
B
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Yep, that's the piece, but it looks as though it it's now out of print. Roger Molyneux appears to have a secondhand copy or two though: http://www.organmusic.org.uk/Cat1007.pdf
You might be interested to know that Bedrich Janacek, who indeed was a Czech but was organist of Lund cathedral in Sweden, died about a month ago. He was a nice man.
B
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Overheard at a carol concert:
Do you come here often?
Only during the rutting season.
Well, I made that up, I'm sorry.
B
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I don't know all the details, but I believe the same pipes just play whatever note is pressed, and therein is a mystery of how it actually works.
So far as I know, it is just a block of pipes of more or less random pitch, which squeak away somewhere in the stratosphere.
I have a bit of sound problem on the computer at the moment, but I may be able to find the link.....bear with me, and I'll see if I can find it.
MM
Imagine a rather fat pipe foot, soldered closed*. To this, looking rather like a chimney flute, though with lots of chimneys instead of only one, are soldered lots of little pipelets......all tiny, none of them tuned to anything particular .......that's your Polish cymbal. There's one of these for every note.
* obviously they're open where the pipelets are soldered on, otherwise they wouldn't be getting any wind. Just to make that clear....
I know I've seen a picture of this on the Internet somewhere, but I'm blessed if I can find it.
Cheers
Barry
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Altough the restoration has been made very carefully, by a very skilled builder,
it is effectively partly a reconstitution.
And a reconstitution is always risky, because we always know too little about
the original.
Just a reason more not to modify organs:)
:)Pierre
But we have almost no original organs. Pierre, you mentioned Casparini, for instance, but where is there any substantial body of work by Casparini in existence? The famous "Sonnenorgel" doesn't have a Casparini pipe in it. And a lot of the famous Schnitgers are effectively Ahrend organs, those which are not Beckerath or Ott organs, that is.
The three famous Trost organs - Altenburg, Waltershausen and Grossengöttern - hardly even sound as though they came out of the same stable, the two Eule restorations perhaps resembling each other a little more, although seperated by many years, but the Kutter restoration at Waltershausen is utterly different. And speaking of Trost brings up a latent point, lying in wait when we speak of transmissions and extensions etc, as one must when names like Casparini or even Wagner come up.
The Compenius family was famous for its use of transmissions even at the very beginning of the 17th century. But we do not know how they worked, since there are no Compenius organs extant. We have two chests - in the Hartmann organ in Niederndodeleben of which I wrote earlier, but they have no transmissions. We know that Wagner practised this art: see http://www.orgellandschaftbrandenburg.de/I...kumentation.pdf . Wagner seems to have been the first organ builder to have transmitted stops from one manual to another. We know that Casparini paid a price for his ingenuity, in that his organs often didn't work very well; and the "Sonnenorgel" was called a "Rossorgel" - a stallion organ (not Stalin organ) because its action was so heavy.
Even if the Naumburg RP was already in existence, as it of course was, it would have been possible, even easy, to remove it. The Naumburg organ was such a prestige object that it is difficult to imagine a compromise of this magnitude being made. Incidentally, however, Gary Cole is misinformed when he says that the Rückpositiv was entirely newly made; new were: the Nassat 3', the mixture, Rauschpfeife and the gloriously beautiful Fagott. Confirmation to be had on the Eule home page at http://www.euleorgelbau.de/orgelrestaurier...disposition.htm . But of course the presence of original pipe-work does not in itself guarantee the original sound, when all voicing parameters have been altered.
I too feel that Joachim Wagner is a seriously underrated and under-mentioned organ builder. But I am not so very sure that these are ideal Bach organs, even if the Silbermann II temperament in which they are tuned didn't make most "big Bach" playing on them a slightly trying experience. Their 8' based HW divisions and fairly high-pitched secondary manuals seem a far cry from the "grave" sound that Bach wanted. And although Brandenburg cathedral has two string stops, these are seldom encountered in his instruments. Indeed, the specifications of the existing instruments are pretty much identical: the HW has a 16 ' Bordun, a principal chorus including two mixtures, a Rohflöte 8' a Spitzflöte 4' and sometimes a Waldflöte 2', a cornet and a trumpet; the secondary manual has a Quintadena and a Gedackt at 8', a Rohrflöte 4' and a Principal 4', a Nazard, an Octave 2', a Tertia and a high quint, a IV rank mixture and a Vox humana. The Pedal usually has a Subass 16', and there may be second 16' stop, usually a principal but sometimes a Violon. Brb has a Principal and a Violon, but no Subbass. There is usually only one labial 8' stop, mostly on Ocave, sometimes a "Gembshorn"; there is always a Quint 5 1/3'. a 4' stop (occasionally 2), a mixture, reeds 16 and 8 and possibly 4'.
All this suggests a standardisation typical of Silbermann but of course also of the French. However the pedal division is considerably more developed than Silbermann's characteristic 3-stop bass division, suggesting that Wagner's actual teachers, whoever they might have been (very possibly either Hartmann or Treutmann), had left an influence that could not be eradicated by 2 years working for or with Silbermann - Silbermann was only 7 years older than Wagner, so it would probably not be correct to think of Silbermann as Wagner's "teacher". And although Wagner's organs are like those of Silbermann in having no Rückpositiv, they are unlike them in having cases in which the divisions of the organ are clearly visible.
Excellently beautiful organs, yes. Bach organs? No, not really. They sound their best in the music of a generation later!
Cheers
Barry
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As for mixtures not being meant for counterpoint, I'm not so sure that this is the case, but I'm sure Barry has a very good reason for saying this.......I'm just racking my brains to imagine what it may be.
When I hear Bruhns or Buxtehude played on a Schnitger, it sounds really quite perfect to my ears. So too does Bach, and I haven't noticed that anyone avoids the Mixtures.
MM
I cannot for the life of me now find the justifying source. But if you play some Buxtehude or Bruhns using mixtures for the flourish-y bits and "consort registrations" for all but perhaps the most boisterous fugal bits, you will perhaps understand - or listen to Harald Vogel's Buxtehude recordings. The reason of course is that repeating mixtures will cause all contrapuntal lines to sound at more or less the same pitch at the same time, which certainly doesn't aid what would be called here "Durchhörbarkeit", a perfect word. But do note that the free, "fantastic" parts of these compositions are not counterpoint.
The thing is, of course that Bach organ music really is sui generis, there was nothing like it before it, and there was to be nothing like it afterwards. Well, except for Krebs...... a good, but not very inventive composer. Not many of his (Bach's) works really betray much northern influence; whatever the claims made for, for example, the E major / C major Toccata, it is not really much like a north German Praeludium, since its 4 limbs are much more complete in themselves than they might be in a piece by any of the northern composers of his time. And the 2-part composition - if they really were always paired in the way we know them today - seems to have been more or less his own invention, although of course Scheidemann and others did use this form. What they poured into it was very different, though.
I agree that at least some Bach sounds "perfect" on a Schnitger, although some care might be needed in registration, as I discovered myself when playing the "Dorian" in Norden in July. But, as I tried to indicate, the music is perfect in itself, and really quite divorced from instrumental considerations, so that the question of the "Bach" organ becomes moot. As we all know, the authors of Bach's necrology mentioned that he was always unhappy at never having had a "fine, large" organ at his permanent disposal, but he certainly knew a large number of instruments, ranging from the organs that he would have known as a schoolboy in Lüneburg to, famously, Naumburg, which would probably have been the instrument closest to his own taste. Those who have played it will certainly have noticed that it is NOT a typical Saxon or Thuringian instrument, apart from anything else, the fact that it was built with a Rückpositiv, already severely out of fashion, gives us some idea of Bach's own predilections. And we know that he was severely critical of a number of aspects of Silbermann's work.
Interestingly, one Schnitger organ (Cappel?) has mixtures with only one repetition each. These were copied at Weener; what the original mixtures there were like is unknown. They are excellent for polyphony. Here in the neighbourhood we have a smallish instrument by Schnitger's pupil Hartmann, on which I have made CD (Niederndodeleben). The divided Mixture is so high in the bass that it is no use at all.....
Incidentally, it seems often to be assumed that the instrument Bach played in Hamburg for reinken (St Katharinenkirche) was a Schnitger. This is not the case; organ builders who worked on it were Vogel, Scherer dÄ, (3 times), Fritsche, Stellwagen and Besser.
Enough for now.
Cheers
Barry
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The subject of Tubas often comes up in this forum, but why do we call a Tuba stop a Tuba? At 8ft. the compass of the organ Tuba is quite different from its orchestral namesake. The Euphonium seems to be a closer relation to the organ Tuba, but I'm not aware of this name being used anywhere. Does anyone know the reason why the term Tuba was adopted?
JC
It's Latin and means a war trumpet. One might well ask why an orchestral tuba is called thus....that might be a question for tuba-l, however.
Cheers
B
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Would Bach's music have been different if he played a Silbermann or the Schnitger at Hamburg?
I would certainly be reasonable to postulate that he would have written more music in the multi-sectional northern style, which relies on lots of colour changes and "stereophonic" effects.
Try playing Buxtehude, for example, on a Saxon or Thuringian baroque organ. It's dead boring, which it certainly isn't in Norden, or Hamburg.
Bach's music finds a way to cast large forms which are not dependant on colour changes. It works everywhere where clarity is possible, and some places where it isn't - often the contrapuntal muddle comes not from over-resonant buildings but from mixtures which begin too high and repeat too often, meaning of course most neo-baroque organs. In the northern style, the mixtures were never meant for counterpoint, of course.
Cheers
Barry
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Thanks everybody. Now I have to get out my atlas, and do some geography. Some clear favourites are emerging, it seems.
Cheers
Barry
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Dear Barry,
It is a shame that Schuke reed voicers didn't attend the Harrison Reed Voicing work shop, held this month. It was oversubscribed many months back. Some Americans were there to 'learn' how to make Willis reeds for a large concert hall organ they're doing.
I realise this is no help whatsoever, sorry. I did write to you on the subject of British Organ Building some years back, but you never replied. Perhaps if you had, we could have sorted out your current problem.
I'm sure eventually what you end up with will work well with the rest of the instrument.
Hello David,
now, not replying to e.Mail is not really like me, althought sometimes when a Mail disappears from the visible part of the screen I forget about it. Please accept my apologies.
Well, I am quite sure that it will "work", as the rest of the instrument is coming along marvellously. It has a very interesting and personal voice - which means that a certain portion of the organ world will find it "wrong". But that's another topic..... I do want it to sound like real tuba, however, and not like loud version of the other reeds, so that is why they should get to know the sound we are looking for..... the stop has been made and scaled by Giesecke, who have made a lot of these stops for various (mostly American) organ builders, but their pre-voicing has been confined, as we discovered on Tuesday night, to more or less making sure that the pipes do actually speak.
Cheers
Barry
B
:)
Liszt Ad Nos
in The Organ
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Apparently the first performance in Merseburg Cathedral took nearly three quarters of an hour. If you play that organ now, you will see why, but it is perhaps a little TOO slow...
but I quite agree with you. I recently heard a reading which took a mere 22 minutes. Technically staggering, musically negligible.
Cheers
barry
Icidentally, Michael Schönheit has recently recorded the piece in Merseburg at a (for him) relatively sedate pace. Excellent.