Barry Jordan
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Posts posted by Barry Jordan
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My recollection - albeit from 1984 - is of a big instrument with electro-pneumatic action and detached console half-way down the gallery on the south side of the church. It had the usual stop tablets and standard BDO parallel but concave pedalboard. The Chamade was something of a novelty in GDR times, added at the request of the distinguished organist Johannes Köhler I'm not sure what changes Sauer made in the most recent rebuild, but I doubt if they were all that radical. Maybe Barry Jordan knows more.
JS
Later - profuse apologies. I missed the vital words "mechanische Tontraktur" in the Sauer prospectus. Their work in 200 was obviously much more extensive than I thought.
JS
It's a totally new organ. Sauers have had quite a battle to survive but I have done a few projects with them and think very highly of them. I don't know the Weimar organ though, I'm afraid.
Cheers
B
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I However, the programme also included Richard Strauss’ ‘Ein Heldenleben’. The programme notes insisted that RS had not intended in any way whatsoever that the ‘hero’ of his tone poem should be equated with Nietchze's Übermensch. Furthermore, any reference to German nationalism that might be found in RS’s works should be seen as being ironic, and not to be taken seriously. Yeah, right.
Chaps, (we don't have any chappesses at all here, do we?)
Now I'm terrified at starting any mud-slinging here and add all the usual caveats here, like please remember that I'm not German myself, neither by birth nor citizenship, but:
- nationalism, even German nationalism, is not Nazism (whether Strauss was a Nazi is a different question)
- British nationalism was considered a Kolly Good Thing up until at least W II
- nationalism was the movement of the moment for almost 150 years, leading any European nation that had any opinion of itself at all to grab large amounts of Africa and India and subject same, often brutally.
Reger - possibly bad - Elgar - jolly good! Why? India was not the holocaust, of course not, but terrible things happened there too, and this is not a numbers game. If we were to refuse to play any music by anybody whose politics were possibly not 100 % MODERN - because the pacifist and egalitarian ideas we fondly hold today would have been considered very odd 100 years ago, or even 45 in the still-colonial South Africa in which I grew up- we wouldn't have much left. Perhaps we could compile a list of all composers we might blacklist?
Let's just think about it from that angle.
Barry -
Manual I (Great)
Open Diapason 8 (stopped or helper bass - prefer indepedant of Stopped diapason bass if space allows)
Manual II
Stopped Diapason 8
Flute 4
Pedal - no stops - couplers only
II-I
Having manual 2 enclosed would be good so I can practise use of the swell pedal
Naturally, all mechanical action.
The OD can be a bit loud in a small room, although I don't know how big your spare bedroom is, of course. How about a tapered flute?
I would recommend transmissions instead of couplers to the pedals, very good for your trios....you could have pedal Stopt D, rh Man 1 with its only stop, lh with the 4' down an octave. That wouldn't work with your OD though.
Cheers
B
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It could just be my one-tracked mind, but I think Barry is being just a teeny weeny bit naughty!
Now now. Considering that at least a certain proportion of the population is likely to be female, that would be a very good average.
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Or are you thinking perhaps of Seigesfeier, from Op. 145? This was a premature 'victory celebration', to herald the triumphant return of troops from the Great War.
Dankpsalm is 145/2, Siegesfeier 145/7.
The victory celebration did have to be cancelled, didn't it? But the Dankpsalm is also dedicated "to the German army."
Cheers
B
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The original cocktail cabinet was I think Rieger's in Ratzeburg Cathedral. There it's called "Rauschwerk" - to have a "Rausch" means to be raving drunk, but of course you international types all knew that already.
Somewhere here, but I am afraid that I have forgotten where, there is a stop labelled "Noli me tangere", but if you do, a dusty old foxtail swipes you in the face. And if you draw the "Vox strigis" on the organ of the catholic cathedral across the road here, a wooden owl appears from the side of the Rückpositif case and says "Hooo" rather plaintively.
Cheers
B
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I have heard that they are proud of the fact that they have one knob per inhabitant of Hurricane.
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If you haven't seen it elswhere , feast your eyes on this one....would have had our departed friend Steve glassy-eyed and panting.
Cheers
Barry
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Eheu! Et tu, Brute?
Hie thee to Germany. Or Scandinavia.
No no, this bit about Germans just loving the organ music after the service is all nonsense. I know, I work there.
They sit down - and talk. Instead of leaving while talking. They also talk while the choir is singing during the administration, until the service, and during the motet, if they get half a chance.
And then they tell you that the voluntary was too long, and all the preludes too.
Personally, if they're not going to listen, I'd rather they just buggered off and left me to play in peace....then I wouldn't have to practise so much.
Cheers, humbug, Christmas!
Barry
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I don't think this one has much going for it either. It sounds as bad as it looks.
http://npor.emma.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch...ec_index=T00828
I adore the extended Henry Crun-horns. Just what I always wanted a full swell to sound like.
B
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Lawrence Phelps - you mean the organ builder who threw away this:
http://npor.emma.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch...ec_index=N04089
in order to build this:
http://npor.emma.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch...ec_index=N04090
Hmmm.... having never heard the previous instrument, I cannot make an informed judgement. However, I cannot help but wonder whether he did the right thing....
Mmmm....
Well, there are a lot of those about. Still. And in any case that's what he was paid to do, wasn't it?
And the Phelps organ sounds very sixties, but it's not an ugly organ by any means - I don't think. Stands up well against your average Hradetzky or whatever. But it doesn't sound like an HNB, that is certain.
It's like tearing down a mud hut to build a glass one, and then wondering whether mud wasn't better after all. But if you got the mud back again, you might miss the light.
Cheers
B
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However, I find it difficult to understand the thinking behind some of the design. Perhaps the voicing differs widely from the sounds normally associated with ranks of these names; although, if this is the case, perhaps it would be better to re-name the stops.
* In any case, this combination is available on the Positif clavier.
Now come along, you are far too intelligent to be so parochial. First of all, there is not really such a thing as a "sound normally associated with a name" - compare a Willis "Lieblich Gedackt" with one by Sauer, for example.
The mixture is probably 2' and in any case this is an instrument which is meant to gain completeness by coupling - no "Werkprinzip" or anything of that nonsense here. The traditional GO has been split up over two manuals in order to allow for more colour stops. The "Nasard" is often found on the HW of German organs too; the name being applied to any Quint stop not of principal scale (for example, even quite a narrow chimney flute, or a conical stop). The combination 8 (4) 2 2/3 is common.
This might be a perfect organ for Alain, if a bit small for some of the more splashy pieces.
Cheers
B
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Such debates rapidly turn into debates about political correctness - what is the "proper" way to deal with an organ? The answer is, of course, that there is no answer except to think about the issue and make an informes decision which may turn out to be wrong. Dangerous stuff.
Not all organs were good to start with. This requires a certain amount of value judgement; quite a lot of organs got into the state in which we now know them because preceeding generations detected shortcomings in them. Sometimes this was because they were simply no longer fashionable, sometimes however because they were tonally poor, badly balanced, or because they didn't work.
The authorities here love to shout loudly "back to the original condition", something which often requires a lot of speculation and which very often results in disappointment. This is only one way of dealing with an organ. It may be justified in some cases, such as the spectacular Scherer instrument in Tangermünde, which still contained the largest stock of late renaissance material in Europe - the reconstruction is nevertheless in many respects still highly speculative - in others, not at all, and, as I like to point out, if it were applied rigidly, would mean the loss of both St Jakobi Hamburg and St Sulpice. "Aha! But that's different", reply the men from Halle. "Why?", I then ask, with my consultant's hat on. "Because Schnitger was a great organ builder, CC too." "But Scherer, Fritsche, Cliquot were not?" "well...........perhaps not quite........" "Also, es geht doch you see, we can make these decisions after all!"
One can talk for a long time about "not damaging the substance" or "respecting the character", but in the end it's a one-off judgement every time, whether it's about adding or replacing stops, total rebuilds (when is a "sympathetic rebuild" a "new organ utilising material from the previous one"?), even revamped consoles. It's almost impossible to gain without loss. I recently promoted the decision to return a baroque instrument just outside the town (almost) to its relatively well documented original state, because the many alterations which had been made to it had not fitted well into the case or onto the chests. It no longer has a C#, and the manual compass is only to c''. That's the way Compenius (from whom the HW chest originated) and Hartmann built it; but there are plenty of people who find that a great disadvantage. And I know that Irene Greulich was also a little bit (but secretly, of course) disappointed when she couldn't play Widor at Naumburg any more. As regards making changes to consoles, take a look at
http://www.friedenskirche-duesseldorf.de/d...l_Baustelle.pdf
and compare pages 35 and 36.
There are no globally right answers. It is, however, worth remembering that our historical orientation is a relatively recent development - and is not necessarily for that reason wrong!
Cheers
Barry
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Isn't it right though that in some cases a high (often with tierce) Cimbel type mixture could be used in a solo context for bell like effects in which its foundations could therefore be flutes. There is a newish Peter Collins organ in a private house somewhere in N Wales where Roger Fisher recorded some Bach a few years ago where he used this sort of effect in a RH obligato type part in a chorale prelude and the effect was quite magical. My historical knowlege is sketchy on this but some of the recent renaissance/early baroque 'recreations' in Germany/Scandinavia have this kind of possibility - maybe this is what the 60s/70s builders got wrong when they tried to bolt on little 'toy' Positifs to Victorian/Edwardian instruments over here.
AJJ
This is correct and it is also, I think, the point of the "Polish Zimbel" which was mentioned somewhere - perhaps on orgue-l rather than here.
Zimbels were not meant to be used as plenum stops, particularly not in polyphony, which has a hard enough time with ordinary repeating mixtures. Unfortunately a lot of neo-baroque builders designed their Zimbel stops as very high chorus mixtures, thus obscuring the issue.
Cheers
Barry
PS In the case of toasters, it's more or less all the same, since the mixtures don't sound much like mixtures anyway - at least I have never heard a toaster mixture that sounded as if it were of "principal scale".
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A few years back I got a bit bored with all the normal stuff I was playing at the Christmas services, so started to make an organ version of the Slade song "Merry Christmas Everybody", but it didn't come to anything because the wife said it was undignified
. I thought it would go down quite well, at least everyone would know it, .I don't, I'm afraid. Perhaps that's because I'm always there, all the bloody time, it seems to me. My children ask who that man is.
Our town church organist where I grew up used to play "Pennies from Heaven" on dedication Sunday, but that wasn't Christmas, of course.
Oh dear, OT again.
Cheers
B
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thought that we might have found the answer with Rieger's effort at Essen Cathedral, but still the strings weren't quite right (fascinating enclosed Tuba in a detached division at the rear of the church though).
Tim
Did you really?. Now THIS is an organ that I would like to classify as a nearly complete disaster, given the total inability of the foundation stops to integrate the upperwork. And that "Auxiliaire" is IMHO nothing more than a superfluous noise-maker. Who needs that in such a small cathedral? Anyone over 60 in the south aisle is i immediate danger of cardiac failure once that lot gets going. A dead invitation to organists to outflank the congregation.
I really would like to think that Beckerath can do a lot better than that.
Cheers
Barry
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it was certainly better in the circumstances than "Keep the home fires burning".
All the best,
N
Now THAT reminds me of a newspaper article I read about a plan they had somewhere in Scandinavia to recycle released energy from the crematorium into the municipal heating system. The headline read "Put another Lars on the fire, it's getting cool in here".
But that, of course, is off-topic. Sorry.
B
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2. I happily accept Barry's point about two spoiled Town Hall organs but I have to ask, was HW4 doing what the advisers wanted? I think it is likely that he carried out a scheme for the simple reason that he could not afford to turn it down. When you have a full-time permanent labour force, you are responsible for doing your best to keep the firm's order-book full enough to be able to pay them.
No, he wasn't. The proposals were his. He was lucky enough to be able to do the two jobs back to back; and the number of stops that disappeared from one organ only to turn up expensively in the other, sometimes admittedly cut in half and soldered onto the top of something else, or half of something else, suggests that creative accounting did not die out with HW III. Sorry, Paul, it would have been nice to have granted you this, but it just ain't so.
One pleasant memory however was of a panel discussion in Cape Town involving HW IV and Joseph von Glatter-Götz. The question of open-toe voicing came up. HW's contribution to the debate: "I don't know of any other way of getting the wind into the pipes."
In spite of the rather over the top language, http://www.albany.edu/piporg-l/JCH.html is worth a read.
Cheers
Barry
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Met Henry Willis 4 once.
He was a nice bloke.
....who ruined a lot of nice organs. Nobody can forgive him for Johannesburg or Durban city halls, or, if they do, there's more pity than justice in the world.
On the other hand the Joburg City Council got some very nice bookshelves out of their lovely 32' open. At a price.
B
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Was surprised to read this as our stop shafts are very definitely wood, a very light beech I think.
Sorry about that. It's my eyes.........
Just to put the record straight, I'm actually a big Beckerath fan, the last instrument in which the old man himself had a hand went into the concert Hall at the University of Cape Town and has influenced me lastingly. Of course there's no one there any more from those days, but there are certain sounds which have remained with them (and may they never die), like those absolutely characteristic Rohrflöten.
Just in case anyone might think I was bashing them....as you'll see from their pages though, they haven't built a large new organ in Germany for a long time, and even lost the contract for a rebuild of the landmark Beckerath organ in the Petrikirche Hamburg to Schuke. I wish them well.
Cheers
Barry
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In the words of a pantomime script.....Oh no I'm not!
Adrian
Adrian, I have been trying to contact you, but your e-Mail seems to have changed. Your switch-board lady was going to give you a message.........buzz me, will you?
Barry
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I'm sure you'll be unsurprised to learn that the console was obliged to be in dark oak to blend in with the existing panelling around it - grade 1 listing and all that, we were given an unequivocal lack of choice in the matter by the local council! Although it does indeed like lighter in real life the overall look is darker than expected due to Beckerath's one and only error - ommitting to tell Heuss, the console manufacture, to reverse the keys from their usual expectation to white naturals/black sharps. However it so happens that none of the organists here could care less so we were happy to leave them as they are rather than put the project behind schedule. The stop font is I suppose a matter of taste - we like it but I'm sure that not everyone will! The feeling was that with every rank of pipes an absolutely beautiful handcrafted gem it would be inappropriate to identify the associated stop with a mere printed label. We feel that the older script style is more individual.
The thing that I noticed immediately becauseI've just had the same fight with Heuss is that they've used their standard crappy stop-switch units with the really horrible white Teflon stop shafts. They cannot simply replace them with wood either, because the wooden ones have a wider bore, so you have to change the entire units. 113 of them, in our case, at a cost of nearly 20 000 euros. All that plastic does not harmonise well with wood or porcelain or even with gothic buildings. I asked the man at Heuss's if he had no aesthetic sense, but he said, no, that was not his job, he jaust delivered what his customers ordered. If they don't say exactly what they want, they get bog-standard. And I hate those tiny Heuss pistons.
Still, nice to hear of a new sizeable Beckerath. They are unfortunately no longer quite flavour of the month.
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I've just noticed that our newest member is John Boody. Are you that John Boody, of Taylor and..... ?
If so, nice to see you here, John. And if not, welcome anyway!
Barry
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Oh God! One downmanship here......I'm 5ft 6" (and a half)....small but perfectly formed.
MM
Are you still growing, or shrinking already? Yes folks, it's that time already....
Do you have tall hair? Not that it helps when reaching the stops.
Barry
Barry
. I thought it would go down quite well, at least everyone would know it, .
Barry
Santa's Paying! You Can Have...
in General discussion
Posted
You know, this is one of the things that I think people spout off because they've heard it somewhere...I used to say it too.
Now I have three transmissions on my house organ. I do believe that I have quite good ears, and I have never heard any difference ever on any note that would indicate grave problems when both pallets are open. It is important, as has been indicated already, to restrict the foot, but also to get the pallets as far open as they will go.
The big Trost organs have lots of transmissions and they work just fine!
My house organ, incidentally, has: I: Chimney flute 8', Gemshorn 4'; II: Stopt Diap. 8', Open Flute 4'; Pedal: Flute 8', G 4', OF 4'.
It's perfect.
Cheers
B