nfortin

I always thought of the Solo as being more of a Nave Great. Is any of the pipework scheduled for re-use? I used to be quite fond (no pun intended) of the solo diapasons which I thought had great warmth and body to them and used to give a real boost to choristers singing in the old semi-circular nave choir stalls with the Harrison nave organ.

I'm sure nobody would get rid of a 4-manual Willis in a cathedral. Incidentally I played Howells Hereford Service at Cathedral Evensong in Gloucester last Saturday, one of the choir came up to me afterwards and said "I suppose the organ is substantially the same as it would have been when Howells new it"...

Excellent photos as usual. One small query, I was interested in the layout of the toe pistons and wondered where the stepper or sequencer pistons were to be found. (I'm assuming there will be one of these systems fitted.) Would it be correct to assume that the pistons immediately to the left and right of the expression pedals will be for Swell-Great and Great-Pedal respectively, if so where will that leave the + piston? Neil

What a sweeping statement. I believe the voicer that voiced our Wyvern organ in St. Mary's Charlton Kings works as a voicer of both digital and pipe instruments.

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I can't say whether thats all true, but I've regularly used the organ in concerts over a number of years and in that time there has never been any label at all on the console to identify the manufacturer or supplier of the organ, neither is there any obvious patch where one may have been removed.

Will miss you by a few hours. I'm playing for evensong on Saturday and will be travelling down from Cheltenham on Friday afternoon. Good luck for the recital. I'm very much looking forward to playing the Willis (which I've neither played or heard before) but not looking forward to the journey. Will have to travel back after evensong (which is at 5:30) on Saturday as I've got to be on my usual bench for Sunday morning. Neil

Paul's understanding, noted earlier, matches what I was told by David Barclay, the previous DOM, which was that the pipes of the proposed hybrid organ would be on the west wall. I have no head for heights but once organised a bell ringing outing which included Pershore. By some force of will I made it onto the platform and took part in the ringing. It was an experience though not one which I enjoyed. The whole platform sways when the bells are in motion.

This is incorrect, the area where the organ formerly stood is free space. Visually the abbey is improved by its absence. The present Bradford isn't all bad. The flutes and principals sound pretty good in the abbey accoustic, its really only when you build up to full swell and on towards the tutti that the sound becomes more disappointing and far less convincing. The specification is also a little odd, particularly the lack of a swell to choir coupler which reduces the usefulness of the choir organ considerably. The abbey has had a considerable turnover with Directors of Music in recent years and is, I'm led to believe, not always a happy place.

Actually, however much fun they were having, to make doggie babies one dog and one bitch is generally the required configuration. Good to hear that the former Pershore organ may soon find a more loving home.

I see April is here again!

Over the last few years I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to have played most of the large cathedral and abbey organs in the south west and west midlands, including those in Bristol (Cathedral and SMR), Birmingham, Gloucester, Bath, Tewkesbury, Lichfield, Salisbury, Exeter, Wells, Hereford and Worcester. I would say that in each case my experience is the opposite of yours, certainly in terms of divisional pistons, where you can rely on sensible and largely predictable combinations being set on the channels reserved for the home team of organists. With respect to generals, I never make any assumptions as to how these will be set, its in their nature surely to be random. On my own organ the generals on channel 1 are settings that I find useful in hymn playing, but I would never make any assumption as to how the generals would be set on an unfamiliar organ.

Well, unless you've really got unlimited channels available, you can't leave all of your settings for different pieces and service music permanently in the system. So if you've spent some time programming in your settings for, say, the Elgar Sonata, it would be very handy to be able to save these away somewhere from whence they can be recalled when you next want to play it (on the same organ). Of course a hard disk somewhere inside the console could serve the same purpose and would offer a vast capacity, more than could possibly be required, so you're right in saying that there's no particular merit in saving the settings onto a removable medium.

I use a similar system, a big plus sign with a ring around it, generally between the staves, together with an indication of the memory level and general piston number, in the format memory/piston (eg. 39/6) above the system. You need some such system to tell you which piston to start from when you go back over a section during rehearsal, so I guess we all have our method of marking this. I also agree with comments re. general crescendo pedals, which I hate. I believe these should always have an on-off switch that allows you to disable the darned thing to avoid accidents. I'm surprised that so few consoles offer the option to save memory settings to removable storage, such as a USB memory stick. I would have thought this would be fairly cheap and would seem a very useful addition to me.

I'm with Ian on this one, the stepper piston (particularly the toe piston I find) makes life so much easier provided you've got the time to set up the generals as needed in the first place, but then if you haven't got the time you're stuck with the divisionals anyway. I don't really understand Holz's view point above, if you're using the stepper system you've still got exactly the same reference points. If you forget to press the "Next" piston that would have given you "Level 39, General 6" for example, you've still got the option of pressing General 7 (instead of "Next") when you reach your next reference point. I share with others the dislike of any system that requires you to sit down with the instruction book before you can use it!

I didn't say I'd agree with the comments about the organ if it had been Coventry, I was just trying to think of large 4-manuals built about 50 years ago in a building with interesting stained glass. Glad it turned out to be elsewhere as I like the Coventry organ too.

I assumed the building in question to be Coventry Cathedral. Might it not be simpler if you were to just tell us?

My choral society The Silurian Choir are rehearsing the work at the moment for perforance on April 5th. We have copies on loan through the county music library. Our loan copies will be going back immediately after this date and would be available through the library system after that date. I guess most performances are around the Easter period so it should not be too difficult to get hold of copies for September. On a related query, I'm due to play the Antiphon (Let all the world in every corner sing) for the first time in Salisbury Cathedral in a few weeks and would be interested to receive any advice from others as to how best to adapt the accompaniment from the vocal score for organ. How much use is generally made of the pedals?

I suspect that those of us on both sides of this particular argument think enough has been said already.

I agree with most of your comments above. My reference to "eminent recitalists" was to counter your suggestion that no members of the association other than David Barton care about anything. I still maintain, whether intentional or not, that this is a ridiculous statement to have made. The GOA has a large membership and should, by most standards, be considered to be a thriving organisation. The membership is very diverse, from student members, village organists through to a number of cathedral, abbey organists and international recitalists. I'm sorry that David has fallen out with the powers that be, but that is no reason to denigrate the remaining members.

I believe the OA in question is the Gloucestershire Organists Association. I'm not now, and have never been, an officer of the association but would like to leap to their defence. GOA present a very active programme of events and members are regularly kept in touch with everything going on locally by the excellent secretary. We have a number of eminent organists in the association, including I believe one international recitalist frequently mentioned if not to say hero worshipped on this board, and I would suggest that the last sentence quoted above is both ridiculous and offensive.

Not sure that I agree with this, if you can play the Sonata at all then 3 manuals should be sufficient. What strikes me is that need for more than three manuals has been largely removed by the advances in stop control & piston systems. A good three manual specification with perhaps some enclosed solo voices, and a decent solo reed, on the choir should be up to most demands. You could go as far as to say that a great deal of service playing could now be managed with a single manual, a second manual only needed for the odd occasion when soloing out one "voice" against a backing registration. Personally I still like to physically change manual onto the swell for passages with no great stops, but there's really no reason to do this any more in many cases, just play on the great and keep hitting the stepper.

Holy Trinity is something of a success story. They attract so many to their services that they've taken to holding services at the race course. According to the story in the Echo they want the space in the gallery for extra seating and to re-expose a hidden window. I'm not sure which 3 anglican churches Paul thinks are so very high, All Saints, St. Mary's Prestbury and Up Hatherly all used to be very high but I believe at least two of these have come down a notch or two in recent years. Certainly I would regard both my current church (St. Mary's Charlton Kings) and my previous church (St. Peter's Leckhampton) as examples of "middle-of-the-road" anglican.

According to a story in today's "Cheltenham Echo", it would seem as if Holy Trinity, Cheltenham (very evangelical, happy clappy) want to get rid of their 3 manual A J Price pipe organ. I've not actually played or heard this one myself, but on paper its not a bad spec and would seem well worth saving. http://npor.emma.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch...ec_index=N07456

I would have thought that the presence of the strings and the corno-d-b on the choir rather nullifies this line of reasoning as there would appear to be plenty of variety and softer voices within the overall scheme. It looks a good spec to me although I'd like to see a 4' clarion on the swell. The only stop I would question, on paper, would be the posaune on the choir, given the presence of both great and solo reeds this seems a trifle unnecessary, and something like the beautiful cor anglais at Hereford would offer more variety.