nfortin
-
Posts
511 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by nfortin
-
-
Oh yes! Very typical. There are many excellent organs in Liverpool, and far too many are now silent. I single out St. Dunstan, Edge Hill, 3 manual Fr. Willis (silent and disconnected). St. Francis Xavier, Everton, 4 manual Hill (ditto), and St. Mary, Edge Hill, 3 manual Bewsher and Fleetwood (badly vandalised), very early 1800s, with a very forward looking specification. The latter now (2007) has Great and other pipework literally flattened and trampled on, probably also used as missiles etc, yet this organ had its blower disconnected when playable......nuff said on that one, you'll get the point.....I do not recall seeing this organ in such a deplorable condition, and this truly is a historic organ, close to the Universities and hence students. Rest assured if there is no money for SGH these organs will not see restoration either. People in churches have been "brainwashed" not to want or require them. Music in churches is now basically second rate rubbish so in many cases the trusty toaster will do! Even sadder is the wanton vandalism done to Cathedral organs by consultants and organ builders, best not go there either. I have said before that one day we will find even the likes of a Salisbury, Hereford, or Canterbury, Chester or Peterborough will be deemed "unsuitable" or "unusable" or whatever excuse is made, and eventually be outed, to be replaced by some new fangled anybuilder organ. If we can't look after what we have, really what hope is there!!?? Hopefully by then I shall be 6 feet under, meantime I prefer to go to Orchestral concerts. At least the orchestras can't be ****** up.
R
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
-
All of these comments relate directly to (and prove) the utter, complete and total inadequacies of the electronic industry to use their technology correctly, let alone adequately. The people who install the machines have no knowledge of what their systems can achieve. With very few exceptions indeed they lack the basic knowledge of acoustics that has been around since the nineteen thirties. None of them has pipe organ training in voicing and it shows, horrendously.
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.
-
I bow to your greater knowledge, but I think you may be mistaken on this point as my experience is otherwise. To me it is also an essential feature of board security to prevent several people using a single log-in.
JC
Cookies are temporary files, generally hidden from view, held on the PC. Hence if you access the same web site from different PC's you will have different cookies held on each PC. If the PC changes its IP address this has no bearing whatsoever upon the cookies held on that machine. This is not to say that individual websites might not take note of your IP address and build this into the data that they choose to store in the cookies on your machine.
-
I was told that the said incumbent had an intense dislike of Makin 'Organs' Ltd, so the then managing director bought the Bradford company, delivered the 'Bradford' instrument in a van clearly labelled Makin 'Organs' Ltd and placed a prominent Makin label on the console.
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.
-
Dear All,
I am playing this Friday's lunchtime recital at Truro Cathedral (1.10pm). The programme is:
Intrada- Grayston Ives
Pastorale- Cesar Franck
Folktune- Percy Whitlock
Sonata No. 1 in G- Edward Elgar
Apologies for using this board for what appears to be a shameless plug for my recitals- in fact it is not. This is the only message board that I contribute to, and I am still not used to the idea that I feel well acquainted (musically at least) with many on here, but there are only two I would recognise in the street! If anyone on this board goes to the Truro recitals regularly (reading a discussion on another thread suggested to me that this is the case) please pop up and say hi- it would be lovely to be able to put a face to the name (or tag!)
All the best,
Charles
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
-
I was told that someone had the notion of suspending an organ over the West space.
Although I have a reasonable head for heights, I did not go to the bell ringing platform!
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.
-
If the Walker were to be restored, where in Pershore Abbey could it be situated? The area where it was has been used for another purpose. This was, I gather, part of the reason for removing it.
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.
-
============================
As a five year old, I asked my brother what two dogs were doing, and he told me this was how they made babies.
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!
-
Anyhow, continuing that theme...in an age of multi-level memory, can anyone explain why so few large organs have even just ONE channel with a remotely intuitive sequence of combinations? I mean, the number of times I've gone on an organ crawl, and with no time to adapt to the new instrument, launched into something requiring registration changes only to find an absoltely random pattern to the generals and/or divisional pistons, like 1 gives flutes, 2 gives you a tuba, 3 we're back to principal chorus, 4 is full organ, 5 is celestes plus a trompet someone forgot to push in etc. I mean, whilst I don't expect people to register their memory levels just for Organ Club visits, for any visiting organist it is a bit disconcerting to find a total lack of coherence amidst the pistons, and it's bad form to attempt to change the settings without the written permission of the Master of Music. I don't recall such ambiguities in organs I've played with fixed pistons, there's usually a reasonably coherent, even if not universally useful, logic to which stops come on and off, going from p to ff.
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.
-
I would have thought such a device would be of limited use, except to ensure nobody else over-wrote your settings.
You could hardly set up pistons on one organ and use them on another organ - finding organs with identical stop lists is hard enough, finding two with exactly the same piston system and layout as well even harder, then the format the pistons settings are saved and read from the usb has to be the same as well... then the stops on the different organs have to have the same effect... Pigs might fly!
So you could only use the piston settings you've saved on your USB stick on the organ they're set up on. So why would you bother taking the memory USB stick away? (Unless you're paranoid someone will delete them or you really don't want anyone else knowing what stops you use...)
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.
-
Ah, to qualify what I do: I mark a large friendly '+' sign on my score (or on the lovingly torn square of Post-it note) but write the general piston number beside it, then the memory level in superscript. I can then immediately check the digital display if something's gone wrong. I always ask my page turner to keep an eye on this too, just be sure.
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 have always avoided sequencers (and even steppers) as I feel myself to be in less control should I press the "Next" piston in the wrong place, or should I forget to press it at all. I feel that, say, "Level 39, General 6" tells me exactly what to press, and gives me a point of reference should I find that I've made a mistake, rather than wondering what's gone wrong and whether to press the "Next" piston or the "Back" piston to get the combination I require.
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!
-
Coventry? How dare you, Sir! That is one of the more exciting organs I have played.
OK, the organ in question is http://npor.emma.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch...ec_index=N10583. The problem with this instrument is that there are no choruses. It is essentially an 8' organ. Don't be misled by the paper specification: the upperwork is not voiced to have impact as such; its function is merely to prevent the mass of 8' colour becoming too deadening. On top of that all the stops (all of which are actually rather pleasant individually) are voiced as smoothly as possible with the result that they all sound much the same. The aim, I assume, is to make the successive addition of stops as imperceptible as possible - and indeed the organ does do beautifully smooth stop crescendos. But this is at the expense of tonal interest. The organ makes a "noble" sound, but is devoid of vivid colour. Full organ is as soporific as the Swell strings - lots of smooth Trombas and no brightness. It doesn't even strike you as very loud (though half an hour with a visiting organists association will make you realise that it is actually a lot louder than you first thought).
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.
-
Fair enough, Vox - I thought that you were talking about Manchester Cathedral (which I quite like, thought it doesn't suit all tastes).
Cheers,
Paul.
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?
-
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHH!
You're being a bit harsh on Gloucester Cathedral organ aren't you? (Unsubtle reference to the filming location of the Harry Potter movies). Or is Gloucester not a good organ (ooops, slapped wrists all round!)
I suspect that those of us on both sides of this particular argument think enough has been said already.
-
I don't give a tinker's cuss about how many "eminent recitalists" there may be in any particular association, or how many events and blah, blah, blah. What I do know is that if a member of any organisation feels the need to resign over something, then there has been a breakdown in communication somewhere, and the association and its officers have a responsibility to put things right, if at all possible.
As far as I can fathom, most organist associations aren't exactly flush with members either, and, frankly I'm not surprised!
BTW, It was certainly not my intention to be either ridiculous or offensive, Neil.
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'm sorry to hear that David's local association has treated him in this way. If they are that defensive about their failings, then David is well out of it!
Sounds like David was the only person in the Association who actually cared about anything!
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.
-
I agree Paul, and think about something like the first movement of the Elgar Sonata, where the fourth manual significantly enables the variety of tone required in some of the quieter sections.
Jonathan
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
-
Personally, I would have thought a traditional solo division with enclosed flutes, strings + celeste, an orchestral oboe and clarinet plus tuba would be more useful for improvisation, rather than the solo organ specified, which is 80% loud reeds so is very limited for any improvisations less than ffff on the richter scale. I guess a good tuba plus octave couplers could be used for those moments - it's not as if it's a huge church with poor acoustics, anyway. But then, I'm not the organist of this church with the money bags this time.
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.
Worcester Cathedral
in General discussion
Posted
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.