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Organs In Books


davidh

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Jack Higgins's 'The Eagle has landed' has a Bach-playing German paratrooper in it (he gets shot in mid-Orgelbuchlein, if I remember rightly, both in the book and in the film). A good read, although why the author made the blunder of claiming that a medieval church in north Norfolk had missed out on the Reformation, I can't imagine. There are some spikey shacks up there that would make most RC churches look like Gospel Halls, but they're all Anglican, after a fashion.

 

I, too, loved 'A Swarm in May' and recently acquired my own copy on Ebay. Unfortunately, all the units of measurement have been converted into metric, which jars slightly. I think it must be in 'Chroster's Cake' that there's a drawing of the organ loft - definitely Canterbury, but only three manuals, which was one less than it had in those days!

 

I wonder who was the inspiration for Dr. Sunderland, the organist?

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Edmund Crispin (the pen name of Bruce Montgomery) an organist/choirmaster at St Johns College, Oxford, in the first half of last century wrote some rather whimsical detective novels. One named "Holy Disorders" includes the vibrations of the 32' in an organ of a rural cathedral used to dislodge a slab (under which if I recall correctly) a dead body is found.... At one stage he was the regular crime writer for the Sunday Times.

Organs get odd mention in some of the less known works of Dickens I recall. To this day I enjoy referring to my own place as the kinfreederal, after the urchin in one of Dickens lesser known tomes. Has a sort of 'cor blimey' ring to it!!

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Robert Schneider's "Schlafes Bruder" (Brother of Sleep, a worse movie version exists, too) should be available in English, too. It is quite fascinating story of an Austrian mountain village and a young genious with a special gift of hearing, secretly starting to play the organ and even participating in an improvisation contest.

The author is the brother to Enjott Schneider, Professor of Movie composition in Munich, who wrote a Toccata "Schlafes Bruder" for that movie.

The depiction of a genious in an absolutely provincial surrounding (here: The province of Vorarlberg, the region where the Rieger organ factory is located today) is touching.

 

Wasn't Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues beyond the Sea" and Captain Nemo from the Nautilus submarine with its house organ mentioned elsewhere?

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Robert Schneider's "Schlafes Bruder" (Brother of Sleep, a worse movie version exists, too) should be available in English, too. It is quite fascinating story of an Austrian mountain village and a young genious with a special gift of hearing, secretly starting to play the organ and even participating in an improvisation contest.

The author is the brother to Enjott Schneider, Professor of Movie composition in Munich, who wrote a Toccata "Schlafes Bruder" for that movie.

The depiction of a genious in an absolutely provincial surrounding (here: The province of Vorarlberg, the region where the Rieger organ factory is located today) is touching.

 

Wasn't Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues beyond the Sea" and Captain Nemo from the Nautilus submarine with its house organ mentioned elsewhere?

 

For anyone not familiar with it I would recommend Robert N. Roth's superb anthology "Wond'rous Machine" (Scarecrow Press, Lanham (Md) and London, 2000. It is a collection of text relating to the organ, including poems, short stories, mysteries and extracts from novels.

 

Graham Dukes

Oslo

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  • 11 years later...

A new book this year, David Baker's 'The Organ Loft Murders'. is set in the 1870's in a fictitious town in Yorkshire. It is no Barchester - sleaze, ruthless ambition and violent vengeance.

At the centre is the position of the organist and choirmaster. Plenty of murders, plenty of obvious suspected and a quite unexpected twist at the end.

Without giving anything away about the plot, the organ is water-blown with some large open tanks of water. This is a puzzle because all the accounts of water engines that I have seen have been totally enclosed. All that I can guess is that if the pressure of the mains water supply dropped. a reservoir could maintain the pressure at the engine. There is an account of someone falling to their death in the works. In what kind of water engine could this happen?

The paperback and hardback copies are expensive, but the Kindle version is very cheap. I am just reading it a second time to see how many clues I had missed.

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1 hour ago, davidh said:

A new book this year, David Baker's 'The Organ Loft Murders'. is set in the 1870's in a fictitious town in Yorkshire. It is no Barchester - sleaze, ruthless ambition and violent vengeance.

At the centre is the position of the organist and choirmaster. Plenty of murders, plenty of obvious suspected and a quite unexpected twist at the end.

Without giving anything away about the plot, the organ is water-blown with some large open tanks of water. This is a puzzle because all the accounts of water engines that I have seen have been totally enclosed. All that I can guess is that if the pressure of the mains water supply dropped. a reservoir could maintain the pressure at the engine. There is an account of someone falling to their death in the works. In what kind of water engine could this happen?

The paperback and hardback copies are expensive, but the Kindle version is very cheap. I am just reading it a second time to see how many clues I had missed.

Header tanks to stabilise the water pressure were quite common, not only in organs but across the water engine scene in general in Victorian times.  They were used to supply engines designed to work at moderate pressures (typically engines could be obtained for applications requiring from around 10 to 1500 psi in round figures).  The height of head required for a given engine can be calculated from the formula: 1 psi equates to about 2 feet 3 3/4 inches of head.  (Forgive the Imperial units but it seems appropriate when discussing British engineering of this vintage).  York Minster had its tanks installed on the roof of the north transept c. 1900, and they held around 5000 gallons.  Norwich cathedral's tanks were in the tower until the 1930s.  Etc, etc.  Pressure stabilisation was sometimes necessary for several reasons, one of which was especially important for churches - the majority of the burgeoning middle class population (those who could afford their own piped water supply) inconveniently took their weekly (!) baths on a Sunday morning at exactly the time when their cooks were also placing unusually high demands on the supply while preparing the Sunday roast.  So not only did the pressure predictably fall during Matins, but the volume of water available was also at its lowest point of the week.

So one can envisage it to be perfectly plausible that someone might drown in such tanks, though since you quite properly did not include a plot-spoiler, I have no knowledge whether that is what actually occurred in the book.

" ... sleaze, ruthless ambition and violent vengeance ... ".  Sounds fairly typical of the situation organists have always found themselves in, then.

Incidentally, there was until well into the 1970s a very high pressure water main running around London which was originally intended to power hydraulic lifts in the city's many hotels.  Some other large cities had similar arrangements.  When I was at King's College in the 1960s such a lift, complete with liveried operator, was still working in one of its constituent (and very shabby) buildings which was originally the Chesham Hotel in Surrey Street.  It was completely noiseless and very fast.  The pipe network still exists but has now been taken over by fibre optic comms cables on which the city's internet connectivity largely depends.  To avoid digging up the streets, engineers developed an ingenious method for blowing the fibre into the pipes using compressed air.  I'm sure you were all desperate to know this.

Originally the water pressure was derived from stationary steam-driven beam engines, often installed in those beautiful cathedral-like pumping stations of the Victorian era.

An excellent chapter on hydraulic organ blowing is included in Laurence Elvin's meticulously-researched book 'Organ blowing - its history and development'.

As for falling to death in the works, any form of organ blower can deliver a very high mechanical force.  It is quite possible for someone sprawled across the top board of a reservoir to be crushed to death against the soundboard(s) above if someone inadvertently switches on the wind.  If one adds to this the cranks and reciprocating components of a water engine, the mutilation that could result causes one to shudder ...  The Victorians were not known for their interest in health and safety aspects of their otherwise excellent engineering.

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As someone mentioned above, there are some references to organs in Dickens. In Martin Chuzzlewit, Tom Pinch plays in the village church and is friendly with the assistant of Salisbury Cathedral. There is at least one scene where Tom plays at Salisbury. One of the other characters is incredulous at the fact that Tom does not get paid by the village church, but plays as a labour of love.

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Bit of a different ,and interesting thread which jolted my fast fading memory back into life.

Exhumed a dust covered volume from the vault entitled " In the Choir Of  Westminster Abbey "; a work which describes itself as, " A Story of Henry Purcell`s Days"   by Mrs. Marshall  ( 1897 )

Typically Victorian in its mawkishness and circuitous convolutions but worth plodding through since the author uses significant historical events to bolster the narrative.  There are several excellent architectural studies of the abbey executed by T. Hamilton Crawford, one is especially good in  that it shows  the West Front before  it was got at.

For those who may be interested  the book has been re-issued  and is available on Amazon . There are even some sample pages  provided.

I particularly like the message inscribed on the flyleaf in my copy dated 1897.

Had a good laugh at a couple of the comments . The  one which deals with the hydraulis was particularly good, especially with regard to " health and safety " issues; what would one possibly be doing  " spread out on a bellows " ?

The other mentioned  DHL. Yes, the esteemed author did refer to " organs" in his writings.

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, Adnosad said:

what would one possibly be doing  " spread out on a bellows " ?

 

Two possibilities:

(a) An organ builder who had the thankless task of adjusting an errant primary pneumatic in an overcrowded organ chamber,  affixed to the bottom of a chest with a clearance of just a few inches above the top board of the bellows when full. 

(b) Said organ builder adjusting the spill valve of said organ on said top board of said bellows.

Let's hope s/he had placed a sign at the console saying "don't turn on the wind".

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Mrs Marshall would be Emma, a prolific author who featured organs and organists in several of her books. I have a copy of An Old London Nosegay by her daughter Beatrice: a similar mix of historical fact and fiction. It claims to be based on a seventeenth century journal found in an attic that was connected to the (real life) Fanshawe family (if I remember correctly - I’m away from home at the moment). Music, musicians and organs feature often. There are some intriguing descriptions of consort playing in it: at one point she describes (supposedly quoting from the journal) the playing of a 5 part In Nomine by John Bull on viols - interesting, as there is such a work, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t discovered  in modern times until the 1950s…. I’ve often wondered if there really was such a journal or if it’s just a fictional device. Marshall claimed she found it herself. The Fanshawe diaries are well known but this (if it really existed) is quite a different text. The musical content relating to the 1640s is surprisingly detailed. At one point the journal writer (a woman) describes herself practising on a church organ - that would be very interesting for the C17, if (a big if!) it was indeed factual. 

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As a postscript to my previous post, these titles by Emma Marshall probably have some organ content (I do not have copies myself).

(I'm in the only corner of England where it is currently raining, so this is my response to another of her titles: 'Rainy Days and How to Meet Them'...)

 

Heart Service: or, The Organist's Children.  1 vol.  London: S. P. C. K., 1870.

The Story of John Marbeck: A Windsor Organist of Three Hundred Years Ago. His Work and his Reward.  1 vol.  London: James Nisbet, 1887.

The Master of the Musicians: A Story of Handel's Days.  1 vol.  London: Seeley, 1896.

And there is of course Adnosad's volume:

In the Choir of Westminster Abbey: A Story of Henry Purcell's Days.  1 vol.  London: Seeley, 1897.

 

 

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Thanks for the inf` Clarabella. It is good to have some light shed onto an author and their world especially when it surfaces for our eyes in the 21st cy.

Mrs. Marshall certainly sounds to have been a very interesting individual.

We have lost a lot of fiction from this era, and that is a great pity.  i can remember from my primary school days that in our library there were some very old volumes which had been obviously donated for " our enrichment ". No one apart from myself bothered with them but I was, and still am, fascinated by the  cover designs, the marvellous " marbled" pattern on the inside boards, the layout of the text, then of course the story and the use of language.

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On 23/07/2022 at 14:30, Colin Pykett said:

Two possibilities:

(a) An organ builder who had the thankless task of adjusting an errant primary pneumatic in an overcrowded organ chamber,  affixed to the bottom of a chest with a clearance of just a few inches above the top board of the bellows when full. 

(b) Said organ builder adjusting the spill valve of said organ on said top board of said bellows.

Let's hope s/he had placed a sign at the console saying "don't turn on the wind".

Thanks for the tec inf` on this. it has always been established that the interior of these machines is a dangerous environment.  I am quite sure that the H&S bods have produced safety guidelines with regards to this matter.

Dodgy stairs/ladders/ asbestos/ lack of safety rails  dodgy electrics, to name just a few.     Didn`t an organ tuner fall to his death from a lofty height in the organ  in Westminster Cathedral many years ago?

My rather ghoulish sense of humour re` " unfortunate occupational death " was encouraged at school when we were bored by  Careers Talks and other  matters to us 15 year olds.   One poor guy who was sent to educate us about H&S was having a not too successful time  until he told us an anecdote about a particularly grisly death, and we all laughed! He then realised he was on to something and reeled of  a pile of cases to our great glee.

However , the downside; our dear headmaster, sat in on these events was not so amused and afterwards we were subjected to some " discipline"  !

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On 23/07/2022 at 15:30, Colin Pykett said:

Two possibilities:

(a) An organ builder who had the thankless task of adjusting an errant primary pneumatic in an overcrowded organ chamber,  affixed to the bottom of a chest with a clearance of just a few inches above the top board of the bellows when full. 

(b) Said organ builder adjusting the spill valve of said organ on said top board of said bellows.

Let's hope s/he had placed a sign at the console saying "don't turn on the wind".

Been there, done that! A thankless task indeed!

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Here's further evidence that such things can happen (i.e. that working inside an organ can be potentially dangerous):

https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/firefighters-rescue-organ-technician-trapped/

I recall once stepping onto a passage board high up inside a large instrument.  The organist then decided to follow me and, to my alarm, I heard the boarding begin to creak under the strain of both of us.  I shouted to him, instructing him to remove himself in no uncertain terms, to prevent both of us falling onto the pipework and pneumatic tubing of an entire division below.  This served to demonstrate that when an organ has got into a parlous state, so has everything associated with it including ladders, passage boards, trapdoors - in fact, the whole works.  Even the building frame itself can become dangerous; I once came across one which had degenerated so badly that you could wobble the whole structure of the organ - soundboards, mechanism and all - just by pushing it gently!  So don't be taken in by the apparently comforting appearance of those massive baulks of timber as they can be in an equally parlous state as everything else.

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