Tradition and Development

A concert by Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini and Gustav Leonhardt at the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, held on October 27, 2000, provided the inspiration for  writing an article on the historical Italian organ, its tradition and development. My goal is to give a panoramic view of the subject, and anyone knows that when looking at a panoramic view much of the detail is lost. Still, such an attempt is worth carrying out because some general guidelines can in any case be drawn. To do so, it is necessary to go back a number of centuries and try to understand the original role of the organ in the musical world of Italian churches.

The Basilica of San Petronio is no ordinary place from the standpoint of organbuilding history. It enjoys the presence of two unique instruments: the oldest Italian organ in existence, built by Lorenzo da Prato between 1471 and 1475, roughly 20 years prior to the discovery of America by Columbus,1 and a later organ, built by Baldassarre Malamini in 1596. The instruments are located face to face in the area traditionally reserved for the choristers, behind the high altar.

The program notes for the Tagliavini-Leonhardt concert, written by Marc Vanscheevwijck, well explain the use for which organs of medieval and renaissance times were intended:

Alternatim performance practice, i.e., the performance of liturgical pieces alternating contrasting musical forces in the various versets of the sacred texts, originates in the old antiphonal singing of psalms of the first centuries A.D. In responsorial music a soloist or a small group of singers alternated with the larger choir. Sometimes they alternated plainchant with polyphonic settings of the text. Probably as early as the organ began to be used in church, the organist already improvised "versets," alternating with the choir singing the counter versets in Gregorian chant. Obviously, the schola never repeated the texts of the versets played by the organist, who improvised (and later composed) on the relative Gregorian melodies. The earliest source of such a practice is the Faenza Codex, compiled c.1420. During the following century this alternatim practice spread throughout Italy. Many alternatim settings, particularly of the mass proper, have been preserved, some of the most famous of which were composed by Girolamo Cavazzoni, Claudio Merulo, Andrea Gabrieli, and (in the 17th century) the Fiori Musicali of Girolamo Frescobaldi.2

Two aspects immediately come to mind:

1. The organ location, which for effective responsorial use had to be near the choir and not necessarily in a favorable position for the congregation,

2. A tonal structure suitable for dialogue with a small group of singers.

There was no need for a sound big enough to accompany the choir, simply because the organ was intended as a soloist. And accompanying the congregation was certainly not in the agenda, since people did not sing during liturgy in Italian Catholic churches until very recently.3

What effect did all of this have on the sound? Since power was not the issue, early Italian organbuilders developed their talents in other areas, and tonal quality became the priority. They created relatively small instruments, mostly with only one manual, with gentle, beautifully voiced stops. Wind pressures were in most cases quite low, down to 42-45 mm. at the water column, and the voicing techniques as well as the tonal design in general reflected such an approach.

Listening to music by Antegnati (also a famous Italian organbuilder), Segni, Veggio, Gabrieli and others performed on the beautiful organs of San Petronio gave me and the entire audience (a few hundred people all gathered in the large space behind the high altar, to be able to best hear the organs) a good perspective of the musical experience which was originally expected from such instruments.

It is my belief that the original DNA of ancient Italian pipe organs, as defined by their original use in the liturgy, played a decisive role in the subsequent evolution of the instruments. This was due to a strong sense of tradition among the vast majority of builders and to their reluctance to introduce changes to a practice which was considered successful. Examples to the contrary do exist, but any effort of generalizing, or extracting general rules from a complex reality, always ends up sacrificing notable exceptions.

In post-Renaissance times, organ use became widespread. All Italian churches had at least one organ and often one or two Positivo4  instruments in addition to the main organ. And a very significant change took place: in addition to being used as a solo instrument for improvisations and for the performance of written music, the organ also became an accompanimental instrument for the choir. Its location within the building also changed in most cases, taking into greater consideration the congregation as the beneficiary of musical performances: the preferred location for new instruments became a balcony facing the nave, which is still considered by many to be the ideal location for the best possible diffusion of sound within a building. Naturally, broader tonal resources had to be made available in order to accommodate this new function, but this did not cause a significant change in the original voicing practices. In other words, more stops were introduced and a Pedal division was added (normally consisting of one or two stops), but the basic tonal structure remained the same and no major changes took place in the sound: still low pressures and gentle voicing. After all, organs still did not need to be big or powerful, because they were not intended to support an entire congregation, just a choir.5

A further, major evolution took place as a result of the greater demands by the repertoire of the Romantic period. A great number of new stops were introduced: reeds of various types, more flutes, strings, even percussion: drums, cymbals, bells and the like. The organs built by the Serassi family of Bergamo towards the end of the eighteenth century and during the following century are a good example of the romantic Italian organ. The occupation of Bergamo by the troops of Napoleon (1796-1813) and subsequently by the Austrians (1814-1859) influenced organbuilding practices by introducing new musical models and, as a consequence, by contributing to the development of new devices and new sounds that would improve the performance of the music inspired by the teaching of Simon Mayr (1763-1845), by his pupil Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) and by Gioacchino Rossini.6 The famous composer Felice Moretti (also known as Father Davide da Bergamo), a Franciscan monk and a family friend of the Serassi, composed music that was deeply influenced by opera. Also, Giuseppe II Serassi, the most innovative member of the family, introduced new devices aimed at facilitating the dynamic control of sound: the third hand, or mechanical super coupler, the fourth hand, or sub coupler, the expression shades, pedals for pre-set combinations of stops, an easier system for the coupling of the manuals (by means of a pedal and no longer by the sliding of the upper manual into position), settable combinations of stops, and the Tiratutti or Tutti for the Ripieno ranks.7

In spite of all of this, the ancient core of the instrument and the basic tonal concept behind it remained virtually unchanged for a good part of the nineteenth century. Low wind pressures were still the rule, as well as unforced voicing, fairly open pipe toes, and few nicks at the languids. As a consequence,   there was a broad harmonic development in the sound, allowing a very effective use of each stop in combination with others and forming an ensemble of rare cohesion and beauty. Pressures of sometimes less than 50 mm. at the water column naturally presented a real challenge, particularly for the voicing of reed stops, but this had the effect of encouraging builders to find original design and voicing methods to overcome the difficulties.8

At this point, it is necessary to define the tonal core of the organ which I have indicated as an element of continuity in Italian organbuilding throughout the centuries. Its main component is the Ripieno. The term does not translate to Mixture, but rather it defines a series of individual Principal scaled ranks of pipes at various pitches, creating a system of sounds at harmonic intervals, normally beginning with 8' pitch as the foundation of the manual.

The composition of a typical Ripieno with its traditional nomenclature follows:

Principale (I) 8'

Ottava (VIII) 4'

Decimaquinta (XV) 2'

Decimanona (XIX) 11/3'

Vigesima seconda (XXII) 1'

Vigesima sesta (XXVI) 2/3'

Vigesima nona (XXIX) 1/2'

Trigesima terza (XXXIII) 1/3'

Trigesima sesta (XXXVI) 1/4'

And occasionally:

Quadragesima (XL) 1/6'

Quadragesima Terza (XLIII) 1/8'

The highest pitch in the entire Ripieno is in most cases the note C at 1/8'. Beyond this limit a ritornello or break begins with pipes double the length, or one full octave lower in pitch.9

Table 1 is intended to give a clear and comprehensive idea of the tonal composition of the Ripieno. The method I am utilizing is unconventional and it consists of identifying each pipe by a number corresponding to its place in an ideal succession of notes starting with number 1 as low C of the 8' Principal. Low C at 4' will consequently be numbered as 13, low C at 2' will be numbered as 25 and so on. The highest pitch pipe in the Ripieno will be number 73, corresponding to the pitch limit of 1/8'. Once a rank reaches note number 73 it will break back and start a ritornello with note C#62 (or one full octave lower). To simplify matters, I am showing the first octave as complete (12 notes). The most common arrangement in Italian historical organs calls for a short first octave (8 notes, with C#, D#, F# and G# missing). Notes are identified by octave number, according to the Italian system, by which C1 corresponds to note C of the first octave, F3 to note F of the third octave, and so on. The chosen compass for our example is of 49 keys, C1 to C5. This system, by numbers rather than by footage, is intended to provide a more immediate idea of the repetition of equal size pipes throughout the compass for the entire Ripieno. Equal number means equal size pipe.

The conventional method is shown in Table 2. The Ripieno here is comparable, in pure terms of number of pipes, to a Principal chorus with 8', 4' and 2' stops plus a six-rank mixture. But by looking at Table 2 one can immediately appreciate the vast difference from such an arrangement. At note C#2 the first doubling or double pitch appears: pipes from the 1/2' rank (XXIX) and 1/4' rank (XXXVI) become of identical size. Consequently, between notes C#2 and F2 the tonal effect is not that of a six-rank mixture but rather of a five-rank mixture with one of the ranks doubled. This aspect becomes more and more prominent as we move up the keyboard, to the point that at note C#4 (key number 38) with all ranks from Decimaquinta (2') up drawn, only two pitches can be heard: 2', repeated 4 times, and 11/3', repeated three times. As one can easily appreciate, such tonal structure cannot be compared with that of a Mixture, or Fourniture or any other multiple-rank stop designed as a single entity. The Ripieno is simply different. It is conceived as a sum of individual ranks at different pitches, each separately usable in combinations with any other rank and all usable at once as a pleno.10

Obviously, this feature provides a great deal of flexibility in the tonal palette. From an organbuilder"s practical standpoint, it has two effects:

1. It forces the voicer to be extremely scrupulous as to the tonal balance, regulation and speech adjustment of each pipe even in the highest pitched ranks, since each can be separately used;

2. It makes tuning more difficult, due to the drawing effect on the equal pitched pipes when they play together. Only a tuner who knows how to deal with such a problem can obtain a stable tuning of the Ripieno.11

Tuning with double pitches was nothing new to ancient builders. In fact, pre-Renaissance and Renaissance organs, in Italy as well as in other European countries, often had double or even triple notes of equal length in the treble of the Principal, the Octave and sometimes the Fifteenth, to enhance the singing qualities of the instrument in the treble. This practice strangely survived, in some areas of Italy, all the way to the beginning of the 19th century. This proves that the difficulties connected with the tuning of multiple equal-pitched pipes never bothered Italian organbuilders too much.12

Other traditional stops forming the original core of the historical Italian organ include the following:

Flauto in Ottava (4'), normally tapered or cylindrical, sometimes stopped

Flauto in Decimaquinta (2') in the earlier instruments

Flauto in Duodecima (22/3')

The Terzino, or Tierce flute (13/5') was later added and, in the nineteenth century, the Flauto Traverso or Fluta (8', normally in the treble only).

Early strings appeared in the eighteenth century, at 4' in the bass and occasionally over the entire compass, but such stops were vastly different from what we think of as a string today. They had no ears, no beards, no nicks at the languids. These characteristics, combined with a very narrow scale, contributed to produce a sound with a very prominent transient at the attach and a cutting sustained tone, strongly imitative of early string instruments.

The Voce Umana or Fiffaro, a Principal-scaled stop at 8' pitch (treble only) was also used in the Renaissance and became increasingly more common in the Baroque and later periods. Its pipes were normally tuned sharp against the 8' Principal, except in the Venetian tradition and among a few builders in the south of Italy, where flat tuning was preferred.

The above description, as I have said earlier, represents a simplification of a much more complicated subject, and many examples exist that do not follow the rule.13 Also, all of those who are familiar with ancient Italian organs will agree that the tonal experience that comes from a Callido or a Nacchini organ is vastly different from that of an Agati or a Catarinozzi. They were expressions of very different artistic environments and the builders were very faithful to their own local traditions.

What happened in nineteenth-century Italian organbuilding is worth investigating a bit more closely. Early signs of rejection of the Italian romantic organ appeared. In 1824 the Cardinal Vicar of Rome promulgated an edict stating: "Organists may not play on the organ music written for theater, or with profane character, but only music that can encourage meditation and devotion . . . "14 Still, many of the major builders in the north, as well as many in other parts of the country, continued in their tradition of building instruments without changing their style.15 But at some point, foreign influence became a strong factor16 and the "new inventions," the Barker lever first and then pneumatic and electric action, came into the picture.17 Pneumatic action in particular and the new sounds, such as the "modern strings" and harmonic stops demanded higher wind pressures, and the organ sound became stronger and aggressive. But, as we all know, pneumatic action represented only a relatively short transition period in organbuilding history, and a further evolution of the instrument was soon marked in the following century by a perfected electric action and by the rediscovery, in the mid 1960s, of tracker action. This movement was immediately promoted by some of the major Italian builders18 and it became stronger and stronger over the years. The neoclassical instrument was created, based on mechanical action and on the re-discovery of the traditional sounds and voicing techniques. But, as it is often the case, the intent was not that of copying the past but rather of preserving the best of tradition within a new context which was calling for a new use of the organ: the support of congregational singing.

One may get the impression that it is impossible to extract a general trend from this entire process of evolution. Still, I believe that one common denominator can be found: the unforced, pleasing singing quality that has survived unchanged for over five centuries, and which effectively represents, in musical form, the character of the Italian language.

Notes

                  1.              The instrument consists of one manual and short pedalboard, as follows. Manual: F1-A4 without F#1, G#1; divided keys G#1/Ab1, G#2/Ab2, G#3/Ab3; Pedal: F1-D2 directly connected to the corresponding manual keys. The stoplist follows:

Principale contrabasso (24', façade) - doubled from C#3

Principale (12', rear façade - doubled from C#3, triple from Bb3)

Flauto in VIII

Flauto in XII

Ottava (doubled from Bb3)

XII

XV

XIX

XXII

XXVI-XXIX

Spring windchest, A = 470 Hz, meantone temperament; restoration by Tamburini, 1974-1982. The above information is the courtesy of Liuwe Tamminga, recitalist and organist at the Basilica of San Petronio.

                  2.              Concerning earlier use of the organ in western world churches, see Peter Williams (Duke University, Durham, NC) in his essay "The origin of the Christian organ with some particular reference to Italy," Acts of the International Symposium on "I Serassi--L"arte organaria fra sette e ottocento," Ed. Carrara, Bergamo, 1999, p. 12. Referring to the early Middle Ages, he writes: "I don"t know any evidence that organs were brought into church in order to accompany singing--whether it was the celebrant singing at mass, the lay people responding with their own acclamations, or the monks chanting their daily office in private or in public. All that one can be certain about is that organs were there to provide sound, and whatever later music historians may have assumed, it is seldom if ever clear what kind of sound they made, or for what purpose and at what point they made it. Only from the thirteenth century onwards the picture is clear . . ."

                  3.              While the practice of congregational singing at celebrations in Italian churches may have had its first examples at the end of the nineteenth century, it was during the Second Vatican Council that this practice was actually encouraged.

                  4.              A Positivo can be described as a smaller size "cabinet" organ, self-contained, whose casework is normally divided in two sections: the lower case, containing the bellows (normally two multi-fold hinged bellows activated by levers), and the upper case, which sits on top and which holds the keyboard, the windchest and pipes. It was almost invariably built without independent pedal stops,  and its pedalboard, when present, consisted normally of one short octave, whose keys were connected to the corresponding keys of the first octave at the manual by means of strings or wires. Although easily movable (sometimes large handles on the sides of the two sections of the case indicate this possibility), it is different from a Portativo, an even smaller instrument whose primary function was that of providing music during outdoor processions.

                  5.              Larger instruments are not unknown to historical Italian organbuilding. I will mention two examples of rare complexity:

a.) The instrument at the church of San Nicolo L"Arena in Catania, by Donato del Piano (1698-1785), with a total of five keyboards, divided between three consoles attached to the case (1 manual - 3 manuals - 1 manual) with the larger console in the center and one pedalboard for the center console, plus a separate small automatic pipe instrument activated by a rotating drum. This enormous, beautiful instrument, now in a poor state of disrepair (among other things, the pipes have all been removed and stored), includes pipework of extremely unusual shape.

b.) The great organ at the Church of the Cavalieri di S. Stefano in Pisa, built between 1733 and 1738 by Azzolino Bernardino della Ciaia (1671-1755) with the help of other organbuilders from different parts of Italy, with four manuals plus a fifth manual activating a harpsichord. This organ was later converted into a pneumatic instrument and subsequently electrified. Only a portion of the original pipework survives.

                  6.              See Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini, "Le risorse dell"organo Serassiano e il loro sfruttamento nella prassi organistica dell"epoca," in Acts of the International Symposium on "I Serassi--L"arte organaria fra sette e ottocento", Ed. Carrara, Bergamo, 1999, pp. 80-84.

                  7.              See Giosue Berbenni, Acts of the International Symposium on "I Serassi--L"arte organaria fra sette e ottocento," Ed. Carrara, Bergamo, 1999, pp. 22-24.

                  8.              The lower the wind pressure, the thinner the tongues must be to obtain promptness of speech. But thin tongues also produce undesirable side effects, notably:  a) A thinner timbre in general, with greater development of overtones and less fundamental; b) Uncontrollable sound at the bass register, where any reed naturally tends to become louder; c) Very weak trebles. To overcome these problems, a series of interesting methods were developed. I will mention a few:

a.) Wide and deep shallots to increase the volume of air excited by the tongue, with the effect of increasing the prominence of the fundamental in the tone;

b.) Double or even triple tongues at the low register, to control volume, timbre and stability;

c.) Variable tongue thickness at the treble, with the filing of the tip to obtain promptness while retaining a good volume of sound.

For a more complete description of voicing methods on low pressure reeds, with specific reference to the reeds of Serassi organs, see Francesco Ruffatti in "I registri ad ancia negli organi Serassi," Acts of the International Symposium on "I Serassi--L"arte organaria fra sette e ottocento," Ed. Carrara, Bergamo, 1999 pp. 144-150.

                  9.              When the lowest pitched stop on the manual is the Principal 16' the nomenclature remains the same, although all stops start one octave lower in pitch. The stoplist becomes:

Principale (16')

Ottava (8')

Decimaquinta (4')

Decimanona (22/3')

and so on. In essence, the organ is still seen as based on the 8' Principal, with the extension of a counter octave towards the bass (see my article on Gaetano Callido, December, 1999 issue of The Diapason, p. 17, Note 8).

                  10.           Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini in his article "Il ripieno," L"organo, Year 1, No. 2, July-December, 1960, Ed. Patron, Bologna, points out the difference between the Italian Ripieno and the northern European mixtures as follows:

"a) The classical Italian ripieno is divided into its constitutive elements, corresponding to separate stops, while the foreign mixtures, starting from a certain pitch (from 4', from 22/3', from 2', from 11/3' etc.) are condensed into one stop;

b) Both in the ripieno and in the northern mixtures a gradual "compression" towards the treble takes place, a compression which is more limited in the German and northern European organ, greater in the Italian organ. In fact a ripieno will have a "compressed" extension in the treble, reduced from 8' to 2', while in the Mixtur-Scharf scheme the treble is extended between 8' and 1';

c) The "masking" of the jumps produced by the breaks is done differently in Italy from abroad; in Italy, by the division of breaks into two different points, one for the octave stops and one for the quint stops; abroad by the partial or complete substitution of the break in quint and fourth with the one in octave.

The northern European mixtures, through a particular interpretation of the break and without any fear of going beyond the pitch limits in the bass and the treble as imposed by the Italian ripieno, tend to make the tonal "density" more uniform, by reducing the difference between the tonal richness of the bass and the treble. Part of such uniformity is sacrificed by the Italian organbuilder in favor of tonal beauty. This is why the use of the Italian ripieno is mostly chordal and for toccatas, while the northern European organum plenum, especially the German, can also perform a polyphonic role."

In c) Tagliavini refers to alternation of quint and unison breaks within the same rank in all ranks of the mixture.

The pitch limit of northern European mixtures and related stops is often C at 1/16', close to the limit of human hearing, one full octave higher than the Ripieno and this factor alone determines a dramatic difference in the sound from the Ripieno.

                  11.           Drawing is an acoustical phenomena by which the sound of a pipe is drawn or pulled into tune by the sound of a second pipe which is playing an interval close to being pure or in tune. This effect is stronger between unison pipes; when tuning the second pipe to the first, its sound will slide into tune as soon as its frequency approaches that of the first pipe, but before it actually reaches the same value, thus determining an apparent tuning condition. Adding a third pipe and trying to tune it to the two previous sounds becomes impossible if the first two pipes are in a status of apparent unison, because each of the two sounds will react to the third pipe differently, according to their real frequency value. The difficulties increase exponentially from note C#4 up in the example shown, where two groups of 4 and 3 equal size pipes respectively play at once. The procedure to tune the Ripieno is consequently different and definitely more complicated than that of a regular mixture stop, as it must take into account the drawing of equal length pipes.

                  12.           I am here mentioning two organs, built in Tuscany by the Paoli family of Campi Bisenzio at the beginning of the 19th century, both restored by Fratelli Ruffatti in recent years:

a.) the organ in the Church of S. Francesco in Pontassieve, near Florence, built by Giacobbe Paoli, which includes doublings at the Principale starting with note Bb3, at the Ottava from note F3 and at the Decimaquinta also from note F3;

b.) the organ built by Michelangelo Paoli in the Basilica of S. Maria, Impruneta - Firenze, utilizing the pipes of a previous instrument by Bernardo d"Argenta, 1535, which has doublings at the Principale starting from note F#3, at the Ottava from note B3 and at the Decimaquinta from C4. Having re-built the windchest entirely, the builder could have easily eliminated the doublings had he not believed in the validity of such tonal approach.

                  13.           As an example, Sicilian organs in the 18th century were often built with multiple Ripieno ranks activated by a single stop control.

                  14.           See "La riforma dell"Organo Italiano" by Baggiani, Picchi, Tarrini, Ed. Pacini, Ospedaletto (Pisa), 1990, pp. 9-10.

                  15.           The largest instrument built by the Serassi family, the "Organum maximum" with three keyboards and over three thousand pipes, was built in the romantic style as late as in 1882. This instrument was restored by Fratelli Ruffatti between 1983 and 1985. It includes many of the effects which were rejected by liturgists, such as the drum, a bell and other percussion.

                  16.           Ferdinando Casamorata (1807-1881), musician and music scholar, introduced the work of Cavaillé-Coll to the Italian musical scene by making public the work of J. A. De La Fage "Orgue de l"Église Royale de Saint Dénis, construit par MM Cavaillé-Coll père et fils, Facteur d"orgues du Roi." Rapport. II edition, Paris, 1846. See "La riforma dell"Organo Italiano" by Baggiani, Picchi, Tarrini, Ed. Pacini, Ospedaletto (Pisa), 1990, p. 12. He gave explanations and favorable comments on some of the most remarkable characteristics of the instrument, notably the variety of wind pressures, the Barker lever, the "strength" of the upper registers, especially the reed stops, etc., and presenting them as valuable innovations worth imitating.

                  17.           An important role in this process was played by George William Trice (1848-1920), a British merchant who became an organbuilder and established a factory in Italy. He built the first electric action organ in 1888 for the Church of S. Andrea, Genoa. Other notable instruments followed, among which the three-manual instrument for the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Genoa, inaugurated in 1890 with concerts by Alexander Guilmant and Filippo Capocci.

18.               

Tamburini and Ruffatti were the first major Italian companies, in the early 1960s, to resume building mechanical action instruments.

Francesco Ruffatti has been a partner since 1968 of Fratelli Ruffatti, builders and restorers of pipe organs, in Padova, Italy. Besides being the tonal director of the firm, he is actively involved in the research on historical Italian organs and the supervision of the many historical restorations performed by the firm.

As told to John-Paul Buzard, Part 2

The factory

He inherited a factory with a great many organ builders in
it, all beautifully trained, all thoroughly disciplined, possibly partially by
the circumstances of the time, possibly partially by the fact that when my
great uncle Vincent wanted to reprimand anybody, he'd used to say "You
wait until the winter and I'll sack you!" because anybody that was sacked
at the beginning of the winter suffered more than somebody who was sacked in
the spring (it's colder in the winter, and if you haven't got enough to eat,
you suffer more).

The men were treated abominably, but they were treated
better at Willis's than at most other organ builders' shops. They had to bring
their own coal in a bucket to work if they wanted to warm themselves; they had
to bring their own candles to see by. Yes, it sounds like Dickens, but it's
not, it's true! They were paid by results: piecework. And if the work wasn't
good enough, you smashed it and sent it back and said, "There you are, fix
it on your own time. There you are . . . you haven't done your work properly,
your work is rejected, bang! Make another, and you won't get paid while you do
that!"

My granduncle Vincent used to cut up a pipe and nick it. If
it didn't speak without any further adjustment, he used to get hold of the top
end of it and smash it on the bench so that the body collapsed each side of the
languid (I spell it "langward"), and sent it back to the metal shop
to have a different one made. He expected his pipes to come up perfect, cut
them, nick them: finished! And no little naughties like punching languids up or
down.

The factory ran like clockwork.  The orders were still coming in, well enough and fast enough
for him to still build organs in spite of the fact that he was spending many
hours a week in or out of court fighting his relatives, determined to pay off
his father's debt. Which is why my father, when he was an old man, was able so
easily to leave people the impression that as a young man he was in charge of
the business. The fact was that my grandfather, Henry Willis II was well in
charge of the business until the end of the 14-18 war (WWI), the difficulties
with his father's debt, and with his relatives having been settled about the
time of the Great War.

By the time my father took over the firm, after the 14-18
War, Henry Willis II was not only old enough, but suffered from senile dementia
to the point where he used to get up in the night, go down and open the back
door and look in the dust bin for burglars. My aunt says this was partly due to
the strain of having to fight his relatives for about 10 years or so from the
time of his father's death, and responsibilities that he bore beforehand as a
very loyal son and servant without any complaint.

Henry Willis III

My father was very pleased to leave people the impression
that Divine Right passed from "Father" Willis directly to him. Most people
know nothing about Henry Willis II because when my father wrote the book:
Father Willis, His Heir and Successors, by William Leslie Sumner, he was
careful to write the truth as he saw it, in which God created the world,
"Father" Willis created organs, and this ability was passed down
directly to Henry Willis III.

When my father's eldest sister read the book, and read the
bit where it said: "My first work was the design and building of the organ
at the Liverpool Cathedral Lady Chapel . . . " she cried, "I drew
that organ on the drawing boards to my father's instructions, and my little
brother had nothing to do with it at all! 
My little brother only went there as a kind of juvenile laborer to help
put it up!"

 His early works
started when he was a young lad. He left school as a brilliant young man
earlier than most, partly because he was required to come into the family firm,
but partly because he was a brilliant student. He was in a class two years
ahead of his age group. This had other difficulties because they did their
sports together, and as he was two years younger and was never a big man
(5'3”), he had a really strong inferiority complex based on his physical
size. Also, having been brought up in Liverpool, he hadn't been able to
overcome his accent, and in those days any kind of that dialect meant you
weren't a gentleman. 

This he overcame by suppressing his natural sympathies and
his natural affections, and putting on a domineering, dominating, hard-hearted
veneer. He wore it like a well-fitting glove, and he enjoyed it. And he got
away with it. He always remained sitting, and had others stand so that the
difference between their heights should not show as a disparagement. Failing
that, in his office he had an armchair, the wooden legs and the casters of
which were cut off, so that if anyone sat down in it, my father could then
stand, assured that he'd be well above their head and shoulder level.

My father's early tonal work was standard. The work he loved
to do was that which he could take over from somebody else and leave his
imprint upon. The work that you can do that with most conveniently was to
accept a voiced reed and then take the tongues out and alter the curve of them,
because he was a superb reed voicer, to give that little extra edge, what other
people might have well called a great clarity, a greater clang. Some, unkindly
perhaps, a harder tone. But he would take this and do it extremely well. But he
didn't wish to spend time cutting the reeds out and putting the initial curve
on them. He was prepared to put his imprimatur on anything--whether he'd done
it or not! On the grounds that as he was the managing director and a majority
share-holder, he could do what he liked.

He started to develop a new fashionable (or unfashionable)
type of Willis tone whereby he started to make stringier strings. He made
string pipes of zinc right through to the top note, which some people
erroneously believe was for economy, although I can assure that certainly from
one foot up they're so much harder to make than spotted metal or pure tin. They
were by no means economical. He did it on purpose because that was what he
wanted to do. You should remember that, as a matter of his personal attitude to
life in general and himself in particular, whatever he wanted to do was
right.  The fact that he wanted to
do it made it right, and if everybody else thought it was wrong, it didn't
matter because it was still right. And that applied to everything.

But this was part of the man, and it was therefore part of
the voicing. You need to understand that my grandfather was a gentleman and a
gentle man, I hope you took the inference, and this shows in his organs--they
were lovely!  They were more near
to the Harrisons' style than they were to the fiercer Willis style, because he
himself was an affectionate, loving, gentle man. He wasn't doing it to appease
people who wanted gentler organs--it was in his style. And my father: his
personal character comes through in his organs, where you have the firmer,
harder, domineering tone. Dictatorial tutti, the awesome clang of the full
organ reeds, which was not outside the Willis style, but was toward the edge of
that golden-mean path which is a Willis term.

I don't know what he thought of Ernest Skinner. But I know
what he said about Skinner to me. 
Same as he said about almost everybody else: "bloody old
fool!" That was my father's general attitude to almost everybody. But at
the same time he came back having seen and heard what Skinner and others were
doing. This affected his willingness to take after his uncle Vincent by
experimenting: "Well, I'll try a stringy string," and so forth. He
held Skinner in higher regard than most because Skinner was wise enough to ask
him to come as a consultant. And that deserved his high esteem. I've tried to
get you to understand the man, because the man helps understand the tone. The
tone must also come from the man. The big change came really, after the 39-45
war, maybe even the slump, 1929, Wall Street and all that.

The Depression

 This period:
work at a premium. In fact, my father stole his wife's money, which was got
from plantations in India where they grew tea and coffee and rubber. My mother
had inherited wealth, which she brought over here, which she kept quietly to
herself until such time as her husband came to her and said, "Times is
hard, and we must sell you some shares in the firm otherwise we won't be able
to carry on and we'll have to put men off."

Very few men were put off. Other organ builders put lots of
men off; we put off very few. My father didn't need to, because he'd stolen his
wife's money. I say stole because she was never issued with shares of stock,
and she never got the money back. But it didn't worry her very much because she
was a loving wife; she was a domesticated woman and loved her children.

This period is more difficult. My father was more amenable
to the suggestions of anybody who could give the firm an order. This will show
in the specifications; you'll see funny little aberrations creeping in. My
father had always been willing to compensate people in the position to give him
work. Although by this time the question of bribery was illegal, if some
organist was able to persuade the church that it should be replaced by a Willis
organ, was going to suffer loss while the old organ was taken out and the new
put in, because he wasn't able to teach on it or give recitals, then my father
was prepared to compensate him for it.

I have never done this, and I have lost a lot of work.
People have come to me, three of whom stupidly in writing, and have asked
what's it worth to me. Then I was told "I am sorry to hear that, because I
would really like you to do it, but if you aren't prepared to cover my
out-of-pocket losses, then I'm afraid someone else will have to get it instead."
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  They've wanted 12.5%, and I have never
done it. And I've lost a great deal of work.

World War II

My father was in the army during the War, and lied about his
age to get in, as I did later . . . got himself invalided out.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  Some people get a story of armed combat
and purple hearts. This was never the case. My father's stomach problem was not
due to hard-tack (biscuits) and bully beef (corned beef) eaten in the trenches
in some place in France (because he didn't go), but alcohol and other poisons,
consumed as a member of the Honorable Artillery Company in London. They were
digging trenches in Hyde Park lest the Germans invade by being dropped from
zeppelins, which had bombed London then and were responsible for the damage to
the early Willis records from 1845-1873.

I myself was in the Home Guard because residential private
school boys had a special dispensation to join at the age of 16 instead of 18;
they were already disciplined and probably in Officer's Training Corps or
something. Their training was in fact probably far better than most of
established Home Guards. When I went to join the army, having been a Company
Sergeant Major in the Officer's Training Corps and having been a Lance Corporal
in the Home Guard, without looking at the documents in great detail, they
assumed I was two years older than I was.

My father's post-war period began mostly with the rebuilding
and restoration of organs, because we were rationed. A lot of organs were built
up from selected second-hand components. Occasionally my father was able to
imprint his artistic opinions on existing second-hand organs, which he did
notably, to my knowledge, from 1948 onwards when I came out of the army,
somewhat against my will. He wrote and ordered me back home, and I didn't
respond. He wrote again, pleading, and I immediately returned.

He became very good at rebuilding and revoicing. The Willis
voicing techniques are there to control the scaling, because it's standard.
Therefore we are perhaps better trained by ourselves and circumstances to
revoice selected second-hand stock than others; we're used to being given
something and saying, "Right! Do what you will with that!"

I'm restoring the organ in the Alexandra Palace, not
improving it. Successfully, so I'm told, and I believe it. I remember hiding under
the seats there when I was small, before the war, when Marcel Dupré was
playing. He always finished his reputed last encore, which never was his last
encore, with full full full full organ, and if you had double super-octave
couplers and double sub-octave couplers, he would've used them. And as Virgil
Fox said when he finally pushed the Swell unison coupler on at the very end,
looked down at me and grinned, and said, "I like to see 'em all
down!"

My father took to his deathbed in early 1966--died at Easter.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  During the preceding several years, he
was distracted by the fact that by 1966, he was in his 76th year and he married
the widow of G. Donald Harrison. She had suffered a hard life, and she received
treatment for her personal nervous disabilities. These worried my father
intensely. Especially since they to some extent reminded him of the troubles
he'd had with his father toward the end of the 14-18 war. These sorts of things
effect the nervous system, and therefore the artistic deposition of a man. One
of the things I've been grateful for is that I've been blessed with a loving
wife and what I understand is an abnormally serene and happy home background.
For my own artistic side, if I have one, that is essential.

So you come up to the time of my father's death, and that's
the end of the Willis era. Everybody knows that I died.

Henry Willis 4

I was brought up in the fear of God--that's an old fashioned
English expression, and it's in our prayer books. In that language, it means
the love of God. Although my father was a Christian agnostic, if there is such
a thing, my mother was a devout
bent-Christian-oblique-infiltrated-partial-Sikh-Hindu-Buddhist. I was brought
up in the agnostic fear of God, and in the very real fear of my father,
including in the word fear that respectful love that any well brought-up
Victorian child would have had for his father.

My father was often not at home. He was a hard working, hard
drinking, hard romancing active organbuilder who delighted in entertaining organists,
particularly influential organists who could bring him work and adoration
because one without the other was of no use to him. He came home and spent his
Saturday nights there, probably from 2 am onwards, the butler having rescued
him from the car. He could always drive home, but couldn't always switch the
ignition off and get out of the car. The relief of having arrived home and
driven up the drive was sufficient to enable him to relax, and immediately he
was asleep. The butler used to go down and switch the ignition off if the car
hadn't already stalled, because he had been known to take his foot off the
clutch.

On Sunday mornings we were wise to keep quiet as children
and not disturb him. About 9:30 he'd be taken his tray of tea. When I or the butler
had run his bath, we'd inform him it was ready, and it was 108° F. And the
correct amount of bath salts was in, and the towels were on the hot radiator.
My father was not somebody that you tangled with as a child. I was brought up
to know that I had been born to take over the firm. Otherwise I would have
willingly been a farmer, and would have equally willingly stayed in the army,
in which I had already done extremely well.

I started as a general laborer, then a laborer in the metal
shop. Once, for some weeks my father sent me home early (early being after the
men had finished) so he could teach himself again how to make pipes without
admitting to me that he'd forgotten, and then turn 'round to me one day and
say, "You'd be going home, my boy? I thought you wanted me to show you how
to make pipes?" I knew damn well what he'd been doing evenings, even
though he'd tidied most carefully after himself for the last ten weeks. He then
showed me how to make pipes. Then I taught myself. 

The foreman was determined that I shouldn't learn to make
pipes. When he caught on, he took one foot out and put it in the wrong place in
the pile. He shaved a foot so that it didn't fit the body. And he scraped a
body too thin at the node, then re-sized the sides, so that when I put it
together, soon as anybody touched it, it collapsed in the middle.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  All sorts of friendly little tricks.

When my father took me out of the metal shop he said,
"It's time you started voicing, my boy. And here is a second-hand Dulciana
which is going back into some organ we're overhauling and it has to be
revoiced. I will set the 2' C, and I've got another  2' C here which I'm going to voice, and I'm going take the
original away from you and leave you with the sample. I don't want you alter
it. The rest of the stop should be voiced to that. Get on with it."

And I said, "But I don't know how to
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  voice." He said, "Here's your
opportunity. You just regulate them at the tip, and if they're not speaking
properly you get the mouths in the right place like you do in the metal shop;
check the cut-ups, and if they're too high you can take it apart and lower it,
but not too much. Take more than a saw cut out of it and you might make it
short. Make sure they're not over-nicked or under-nicked. Just go from one to
another, it's very simple, you won't find any difficulty."

At the end of about three days--and he left me strictly
alone contrary to his normal habit of calling in and seeing everybody in the
shop twice a day--he always walked past my voicing shop.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  After three days he came in the evening
on his last round and went--blupblupblupblup (trying the stop on the voicing
soundboard) and said "Bloody awful," and walked out!

When I'd dried my tears and mopped up the floor, I went to
Mr. Piper, of whom you may have heard. Richard Piper went to Austin in America,
a well respected, competent, loyal servant, who became well loved at Austin,
and did some excellent, straight-forward work. I said, "Please, Mr. Piper,
my father's just come in and blupblupblupblup, and said 'bloody awful,' and
walked out. Will you please advise me?" And he said, "No, Mr. Henry,
I've been forbidden to tell you or show you anything or help you in any way.
I've been absolutely forbidden to advise you."

I went back in and spent another day or so, and my father
called in again, and blupblupblupblup and said "bloody awful," and
walked out.

So I'd been working on it for over a week. And next time he
came in, I rounded on him, and I seldom rounded on my father because I held him
in that awe and respect which Victorians used to keep for God alone and their
fathers, and I had been brought up in a semi-Victorian aura (not era), treated
my father with very great care. I said, "Will you tell me what's the
matter with it, or tell me what to do?" He said, "blupblupblupblup,
well, you can hear, it's uneven." And he walked out.

After some further time he came back, and I actually lost my
temper a bit, very respectfully and carefully, I may say. And he said, "No
need to get irritable, my boy, I'm just tryin' to teach ya somethin'. Now,
here's the pipe. I told you you weren't to alter the substitute which you've
put in, which you have done, haven't you?"

I said yes, because I had to because . . .
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  He said, "Um, I knew it, I knew
it." He took the 2' C from its wrapping, having put a stamp paper over
with initials on it, and put it on the voicing soundboard, and says, "Now,
what do you notice?"

"Oh, you've come back and loudened it up."
"No I haven't, I assure you I haven't," he said. This is what happens
when you spend too long regulating a stop. The human ear, and the human emotion
always picks out the loud, or what seems loud, and softens it. And rarely picks
out the soft, or what seems soft, and loudens it. So the more somebody tells
you to regulate a stop, the softer it becomes, particularly with a soft stop.
And you will regulate it and regulate it until there's nothing left.

It's partly the imperfections that make the character, make
the artistry. The most beautiful, the most artistic, the most musically useful,
loveliest, emotional organs are those which are made to the best of the ability
of a craftsman working to a reasonable commercial outline. Because if you have
too much money, and too much time and somebody says "carte blanch,"
you can spend 500 hours voicing a Dulciana. By the time you've spent more than
10 or 15 hours, you are only spoiling it. And you will end up with something
which is useless.

One of the great managerial arts is the art of knowing when
you've done enough work, when the responsibilities of management are beginning
to become overbearing, where you could loose your patience or your sanity or
your judgment--that's when you say "good-bye" and take a walk around
the block or go home or get drunk or whatever.

I developed some knowledge of scaling and rebuilding. While
my father was away, an order came in for an organ. I scaled, designed, and
voiced it in my father's style; it was the quickest organ we'd built since my
grandfather's time. When my father came back, I held him in the office until he
refused to stay any longer. I said, "Just before you go out, have a look
at this inquiry that's come in. How does this scaling snatch you?"
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  He went into the drawing office to look
at what I'd done. I then took him to all the places except for the building
hall (erecting room), which I saved till last. When we got there he said,
"What's this!"

"This is the organ." "All right--I'll set the
C's." "Wait, try it first."

He went in and tried the job, right through. He didn't play,
but he knew how to try an organ. He could do it better than I, because I'd been
taught how to play piano at the age of three with a sharp pencil sticking in my
ribs. He said, "The 17th's too soft" and got up and walked off.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  And that was it. After that, after
having always been told I was too soft or too stupid, I was sent up to
Liverpool to restore the organ at St. George's Hall and to rebuild the organ in
the Anglican Cathedral.

I said to my wife, "As long as my father lives, I'll
always stand the likely possibility of being fired if I don't do what he says,
when he says, how he says, quickly without arguing. I would like now, in 1955,
to do something of my own, and I propose to start offering to rebuild organs
without bothering my father." And I did several.

I started to offer the Willis Junior Development Plan, in an
attempt to persuade people of the type of specification I would like. The
Development of an Organ From a One-Manual, Two Stops, No Pedals, Up To a
Moderately Well-Developed Two-Manual--a complete plan, with prices. I started
to build the very first one; it was a two-stop, one-manual organ, on which I
made 50% net profit on the gross. On the other hand, I didn't charge for my
time: about three-million man-hours!

I've got nothing to say about my own work, with the possible
exception of when the International Society of Organbuilders came to London on
their previous English congress about 30 years ago. I managed to get them to
stop to see a one-manual, 4-stop instrument I had built a couple of hundred
yards away from my father's old Kent Road factory.

Dr. Martin Vente, the Secretary of the ISO, and several
others were interested because several people had said that it sounded like
Silbermann's work. They were astounded when they went up the ladders, because
the thing is a box nailed on the wall, 20-30' in the air. They looked at the
pipework and saw how the Gedeckt was very small-scaled and cut up 2/3rd its
mouth width. Perhaps 10-12 nicks in it. The Dulciana (tenor c, common bass) was
also voiced totally incorrectly. The Gemshorn was cut up with an arch, 5 in 2,
16 nicks.  The 15th Diapason was
far too small in scale and cut up far too high.  The way the pipework looked didn't match the sound--like a
musician reading a score, expecting Bach and the noise in his head being Gershwin.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> 

Nevertheless, I accepted all that as a compliment, although
I don't think my stuff sounds like Silbermann.  Certainly those people who are sympathetic with the
gentility of Henry Willis II might be forgiven for thinking that I had cribbed
his style. I must say that I hadn't, because I hadn't been familiar--hadn't
been allowed to become familiar--with Willis II's work whilst I was still under
control of my father in London. Because Henry Willis II didn't exist! It wasn't
until I went up to Lancashire and met several examples that I found what he'd
done.                    

Basil Harwood was born on April 11, 1859, at the family estate called Woodhouse, near Almondsbury, Gloucestershire, England. He received an education that was broader than that of most British organists of the day. In his teens, he studied piano with J. L. Roeckel at Clifton College and organ with George Riseley at Bristol Cathedral, then, after attending Charterhouse School, Godalming, Surrey, took theory and composition with C. W. Corfe while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Oxford. The youngest son of a wealthy Quaker banker, after graduation from Oxford and working briefly in the Bodleian Library there, he followed in the footsteps of other well off young British musicians, like Hubert Parry and Charles Stanford, taking lessons in composition briefly at the Leipzig Conservatory of Music, Germany. His professors there were Carl Reinecke (who had been a pupil of Mendelssohn and Schumann), and Salomon Jadassohn (a past student of Liszt), of whom Harwood said "he taught me much."1 He then began his career as a church organist, occupying posts at St. Barnabas' Church, Pimlico, London (1883-87), Ely Cathedral (1887-1892), and Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford (1892-1909). His father died in 1907, and, being the sole surviving son, two years later he retired from church work in order to assume responsibility for running the Woodhouse estate, and so as to devote his undivided attention to composition. After his death in London on April 3, 1949, his ashes were buried beneath a memorial tablet in the church where his career began, St. Barnabas', Pimlico, London.

By the end of his long life, a significant body of solo organ music had been created, but most of it quickly fell out of fashion after his death. Thanks to Stainer & Bell's 1991 six volume The Complete Works for Organ Solo by Basil Harwood, edited by Kenneth Shenton, organists now have another chance to evaluate this music. Admittedly, some of the pieces have an old-fashioned air, but many of them, arguably retaining a timeless freshness and eloquence, may speak to many of us today.

Prior to examining his output, it might be helpful to mention the backdrop against which the compositions were written. When Harwood began to compose in the 1880s, two main influences were dominant in Victorian organ music. One of these was a home-grown quality, which might take the form of a familiar melodic turn of phrase derived from sources such as popular ballads or hymn tunes, or one might detect an indefinable Victorian atmosphere inherited from one or more of such older contemporary organ composers as Samuel S. Wesley (1810-76), William Best (1826-97), Henry Smart (1818-79) and John Stainer (1840-1901). The other influence frequently found was 19th-century Austro-German style, principally that of Mendelssohn, Rheinberger and Brahms, but also, occasionally, Wagner, Reger, and Karg-Elert.

Furthermore, British organ composers in Harwood's youth tended to write music that fell into two broad genres. One genre appealed primarily to the senses. Pieces in this group might have titles like toccata, postlude, grand choeur and fantasia, and were emotionally highly charged and flashy. Others in this category were in more moderate tempos and were sentimental, with names such as nocturne, andante cantabile, and cantilène. Pieces in the other genre--with such titles as sonata, prelude and fugue, and passacaglia--were more highbrow and reserved in tone. In both genres, but more often in the second, late Baroque or Classical forms and idioms might be blended with more recent features. Many composers did not restrict themselves to writing music in only one of the style groups.

Before he began to compose, the very well educated Harwood had had ample time to become well versed in both the native organ repertoire and in the Continental composers. Perhaps partly because of his upper-class family background, and partly through his being organist in High-Church cathedrals, he adopted a highbrow, stylish, often reserved tone in his music for the instrument.

Harwood established his reputation as a composer of organ music with his very first two works for the instrument, Sonata No. 1 in C-sharp minor, Op. 5, and Dithyramb, Op. 7. While the Sonata bears the hallmark of the composer's individual style, it also shares a number of features found in earlier works in the genre that were popular in Britain, including features of Mendelssohn's sonatas, but especially those of Gustav Merkel (1827-85) and Josef Rheinberger (1839-1901). Harwood's three-movement conception was favored by Merkel and Rheinberger.  Similarly, the contents of various sonata movements by them anticipated the Englishman's: a preludial first movement, marked Allegro appassionato, with affinities to sonata form; mono-thematic, song-like Andante second movement; and Maestoso introduction and con moto double fugue finale. Like Merkel and Rheinberger's sonatas, Harwood's work is pervaded with religious fervor. It calls for a large three-manual Romantic organ with a tuba stop,2 and, to pull it off, requires a first class organist like the dedicatee, Walter Parratt (1841-1924),  whom Harwood admired greatly.

Parratt was the champion of "orthodoxy" and "legitimate organ playing,"3 a school that stressed the playing of works originally written for the instrument, fastidious accuracy of the part-playing, clean phrasing, and simple registration. As a corollary of the "legitimate" approach to organ performance, Parratt argued that those who made the instrument an imitator, "a mere caricature of the orchestra" were corrupt,4 a view that led to heated exchanges in 1891 and 1892 with his chief adversary in this matter, Best.5 He would have approved of Harwood's Sonata, as would Merkel and Rheinberger, who were also not interested in writing for the instrument as an imitator of the orchestra.

The Sonata was completed in 1886, near the end of his tenure of the organistship at St. Barnabas', Pimlico, London, but the young composer, being unknown, had to wait until 1890--by which time he was organist at Ely Cathedral--before he could pursuade Schott to publish the whole work.6 It is still generally regarded as probably his best piece for the instrument, and, until about 1950, was seen as possibly the "finest organ sonata written by an Englishman."7 Was this a reasonable claim? British music critics of the day were not prone to make such extravagent claims for a new, native sonata,8 so one might well ask if there were any grounds for applying "finest" to the work. Probably not, unless one were to add certain qualifications. Thus, it might be tenable to assert that the work was the greatest organ sonata that was endowed with Christian conviction by a native son9 in the last two decades of the 19th century--with Elgar's Sonata in G (1895) possibly being its secular counterpart.

The composition is cyclical, the plainsong hymn tune Beata nobis gaudia,10 which is heard in the first and third movements, binding the work together. In the first movement, following the C-sharp minor first theme and second subject in the relative major, the ancient preexistent theme is heard in the unrelated key of B minor in place of the usual sonata-form development section. The sacred theme reappears as the second fugue subject in the finale, first in E major, then, at the end of the movement, in D-flat major (the enharmonic major form of the work's tonic, C-sharp minor).11 While the five-voice, technically polished, double fugue suffers from being a trifle academic and dull, this may soon be forgotten with the maestoso, fortissimo chordal entry of the Beata nobis gaudia plainsong hymn tune in the manuals, over the first fugue subject in the pedals, at bar 106. Harwood's religous fervor injects into this regal passage, and the coda that follows, such conviction that it is hard to imagine any spiritual person remaining un-moved by such a close.

The satisfaction one may feel from experiencing Sonata No. 1 in C-sharp minor's conclusion is in no small part due to the journey that we are taken on by Harwood. At the outset, he successfully juggles the uneasy mix in the first movement of the predominantly capricious, improvisatory style--that results in several inspired harmonic sparks--with Classical sonata form. Delicately balancing these disparate elements contributes to the troubled, pessimistic, dark mood of the minor-mode opening movement, which leads irresistibly along a Romantic path to the jubilant, brilliant light that shines out in the tonic-major close of the score.

 Dithyramb, Op. 7 (composed 1892; published 1893), was also widely admired12 for many decades after its appearance. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the title "Dithyramb" has tended to be applied to music of a passionate, Dionysian character. Harwood's composition is passionate at times, but not Dionysian. Indeed, it had never been his intention to write a wild "Bacchanalian hymn."13 It was to have been the first movement of a second sonata, with the Interlude, Op. 15, No. 2, and Paean, Op. 15, No. 3, being the second and third movements. On the advice of Parratt,14 the composer published the three pieces separately instead.

As in the first movement of the Sonata, Harwood uses Classical first-movement form loosely in Dithyramb. There is an exposition with motivic, fragmented F major first theme and lyrical, legato second group of themes in D flat (bar 24); a development section (bar 65) which is concerned with the first theme and only one theme of the second group; and recapitulation with second themes now in tonic. The character of Dithyramb, however, is not related to the Viennese Classical molds. Almost Lisztian in character, there are Romantic vascillations between loud bombastic passages, and soft, tenderly prayerful ones, with the transitions often improvisatory recitatives or cadenzas that are studied with fluctuating tempo and dynamic markings. Thick-textured sections are juxtaposed with transparent, the latter with many rests and two-part writing. The work's rich ornamentation, and pianistic passage-work and high tessituras, not features of Sonata No. 1, are prophetic of the composer's manner over the middle years of his career.

At the time of its publication, Harwood announced that Dithyramb was to be the first of Twenty-four Original Compositions for the Organ, and he carried out this goal.  Completed in 1931 and filling 245 pages, the 24 pieces are as follows:

1.              Dithyramb, Op. 7 (1893).

2-7. Six Pieces, Op. 15 (1903).

Communion

Interlude

Paean

Short Postlude for Ascensiontide

Requiem Aeterna

Andante Tranquillo

8.              Capriccio, Op. 16 (1904).

9.              Two Sketches, Op. 18 (1905).

No. 1 in A major

No. 2 in F major

10.           Concerto in D major for Organ and Orchestra, Op. 14(1910).15

11.           Three Cathedral Preludes, Op. 25 (1911).

No. 1 in B flat

No. 2 in E

No. 3 in C

12.           Sonata No. 2 in F-sharp minor, Op. 26 (1912).

1st. mt. Lento ma non troppo

2nd mt. Allegretto serioso

3rd mt. Allegro moderato

13.           Christmastide, Op. 34 (1920).

14.           In an Old Abbey, Op. 32 (1923).

15.           Rhapsody, Op. 38 (1922).

16.           Wedding March, Op. 40 (1924).

17.           Three Preludes on Anglican Chants, Op. 42 (1925).

No. 1 On a Chant by Benjamin Cooke (1734-1793)

No. 2 On a Chant by Matthew Camidge (1758-1844)

No. 3 On a Chant by Lord Mornington (1735-1781)

18.           Voluntary in D flat, Op. 43 (1926).

19.           Processional, Op. 44 (1926).

20.           Three Short Pieces, Op. 45 (1928).

No. 1 in D

No. 2 in A minor

No. 3 in A flat

21.           In Exitu Israel, Op. 46 (1928).

22.           Toccata, Op. 49 (1930).

23.           Lullaby, Op. 50 (1930).

24.           Prelude, Larghetto and Finale, Op. 51 (1931).

Before his death, Harwood wrote five more works. Four of these were published in his lifetime:

Two Preludes on Old English Psalm Tunes, Op. 52 (1932).

I. Salisbury

II. Old 132nd

Two Meditations, Op. 57 (1935).

1. The Shepherd on the Mountainside

2. The Pilgrims nearing the Celestial City

Album of Eight Pieces, Op. 58 (1935).

                  I:              Invocation

                  II:            Eventide

                  III:          Communion

                  IV:          Rest

                  V:            Prelude for Lent

                  VI:          Diapason Movement

                  VII:        Benediction

                  VIII:      The Shepherds at the Manger

A Quiet Voluntary for Evensong, Op. 70 (1946).

The fifth work, Reverie, had been written in 1926 for the Canadian virtuoso organist, Lynnwood Farnam, and was planned for publication in Canada.  It underwent revision in 1931, but remained unpublished until its inclusion in Stainer & Bell's 1991 Complete Works edition. This Reverie and the Sonata No. 1 were the only Harwood works for organ not originally published by Novello.

The composer was at the peak of his career as a Cathedral organist at the beginning of the 20th century, and some regard, with justification, the Six Pieces, Op. 15 (1903) as the high point of his organ output. The collection is a miscellaneous collection stylistically, there being pieces indebted to the Baroque, and others reminiscent of Brahms. Well settled into his organistship at Oxford by 1903, the stops specified in Opus 15 correlate almost exactly with those found on the Christ Church Cathedral Father Willis, four-manual instrument, so there seems no reason to doubt that he wrote with that organ in mind. The Oxford Cathedral instrument was a medium sized British cathedral organ, with 39 speaking stops, half of which were 8-foot stops; only two mixtures, three 2-foot ranks, and one mutation rank.17 Registrations for the Six Pieces, typical of his entire organ output, are mostly of a rather general nature, though there are a few registration features that might be singled out, because they appear in the Six Pieces and in many of the subsequent works. Harwood is precise in his indications as to the manual(s) to be utilized at any given place in a score, but only occasionally indicates where 8, 4, and 2-foot ranks (never mutations or mixtures) should be used. Full swell was marked, and fluctuations in dynamics were indicated by the appropriate symbols, so that he clearly looked for a fair amount of swell-box expression. Solo tuba lines were always indicated, while solos for clarinet and oboe, accompanied unobtrusively on another manual supported with pedal, remained a favorite combination in the ensuing years.

Four of the Six Pieces are based on sacred preexistent melodies. Nos. 1 and 4 are chorale preludes in the Bach tradition at a time when the German composer's music in the genre was not widely known in Britain,18 due partly, perhaps, to their being based on German hymn tunes that were hardly ever sung in Britain. In choosing hymn tunes with which native congregations were familiar, therefore, Harwood improved the chances of his two chorale preludes being appreciated. In No. 1, Communion (On the Hymn Tune "Irish"), the composer places the melody in a slightly embellished form in the soprano, and brief interludes separate the tune phrases. The simple approach is that taken by Bach in his Orgelbüchlein, but, while the hymn tune has Bachian embellishments here and there, Harwood's lower voices are essentially chordal, instead of polyphonic like Bach's. Again, Bach is the distant ancestor of Harwood's Short Postlude for Ascensiontide On the "Old 25th" Psalm Tune, the fourth of the set, in its pervasive counterpoint and presentation of the melody in the soprano in long tones like an ancient cantus firmus, but the rich late 19th-century harmonies and general style are pure Brahms.19

The last two of the Six Pieces are also founded on preexistent sacred themes and are also built on the chorale prelude principle. Harwood had been pleased with the use of plainsong at St. Barnabas, Pimlico,20 and this influence in his formative years led to his using the ancient themes from time to time in his music.  The first occasion was in the Fifth of the Six Pieces, titled Requiem Aeternam, where three musical phrases from the Introit of the Roman Catholic Missa pro defunctis are quoted in the central section.  A reflective work, suitable for performance on solemn occasions such as All Saints' and All Souls' Day, the composer wrote the piece after witnessing a Requiem in the church at Dinant, Brittany, France.21 Later, the composer tried to capture his impressions of this funeral service in Requiem Aeternam, including his recollections of the massive bells producing many harmonic effects in the cavernous Dinant church, and the priest singing the plainsong melody accompanied in unison by a euphonium. Harwood does not follow the centuries old tradition of converting the ancient chant into a barred, metric, tonal version. Instead, he leaves it untouched, to be played senza tempo, in an ethereal, atmospheric setting.22 Encompassing the central plainsong section are a solemn prelude and postlude, which are built over a pedal line that seems to be vaguely derived from the Gregorian chants of the middle. A repeated pedal E-flat resounds like funereal muffled drum beats, and the work closes with a reference to the opening of the Requiem aeternam chant in the tonic E minor. The last of the Six Pieces, the Lenten Andante Tranquillo on the Hymn Tune "Bedford," is, again, based on a Baroque chorale prelude form, but is Brahmsian in idiom.

Interlude, Op. 15, No. 2, marked Lento con espressione, has echoes of Bach and Mendelssohn. It is pervaded with syncopations and grace notes, and features a sweet clarinet solo that is similar in its shapely lyricism to an oboe solo at the end of No. 5. Modest in utterance, this meditation is perhaps as sublime as anything he wrote for the organ.

In Harwood's 19th-century organ music, notably the outer movements of Sonata No. 1, and Dithyramb, the composer demonstrated a taste for brilliance and bravura. The same characteristics are found in the third of the Six Pieces, Paean. Parratt premiered the work at the reopening of the newly rebuilt J. W. Walker organ at York Minster on April 15, 1903, having been handed the manuscript of the as yet unpublished work as he was leaving Windsor for York on the day of the recital. There does not appear to have been an eye witness report of the performance,23 but, when W. Henry Goss-Custard24 played Paean at the dedication of the new Henry Willis 168 speaking stop instrument in Liverpool Cathedral on October 18, 1926, a writer observed that:

In this work many tonal combinations were displayed; contrasts of one department with another; and a gradual working up of tone towards the exciting finale, until the cathedral was ringing with joyful sound; when, suddenly, the ear was arrested by a new tone. The mighty tuba magna, with its colossal and glorious voice, was heard for the first time.25

In 1949, Harwood's head boy chorister and soloist between 1900-02 at Christ Church Cathedral, recalled the composer playing Paean, which was composed in 1902, from manuscript.  "One could hardly imagine that such a quiet and gentle person," who was affectionately nicknamed "Billy" behind his back by the boys in the choir, "a shortish man with sandy-coloured hair, a well-kept beard and a sprightly walk . . . could have produced and performed [as he did] such fiery music for the organ." He remembered Harwood more for his "reverent and devotional playing . . . his humility and charming old-world courtesy."26 This observation sums up fairly well Harwood as an organist. Despite the difficulty of a number of his organ works, it should not be assumed that this was a reflection of the composer's own technical prowess.  Not a virtuoso, "Harwood was apt to be uneven though on occasions he could be very fine."27 From innumerable instances in the oeuvre, and because he was a cathedral organist where such ability is a sine qua non, one might guess that he was an excellent improviser.

In loose sonata form, Paean is characterized by the Harwoodian liking for chromaticism,28 in both terms of extensive modulation and coloring of common chords with chromatic embellishing tones. Like Wagner, however, he often accentuates the great moments by a return to diatonicism,  as, for example, at the triumphal start of the Brahmsian first theme at the beginning of the piece, the recapitulation (bar 89), and its last appearance at the entry of the solo tuba at the close of the coda (bar 162). Symphonic in concept, Paean  ideally calls for a Romantic, orchestral organ such as most British cathedrals possessed at the time of its composition. 

Capriccio, Op. 16 (1903) was perhaps an expression of the composer's romantic feelings towards the dedicatee, his wife of four years, Mabel Jennings, who was, incidentally, an accomplished pianist and composer.29 The high flown, agitated, troubled  atmosphere of the D minor thirty-second-note manual broken chords, to be played Tempo irresoluto, over a slower-moving pedal line in the opening and third sections, perhaps recapture the din of the mighty bells reverberating around the Dinant church mentioned above. Are these sections the outcome of Harwood's poetic improvising? Certainly this would account for the dramatic surprise at the end of the opening section, a quasi cadenza (bars 30-35). The passage passionately rises sequentially, stringendo, from the home key of D minor to a fortissimo tonally ambiguous pivot chord, which may be either seen as the supertonic chromatic ninth chord with the root omitted, or the dominant minor ninth with the root omitted in A major (the dominant of the D major next section). This dramatic effect finds release, after a general pause, in a lyrical, sunny, joyous, slower second section. After a return to the D minor flurry of the opening, Harwood's calm after the storm is a peaceful F major chorale prelude setting of Orlando Gibbons' hymn tune Song 13 .

Although Harwood was a church organist for less than a third of his long life, in his music for the instrument he never seems to have left the cathedral organ loft, at least in spirit. This may be seen in the Three Cathedral Preludes, which illustrate Harwood's church service prelude style at it best, it might be argued. Their composition was the result of his happy associations with southwest England. Born on the family estate in Gloucestershire, the composer's association with the Three Choirs Festival was lifelong, especially the Gloucester Festival, where first performances of several of his major choral works were given.30 In 1911, as a token of respect and gratitude for their friendship and assistance in his career, Harwood dedicated the Three Cathedral Preludes to the three Cathedral organists of the day, A. Herbert Brewer of Gloucester, G. R. Sinclair of Hereford, and Ivor Atkins of Worcester, respectively, There is nothing programmatic in them,31 except that they convey the impression of a cathedral organist improvising in a dignified, spacious building before a service.

No. 1 in B-flat is a microcosm of Harwood's peaceful, reflective type of prelude. Example 1 shows the theme on which the piece is based as it is enunciated at the outset.  The composer's musical fingerprints here include a) triplets within the duple meter; b) expressive use of dissonance, as, for example, the suspension in bar 3 (F suspension in the solo clashing against G flat in the accompaniment), and cross relations in bars 3 and 4 (involving E naturals and E flats). (See Example 1.)

Two other characteristics of the first Prelude might be pointed out. First, there is extensive chromatic coloring. See, for instance, the use of the minor triad on the subdominant in a major key in bar 10, and the quite Wagnerian serpentine, chromatic unaccompanied solo cadenza at bars 12 and 13, marked with a series of indications for tempo and dynamics (poco accel. a piacere; rall. e dim.; lento; pp). Second, a keen sense of effective organ sonorities. In Example 2, a Brahmsian sense of nostalgia, and autumnal coloring, is partly the result of the low tessitura of all the parts, with crossing of hands and the final chord's top voice being played by the right foot.

The second of the Three Cathedral Preludes is also peaceful and reflective in atmosphere. The third gradually rises to a resounding fortissimo close. Like the first two, the principal theme of the last Prelude is heard at the start, and there follow several variations on the material, which are interspersed with bridge passages that continue to develop the theme. Harwood builds up from a restrained start to a coda in which he releases a torrent of noble, grandiose emotion that rises to a tense, forceful climactic close.

To believe that the Sonata No. 2 in F-sharp minor, Op. 26 (1912), dedicated to Harwood's predecessor at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, Charles Harford Lloyd, was composed for the thirteen-stop, three-manual instrument built by Bishop and Son for Harwood on his retirement home at Woodhouse defies reality, despite words to that effect printed in parenthesis under the title in the score.32 The lush harmonies and melodies, romantic moods, and symphonic demands of this sonata ideally call for a four-manual instrument along the lines of the Christ Church Cathedral organ, with which he was very familiar. The work, in four movements, the last two played without break, show his characteristic fondness for triplets and grace notes, which had first appeared in Dithyramb. What is new for Harwood in Sonata No. 2, especially in the monothematic sonata form first movement, though cropping up also in the other movements, are perhaps an excessive use of pianistic features associated with Chopin and Schumann, such as complex ornamental filigrees and extended right-hand octave passage-work. These, and Chopinesque frequent detailing of tempo changes that Harwood calls for in the shaping of phrases, may be seen in Example 3.

Other features of the work are the Romantic yearning in the Brahmsian first movement, the gentle, transparent-textured second movement, an Allegretto serioso scherzo in 7/4, and the slow fourth movement, Arietta. This last movement is placid except for a turbulent cadenza near the end, may remind one of the Brahms of the late Intermezzi, in the tonic major.

Eight years passed before the next organ work appeared. This was Christmastide, Op. 34, a fantasia written for the reopening of the Gloucester Cathedral organ in 1920.33 A large-scale programmatic piece that depicts parts of the Christmas story, the score is interspersed with Biblical and liturgical quotations. The first half, in which the text "What joy shall be in the midst of affliction"34 is expressed, is newly composed.  The start of the second half is based on the plainsong Sarum Sequence for Christmas Day, much of which is unmetered, like his treatment of the plainsong in Requiem Aeternam, Op. 15, No. 5. The close of the work is based on the Office Hymn for Candlemas. There are the usual Harwood musical fingerprints. For example, there is writing for the instrument along lines similar to that of the contemporary symphony orchestra--fondness for soloing of melodies played on oboe and clarinet stops, and dramatic shifts in dynamics, sometimes involving crescendos achieved by skillful manipulation of the swell box, and, at climaxes, sometimes involving judicious use of the tuba stop. Another characteristic of the composer in Christmastide is the classical balance in the tonal scheme. He modulates from minor at the start to major half way through--F minor; B-flat minor; A-flat major; F major; B-flat major; F major--the music mirroring the uncertainty of the Old Testament prophecy of Christ's coming giving way to New Testament joy when the Messiah is born.

In an Old Abbey was first conceived for cello and organ in 1919, then arranged for cello and piano, before being finally arranged for organ in 1923.  The dedication of the organ version, to Henry Ley, Harwood's friend and successor at Christ Church, Oxford, suggests that perhaps the "Abbey" the composer had in mind is the medieval monastery priory that became Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, in the 16th century.35 Perhaps he is inviting his listener to envisage the sturdy Norman arches, the fan tracery of the choir vault, and lovely stained glass of the east-end rose window of an ancient church of which he is very fond, Oxford Cathedral?  Be this as it may, there is nothing archaic in the music:  this is late Victorian soiree music.

A sentimental, idealistic mood characterizes In an Old Abbey. Sentimentality pervades the introduction (bars 1-14), which opens in the "wrong" key of E major (the work is in E-flat). Expressiveness in these opening bars is achieved mainly by means of embellishing tones and a chromatic, modulating, developing sequence. In bars 1 and 2, the sequential phrase features the major common chord on the flat submediant in the major key, approached by, and resolving to, the dominant seventh chord in E major. The next step of the sequence, in C-sharp minor, is approached by means of a common-tone modulation. Finally, after several more steps in the evolving, chromatically unstable sequence, tonal bearings are finally established, and expectations are aroused, with dominant preparation beginning at bar 7. The noble principal melody is long (bars 15-30) and, reflecting its cello origins possibly, is wide-ranging, with big romantic leaps. Harwood yanks one from the E-flat of the main theme to the opening B major of the middle section (bar 31) by means of another common-tone modulation, and follows this almost immediately with another abrupt modulation using the same technique in moving from B major to B-flat minor (bar bar 33). In the 1920s, the composer's pursuit of new chromatic colorings led to tolerance of greater, fleeting dissonances that are usually explained by his emphasis of horizontal consideration, of voice leading, rather than vertical outcomes. Such is the case at bar 35, where B-natural, C-sharp, G-sharp and both E-natural and E-sharp, collide simultaneously.  Similarly, at bar 60, there is a harsh crunch when E-flat, C-natural, D-natural, and F-natural are heard together.   Direct quotations and reminiscences of the work's introduction and principal theme, replete with suspensions, appoggiaturas, and upper and lower neighboring tones, make up the nostalgic coda of In an Old Abbey.

The inception of Rhapsody took place when Harwood was examining at the Royal College of Music, London, in 1922 with Walter Alcock (1861-1947)   and Parratt.  Themes that were used by the composer in the examinations were incorporated into the work, and it was dedicated to Alcock, who was already known for his magnificent performances of Harwood's organ music.36 Although a follower of Brahms in style, he does not follow the German's sonata form of the two famous piano Rhapsodies, Op. 79, as Harold Darke had done in his organ Rhapsody, Op. 4 (1908). Nor is there any apparent indebtedness to Herbert Howells' three organ Rhapsodies, Op. 17 (1919), which are loose in form but centered around one principal theme.  Instead, Harwood casts his work in the style initiated by Liszt's 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies (1846-86) that was more commonly adopted by a number of European composers for subsequent 19th- and early 20th-century rhapsodies.37 Thus, Harwood's is in a loose, episodic form; has exaggerated mood contrasts; and quotes a preexistent theme, an untitled  hymn tune by Thomas Tallis.38 Written only four years after the conclusion of the terrible loss of life in World War I, one might hypothesize that Harwood's Rhapsody is an elegy for that carnage. Harwood avoided talking in public about his music, and we know nothing of his thoughts on the matter.  In any case, the work is funereal. A section near the beginning labeled Funeral March returns for a lengthy development later.  Tallis' solemn hymn tune appears in a dignified, forceful manner in the second of three trio sections, with Joseph Addison's text, "When, rising from the bed of death," inscribed parenthetically under the melody in the score, and this melody reappears in the final bars of the piece. Although Harwood's craftsmanship is as fine as ever, one may wonder if it is,  in fact, an artifice, a collage of six unrelated melodies used by the three examiners at the Royal College in 1922.  This impression may be felt, for instance, when, near the end, out of the blue, a three-voice fugal exposition emerges on a thematic idea not heard before.

Among the people that Harwood met at the regular concerts and soirees held at his country home of Woodhouse shortly after 1909, was a highly gifted, young, likable pianist and organist named Douglas G. A. Fox. Shortly after completing distinguished studies by means of organ scholarships at the Royal College of Music College and Keble College, Oxford, Fox tragically had his right arm amputated just above the elbow in a battle in France in late August, 1917, during World War I. For this cocourageous musician, Harwood composed Voluntary in D-flat for left hand and feet.39

Among the remaining Harwood compositions for the instrument, it is harder to find works that rise above the bland.  Was the well of inspiration running dry? Whether or not this is true, one may detect with assurance a change in Harwood's style at this time.  Following the general trend in British organ music in the 1920s, and starting with the Three Preludes on Anglican Chants, he returned to the simpler, less chromatic voice leading of the First Sonata.

This may be seen in the Album of Eight Pieces, which were written between November, 1934, and March, 1935. Programmatic, technically easy miniatures, at the top of each, the title and a line or two from a hymn points to what Harwood is portraying. No. 3, Communion On a French Hymn Melody, cites the opening lines, "Therefore we, before Him bending, this great Sacrament revere," of the fourth verse of Thomas Aquinas' hymn text "Now, my tongue, the mystery telling" and is a chorale prelude on the hymn tune Grafton. First, the preexistent melody is presented in straightforward half and quarter notes as a baritone solo for the left hand, with equally unembellished right-hand and pedal accompaniment. Then the preexistent theme is soloed, slightly ornamented, in the treble register. It is in this varied treatment of the theme that Harwood rises, perhaps, above the average. Here, he captures  exquisitely the Holy Communion sentiments associated with the text and melody, not the least through frequent expressive use of dissonance--appoggiaturas, suspensions, and chromatically inflected tones either singly or in combination--and eloquent little melodic twists in the soprano line. In No. 6, Diapason Movement, we catch a glimpse of the old noble, ebullient side in Harwood's response to the opening line of Henry F. Lye's hymn text based on Psalm 103, "Praise, my soul, the King of heaven," which he achieves without any reference to John Goss' famous hymn tune usually associated with this text. As with No. 3, though the mood in No. 6 is different, there are the same fleeting dissonant crunches created mostly by bold suspensions, appoggiaturas, and numerous cross relations. Unlike the third work, however, chromatic coloring is achieved quite frequently through secondary dominants and common-tone modulations.

The organ pieces of the later years have occasional moments of intuitive truth such as one may detect in Diapason Movement of the Album of Eight Pieces. By and large, though, Harwood, now over seventy years old, was unable, or unwilling, to break free of his Victorian/Brahms roots. Unfortunately, this left his last music sounding dated, at a time when the works of post-Victorians, such as Herbert Howells and Percy Whitlock, were emerging.           

Notes

                  1.              Lancelot G. Bark, "Basil Harwood, 1859-1949," The Musical Times, XC (May, 1949), 165.

                  2.              Harwood's sole registration indication in the whole work is for a tuba on the last page of the score.

                  3.              Walter G. Alcock, The Organ (1913), p. 101.

                  4.              Walter Parratt, Music in the Reign of Queen Victoria (1887), Vol. 2, p. 604.

                  5.              Recorded by Henry C. Lahee, The Organ and Its Masters (1902), pp. 219-22. See also W.T. Best's letter of May, 1892, printed as "Organ Arrangements," in The Organ, I (July, 1921), 58-61.

                  6.              In 1887, Schott published the middle movement under the title Andante Pour Orgue.

                  7.              Lancelot G. Bark, op. cit.

                  8.              See William S. Newman, The Sonata Since Beethoven (2nd edition, 1972), pp. 575-92.

                  9.              His use of a preexistent hymn tune here was the first of a number of times that he quoted hymn tunes in his organ works.

                  10.           The melody is from a Constance Psalter titled Psalterium Chorale, printed at Mainz, Germany, in 1510. See Hymn 185, The English Hymnal (1933).

                  11.           Harwood was clearly attracted to hymn tunes old and new. He wrote a number of them--the best known being Thornbury--and was editor of The Oxford Book (1908), he quoted them in several of his organ works.

                  12.           Henry Ley, Harwood's successor as organist at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford (1909-1926), said that Elgar much admired the work and wished to orchestrate it. See William H. Harris, "Basil Harwood--1859-1948 (sic)," English Church Music, XXIX, No. 2 (June, 1959), 44.

                  13.           Wilfrid Mellers, "The IAO Jubilee at York," The Musical Times, CIX (October, 1978), 886.

                  14.           Henry Ley, "Basil Harwood, 1859-1949," English Church Music, XIX, No. 3 (July, 1949), 40.

                  15.           Omitted from this discussion, because it is not for organ solo. The work was performed at the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester that year with Harwood as soloist. For an account of it, see [no author] "Dr. Basil Harwood's New Organ Concerto," The Musical Times, LI (October, 1910), 641. The score calls for an orchestra of strings, brass, percussion, harp and celesta, but no woodwinds. Harwood does not write for soloist and orchestra as protagonists, as is usual in the genre, but requires both entities to play almost the whole time. There is a glissando on the pedals.

                  16.           The last work published in his lifetime.

                  17.           For the complete specification, see Andrew Freeman, "Organs of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford," The Organ, XI (July, 1931), 35-42.

                  18.           Nicholas Temperley, Music in Britain: The Romantic Age 1800-1914 (1981), p. 448. As late as 1922, Ivor Atkins, "British Organ Music," The Musical Times, LXIII (October, 1922), 685, asserted that Bach's chorale preludes for organ appeared to have been "practically unknown to all but the most adventurous of Bach's English followers."

                  19.           Over fifty years later, Healey Willan was still composing organ chorale preludes like these in his three sets of ten Hymn Preludes.

                  20.           A Tractarian parish built on the edge of the parish of St. Paul's Church, Knightsbridge, London, and consecrated in 1850.

                  21.           R. Meyrick Roberts, The Organ at Liverpool Cathedral (1926), pp. 36-37.

                  22.           George Oldroyd (1886-1951) was to follow this approach for his Three Liturgical Preludes (1938) and Three Liturgical Improvisations (1948).

                  23.           Vernon Blackburn, "York Minister," The Musical Times, XLIV (May, 1903), 302, appends Parratt's program, but no critical commentary.

                  24.           Organist of Liverpool Cathedral (1917-55).

                  25.           R. Meyrick Roberts, The Organ at Liverpool Cathedral (1926), pp. 36-37.

                  26.           Claude Williams, "Basil Harwood 1859-1949," English Church Music, XIX, No. 3 (July, 1949), 41.

                  27.           Bark, op. cit., p. 166.

                  28.           See C.V. Stanford, Interludes: Records and Reflections (1922), p. 96.

                  29.           Harwood was to dedicate Wedding March to Mabel. It was written in 1923 and revised for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary the next year.

                  30.           They included Inclina Domine (1898), Love Incarnate (1925), and Ye Choirs of New Jerusalem (1928).

                  31.           Such as was the case with Richard Hall's Three Cathedral Voluntaries (1936), which bear the sibtitles York, Ripon and Durham.

                  32.           For the instrument's specification, see Kenneth Shenton, "The Organ Music of Basil Harwood," The Organ, LXX (October, 1991), 208.

                  33.           The work was, according to the note in the score, "composed for the reopening of the organ at Gloucester Cathedral, 1920." However, the Cathedral Organist, Herbert Brewer, to whom the work is dedicated, played Harwood's First Sonata at the dedication service on November 19.  See [no author] "Gloucester Cathedral Organ," The Musical Times, LXI (December, 1920), 825. William Faulkes (1863-1933) had composed an organ piece along similar lines in 1907, Fantasia on Old Christmas Carols, Op. 103. Faulkes' style is fairly unsophisticated, and he focuses on three carols, rather than mainly reflecting on Biblical texts, like Harwood.

                  34.           The text is not, in fact, a part of the Bible, but a prefatorial phrase provided by the translators of the King James Version (1611) for 28 Isaiah, IX.

                  35.           There is no evidence, however, that Harwood had any specific church in mind.

                  36.           Harris recalled Alcock playing "magnificently" the Sonata No. 1 around 1900 at Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Street, London. See William H. Harris, "Basil Harwood--1859-1949," English Church Music, XXIX, No. 2 (June, 1959), 44.

                  37.           For example, Vaughan Williams' orchestral Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 (composed 1905; published 1925).

                  38.           No. 92, The English Hymnal (1906), which Vaughan Williams had used for his Fantasia on a Theme by Thoms Tallis (1910; revised 1925) for strings.

                  39.           For a full obituary tribute to Fox, see David Willcocks, "Douglas Fox," Royal College of Music Magazine, Vol. 74, No. 3 (October, 1978), pp. 119-21.

Bradley Rule received a Bachelor of Arts in Organ Performance from the University of Tennessee, from which he graduated with high honors in 1982. From 1982 to 1988 he worked for the Andover Organ Company in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and at this firm he encountered hundreds of different kinds of mechanical-action organs.
After working nearly six years at Andover Organ Co., Mr. Rule returned to his home of East Tennessee and began business for himself. He set up shop in the old St. Luke Presbyterian Church building in New Market, Tennessee, a venerable old brick building which has served admirably as an organ building shop. Mr. Rule has built and restored organs from Alabama to Massachusetts in the years since 1988.
In addition to his lifelong pursuit of organbuilding, Bradley Rule has held various positions as organist or organist/director from 1976 until 1991, at which point his organbuilding business began to demand his undivided attention. During these years, his organist activities included playing concerts and making recordings, in addition to the usual weekly church duties.

While completing the installation of a new organ in the
Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in late 1998, I was drawn into a
conversation between Will Dunklin, the organist, and Marian Moffett, a viol da
gamba player who is a member of a local early music ensemble. Marian indicated
an interest in acquiring a small chamber organ for her home, which would be
appropriate as a continuo instrument for early (particularly English) music.
After briefly discussing prices, both Will and myself commented that an early
American organ (pre-1860) would possess many of the tonal characteristics
required for such a use, as well as providing its own historical interest.
Besides, restoration of such an instrument would likely be quite economical
compared to the price of a new organ.

After checking with the Organ Clearing House, we found
nothing small enough for such a use, and the matter got shelved in the back of
my mind. About a year later, I received a message from Marian that Will had
found a small American chamber organ on eBay, for sale by a doctor in Michigan.
After some negotiation, she purchased the organ and went with Will in a rented
van, returning two days later with said instrument. In such a serendipitous
series of events, then, did this enigmatic and charming little instrument fall
into my hands for the purpose of restoration.

Provenance

Establishing the provenance of the instrument was the first
item of interest; since the organ sat in the shop for a year before work could
commence, it gave me some time to pursue the subject. Alas, despite our efforts,
the little instrument still remains anonymous. The following, however, are some
of the identifying characteristics pertinent to its provenance.

The cabinet holds a number of clues, which help us make some
general conclusions. The cabinet (as well as the chest and internal framework)
is made of eastern white pine, with a smattering of cherry and black walnut.
This clearly identifies it as an American-made instrument. The Empire case,
with its ubiquitous crotch mahogany veneer and late Empire styling, seems to
place it between about 1845-1855. According to Barbara Owen, the cabinet looks
like the work of early Connecticut builders. This dovetails nicely with the
oral history we received from the previous owner, who had been told that the
organ was built for the Lockwood family of Norwalk, Connecticut. Apart from
these general observations, the cabinet holds another clue: the ripple
moldings, which appear in several shapes and sizes. According to an article by
Carlyle Lynch in the magazine Fine Woodworking (May/June 1986, pp. 62-64), such
molding was made by only one company in America, the Jonathan Clark Brown clock
company in Bristol, Connecticut. This company made the gew gaw covered clocks
known as steeple clocks, but after the factory burned in 1853, J. C. Brown
clocks no longer were made with the unique ripple moldings. Such moldings
require an elaborate, slow-moving machine for their manufacture, and the
machine was evidently never rebuilt. If the builder purchased his ripple
moldings from the clock company, then it is clear the instrument was built
before 1853.

The hardware found on and in the instrument provides more
tantalizing hints as to the organ's provenance. The mix of early factory-made
components with other hardware which is clearly hand-made seems to place the
organ on the very cusp of the Industrial Revolution. For instance, the lock for
the keydesk lid bears unmistakable marks of being handmade: all parts were hand
filed out of solid brass, and then fitted together with hand-threaded screws. Yet,
the hinges which occur in various places (e.g., swell pedal, main reservoir)
are all of cast iron and bear the name "Clark's Patent." While a bit
crude (they certainly are not interchangeable), they bear all the signs of
early factory production. An additional item of interest is that one leaf of
each hinge was cast around the pin while the pin was inserted into the other
leaf. This makes it impossible for the pin to ever work its way out; it also
makes it impossible to separate one leaf from the other, short of a sledge
hammer.

The most interesting piece of hardware is the square iron
roller for the swell mechanism. Clearly stamped on the bar is the word CLYDACH.
It turns out that Clydach was a Welsh ironworks established in 1793, continuing
in production until about 1858. I'm not sure what this reveals about early
American sources of iron and steel. Of course, it is possible that the builder
recycled the piece of iron from an older apparatus or structure.

Finally, even the humble wood screws give us some
information. They are a mix of the earlier blunt ended screws and the more
modern pointed screws, and all but one or two were clearly made by a machine.
This also seems to point to about 1850-1855, although I am unsure when the more
modern pointed wood screws became available. The E. & G.G. Hook organ of
1847 in Sandwich, Massachusetts, was put together entirely with blunt ended
machine-made screws, so it seems that modern wood screws came along a few years
later.

One intriguing note is written (sometimes scrawled) on
almost every piece of the instrument. The message "No. 2" can be
found on the bellows, keyboard, backboard, knee panel, etc. The inescapable
conclusion is that there must be (or must once have been) a "No. 1"
lurking out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

The reader is left to draw his own conclusions about the
provenance of the instrument. Clearly, the Empire style and the handmade
hardware place the instrument no later than about 1855. The wood screws fit
into the time frame of about 1850. The oral history as well as the general
design of the case place the builder in Connecticut. We were unable to find
information about "Clark's Patent" hinges, and CLYDACH presents more
an enigma than it does an answer. Perhaps a reader will recognize one of these
items and shed a bit more light on the history of this little instrument.

Restoration techniques

The following describes the techniques and materials used
for the restoration. An astute reader will occasionally see the tension which occurs
when the desire to restore the organ to its original state is not always in the
best interest of the customer. Ultimately, we did almost nothing to the
instrument which could not be easily reversed later. Additionally, we took
great care to avoid removing any original material (no pipe tops were trimmed,
and even the finish was not entirely removed).

Cabinet

Failing joints were disassembled when practical and re-glued
with hot hide glue. Other joints were simply injected with hot hide glue and
clamped for 24 hours minimum.

The reservoir and feeder assembly share a common 1"
thick horizontal board which is dadoed into the sides of the carcass. This
board was originally glued into the dados and glued and nailed to the front
rail directly above the two pedals (the self-closing swell pedal on the left,
and the single pumping pedal on the right). Mahogany crotch veneer was then
applied over the nails. Someone had previously done a very nice job of sawing
through the nails and sliding the entire assembly out the back of the
instrument in order to patch the bellows. We decided to leave this alteration,
since it is truly the only way to access the bellows for releathering. Maple
cleats were added so that the 1" board could be screwed securely to the sides
of the carcass.

Stabilizing and repairing the veneer became one of the most
time-consuming jobs. Like many Empire pieces, the crotch burl mahogany seemed
to shed little bits of veneer onto the floor every time one walked past. About
half of the veneer was no longer securely glued to the white pine below, and
the ogee-shaped front board of the folding lid was missing about 70% of its
veneer. The ogee crown molding veneer was almost entirely unglued from its
substrate, although miraculously most of the veneer was still there. The
decision was made to remove the remaining tatters of veneer from the ogee
shaped lid front and use the bits to patch veneer on the rest of the piece. The
lid front was then entirely re-veneered with book-matched mahogany crotch burl.

The crown molding presented another challenge; the veneer
was so brittle that even the slightest attempt to lift it in order to work glue
under it caused it to shatter. Clamping was difficult; since the veneer was
glued over a hand-planed ogee, the shape of the contour changed from one end to
the other, and the molding on the sides of the crown were quite different in
shape from each other and from the front. This precluded any possibility of
making precise blocks to fit the shape of the molding. The solution was finally
to inject fish glue through tiny holes in the veneer and clamp a sand-filled
Ziplock bag firmly over the area. The sand conformed perfectly to the contour
of the molding and distributed the clamping pressure evenly. The fish glue,
being a protein-based glue, was compatible with the old hot glue and adhered
well, though it required long clamping times of about 48 hours. Close
inspection reveals the pinpoint size holes through which the glue was injected,
but it seemed the least destructive way to stabilize and re-glue the very
brittle veneer.

Conservation of the finish required a careful approach.
Rather than subject the piece to the humiliation of being entirely stripped and
refinished, we decided instead to conserve what was left of the old shellac
finish. Parts of the case, such as the underside of the lid, retained the
original finish in excellent condition. Other parts had obviously been covered
with an additional layer of low quality shellac. Besides this, someone had
studiously "patched" every missing veneer chip by the application of
red-primer colored latex paint. Paint ended up on the surrounding intact veneer
as much as it did on the offending gap in the veneer. To address these multiple
problems, the course of action was as follows:

The top layer of accreted dirt and crazed finish was sanded
off using 400-grit sandpaper with paint thinner as a lubricant. This required
removing only a very thin film of finish. Then, a pad of wool and cheesecloth
was filled with shellac and applied over the remaining old shellac. This
smoothed out any remaining "alligatored" shellac. This French Polish
technique was repeated about a dozen times until the surface took on an evenly
covered appearance and began to glow. Then, at the request of the customer, the
shellac was sanded lightly and was covered with two coats of high quality
varnish for durability. On parts of the cabinet where extensive veneer patching
was required (such as the crown molding), the resulting surface was too rough
and the old finish too compromised for conservation; it was necessary to sand
the entire surface down to the bare wood. Then, colored pumice was rubbed into
the grain along with residual sanding dust and garnet shellac, after which the
usual french polish technique was used, followed by the two coats of varnish.
The orange colored garnet-lac returned the "old" color to the newly
sanded wood, making a perfect match. The results were visually stunning; the
mahogany crotch burl fairly leaps off the surface of the piece with three-dimensional
fervor. The keydesk itself is veneered with rosewood, and since the lid
evidently was always closed, the finish on the rosewood required little
attention.

The center panel of cloth was originally a very thin silk,
bright turquoise in color. We found well-preserved pieces of it under the wood
half-dummy façade pipes. Marian decided the original color was
remarkably wrong for her house (I had to agree), and chose a silk of subdued
gold instead. The turquoise silk is still under the dummies for future
reference. Behind the cloth panel is a very small swell front, with shades
which open only about 45 degrees. After listening to the instrument, we decided
that omitting the shades made the organ considerably louder, and virtually
perfect in balance to a small consort of viols. Fortunately, there is a large
well behind the crown molding which provided a perfect storage space for the
shades. Reinstalling them would be the work of a few minutes should a future
owner wish to use the organ in its completely original state.

Wind system

The bellows still had its original leather, but every square
inch of it had been secondarily covered years ago with hot glue and rubber
cloth, probably by the same party mentioned earlier who went to such lengths to
remove the bellows plate from the organ. The rubber cloth and hot glue had
ossified into a stiff, inflexible board-like structure which had caused all
bellows hinging to rip itself apart upon inflation of the reservoir; the single
large feeder suffered the same fate. The bellows and feeder were completely
releathered with hot hide glue and goatskin. The bellows and feeder boards were
rather generously filled with splits, cracks and checks; the worst were
reinforced with butterfly-type patches, and all were entirely covered with
rubber cloth to prevent leakage.

The short wooden wind line which conducts wind from the top
of the bellows plate into the chest was originally simply fitted into place by
friction, but the horizontal members of the cabinet frame did not shrink and
expand in the same direction as the vertical boards of which the wind line was
made; in summer, as the cabinet expanded and lifted the entire upper assembly
away from the bellows, the leakage must have been spectacular. The joints
around the wind line had probably received more attention over the years than
any other part of the organ. Numerous layers of patching (leather, glue, rubber
cloth) attested to the trouble which this particular design flaw had visited
upon those who chose to play the instrument in humid weather. It seemed that a
change was necessary, so four small oak cleats were attached to the narrow ends
of the wind line so that it could be screwed securely to both the bellows top
and the bottom board of the pallet box. The cleats are clearly and
intentionally not a part of the original construction.

Chest

The chest was plagued by innumerable runs, and after some
investigation, they all were found to be caused by a joint in the table. The
front five inches or so of the grid is covered with a thin (1/4") mahogany
table. The rest of the chest is covered by one large pine channel block,
13/4" thick and honeycombed with many channels. The joint between the thin
mahogany and the thick pine channel block is naturally a source of some tension;
even though no crack had opened up between the two, the mahogany had almost
imperceptibly lifted along the joint. The problem was solved by screwing down
the mahogany piece with a screw in every rib, and by gluing a piece of thin
leather in each channel to bridge the joint. Should the joint ever move again,
the flexible leather should absorb the movement and prevent leakage. All key
channels, as well as all offset channels, were poured out with sanding sealer.
Shellac could have been used, but since the work was being performed in the
humid summer weather of East Tennessee, I decided to avoid shellac because of
the tendency of its solvent (alcohol) to absorb water from the air.

The bottom of the grid was originally covered in a thick
cotton covered with much shellac. We chose to replace it with rubber cloth.
Pallets were re-covered with two layers of leather, just as they were
originally, and they were installed in the original fashion, glued with hot
glue at the tail and held down by a small pine slat nailed on by tiny cut
nails. The builder evidently thought it was necessary to provide pallet sizes
commensurate to the wind demand, so the already tiny bass pallets (43/4"
long) were made even shorter at middle C (4" long).

Key and stop action

The keys are mounted on a balance pin rail at a ratio of
roughly 2:5. Thus, the pallets open a small, but nonetheless sufficient,
amount. Under the keyboard is mounted an elegant mahogany backfall (ratio 1:1)
which pushes down on very slender (.047") brass wire stickers. The
stickers pass through the 1/4" mahogany table, which also serves as their
register, and push the pallets open. All the stickers are original and the
action is pleasing to play and surprisingly responsive; in spite of the tiny
pallets, a definite pluck can still be felt in the keys. Key bushings are wood
on round brass pins, and the keys are covered in their original ivory. The
pallet springs are brass, clearly factory-made, and were still all perfectly
regulated when I checked them. No spring varied from all the others more than
1/4 ounce. I left them unchanged. The builder solved one problem with the
keyboard in a rather clever way. Since the keyboard is so short, it is not
possible to place the usual 19th-century style lead-weighted floating thumper
rail behind the nameboard. The builder instead installed the nameboard itself
in loose dados in the stop jambs so that its felted bottom edge simply sits on
the keys, keeping them in tension and making it possible to adjust them
perfectly level. When seasonal changes occur, the nameboard itself simply rides
up and down in the dados. (Of course, since this particular nameboard has no
actual name, it must be a nameboard in name only).

The stop action would seem to need no mention, except for
the stop to the left of the keyboards. The single knob to the right pulls on
the tiny slider for the Principal 4', which leaves the knob on the left with no
job to do at all. However, the builder thoughtfully provided a slotted block so
that the knob, which does absolutely nothing, can be pulled out just like its
brother on the right. The disappointing aspect is that the Principal had its
original engraved ivory disc, but the ivory disc on the left was missing. I
glued in a blank ivory disc for appearance's sake, but I will always wonder
what the label on the dummy knob said. Perhaps it might have even been engraved
with the builder's name.

Pipework

The pipework is unusual from the start in that both ranks
are metal: a Dulciana 8' and Principal 4'. The Dulciana has the usual wooden
bass of the period: large scaled, low cut-up and quinty. No identifying marks
were found on any of the pipes, not even on the seven zinc pipes of the
Dulciana (F18-B24). Early zinc often had an embossed stamp identifying the
(often French) manufacturer. The rest of the pipework is common metal. The
wooden basses were labeled in distinctive block lettering, with pencil, very
unlike the elegant old cursive one usually sees on 19th-century pipes. (I have
seen identical lettering on one other set of New England stopped basses which
the OCH found in an 1890s organ. The pipes were basses to a chimney flute, and
the entire stop had been completely reworked and re-scaled for its second use.
Alas, these pipes were also of unknown provenance).

I can find no rhyme or reason for the varying mouth widths
and variable scales. Surely part of the reason is that the common metal
pipework betrays the hand of a somewhat inexperienced pipemaker. While in
general neatly made, the solder seams are not as smooth and perfect as one
usually sees on 19th-century American pipework. It is particularly
disconcerting to see a pinhole of light shining through from the back of the
pipe when one is looking in through the mouth. These pinholes occur where the
back seam of the body meets the back seam of the foot at the languid, and are
present on several pipes. They did not particularly affect the pipes'
performance, so I left them. It does seem likely that scales were made
deliberately small in the tenor range of both ranks simply so that pipes could
be made to fit in the very cramped quarters. The very fat stopped wood basses
take up a huge amount of space, making it necessary to cram the metal pipes
into a very small area. Both ranks increase several scales in size from tenor
to treble: the Dulciana gets four scales larger, and the Principal increases by
three. (See pipe scale chart.)

From the chart, one can see that the cut-ups are all over
the map. The Principal seems to have a fairly even increase in cut-up toward
the treble, but the Dulciana seems to follow no discernible pattern. Mouth
widths are more predictable, generally hovering between 1/4 and 2/9.

The original pitch was fairly easy to ascertain. The pipes
seemed most comfortable speaking at 21/4"; at that pressure at 70 degrees,
the pitch was about A432. Since the whole point of this project was to make the
organ useful to an early music ensemble, the decision was made to fit tuning
sleeves carefully onto the pipes, and lower the pitch as much as possible. This
is a completely reversible procedure, with the added benefit being that it did
not require tampering with the tops of the pipes at all. The organ pitch is now
A421, not as low as the A415 the early music players had hoped for, but still
low enough that the instruments can tune to it easily.

One remarkable aspect of the tuning is that the Dulciana,
which showed no real signs of having been tampered with, was almost completely
in tune with the pipes at dead length and the few errant pipes brought into
regulation. A few chords quickly revealed that the keys of C, D, F and G were
close to pure, while the remote keys (B, F#, Db) were quite out of tune. This
sparked a lively discussion with Marian about temperament, and after some
research into early music temperaments (research done entirely by Marian) we
decided to tune the organ to Erlangen comma, which yields perfect thirds
between c and e, & d and f#. This temperament dates to the 15th century,
and is particularly suited to use with viols, avoiding the tuning conflicts which
mean-tone introduces between keyboard and viols.

Playing the organ is truly like stepping back in time;
voicing from this era demands less from each pipe than our modern ears
ordinarily expect. The gentle metal trebles in conjunction with the quinty wood
bass is a quintessentially early sound; virtually no one was still building
organs with that inimitable sound by 1860. Adding the small Principal 4' to the
Dulciana is an exercise in judicious restraint more than it is an augmentation
of the sound. All in all, it is an instrument from a different time and place,
built for sensibilities and perceptions unique to its milieu. Other than
changing the pitch, we did nothing to the instrument to make it more relevant
or modern. It so happens that leaving things as they were makes the organ
almost perfect for the customer's use. The subtle tone and slightly unsteady
wind work almost seamlessly with a small consort of viols da gamba. Placing the
instrument in a small room brings the sound into context, and music begins to
make sense on it. It is truly a chamber organ, and is at home in that
environment.     

The author wishes to thank Barbara Owen for her gracious and
invaluable assistance in seeking the origins of this instrument; Marian
Moffett, for her research on a multiplicity of subjects; and Will Dunklin, for
his generous help in bringing the organ to Tennessee as well as for insightful
advice during the project.

Pipe scale chart

Principal 4' (labeled "Pr.") TC 42 pipes

Note        Diameter
style='mso-tab-count:1'>                  Mouth
width      Ratio
of mouth width    Cut-up
style='mso-tab-count:1'>  Ratio of cut-up                       
style="mso-spacerun: yes">   Toe size

C13           41m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>          29m
        .225
        7.8m
      .190
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        3.98m

C25           22.5m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>    18m         .254
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        4.5m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>      .200
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        2.99m

C37           15.8m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>    12m         .241
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        3.0m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>      .189
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        2.28m

C49          10m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>          7.2m
      .229
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        2.1m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>      .210
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        2.03m

F54            7.5m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        6m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>            .254
        1.9m
      .253
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        1.77m

Dulciana (labeled "Dul") 54 pipes

C1              110x90m
                90m
                                21.8m
  .242

C13          64x52
  52m                                 11.2m
  .215

E17          55x43
  43m                                 10m
        .232

F18           58m
        45m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>          .246
        11.8m
  .203         6.09m

C25          42.7m
  31m         .231
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        7.5m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>      .175
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        5m

C37          27.5m
  21m         .243
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        3.9m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>      .141
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        3.04m

C49          17m
        13.1m
  .245         3.4m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        .200
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        2.71m

F54           13.5m
  10m         .235
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        2.5m
style='mso-tab-count:1'>      .185
style='mso-tab-count:1'>        2.38m

The ratio of the mouth width is in relation to the
circumference: .250 would be 1/4 mw and so on. The ratio of the cut-up is a
simple ratio of the diameter.

"English concert organist John Scott is recognized not only as one of his country's finest organists and musical leaders, but also as one of the most gifted of his generation of concert organists in the performance world today." So begins John Scott's biographical sketch in his management's brochure. Scott's stellar career includes serving as Director of Music at St. Paul's Cathedral and (formerly) Professor of Organ at the Royal Academy of Music, many tours and recordings with the St. Paul's choir and as organ soloist, and a dizzying array of other appearances and awards. In addition to an already demanding schedule, this year he served as a judge at the Dallas International Organ Competition, arranged an exchange with the choir of St. Thomas Church New York City in June, and is performing the complete works of Bach at St. Paul's in twenty-five recitals.

On his most recent recital tour to the United States, John Scott visited Glenview Community Church in Glenview, Illinois to play the inaugural recital for a concert series featuring the new Buzard pipe organ and to give a masterclass, "Accompanying the English Anthem." During the visit, he demonstrated a genuine love of his work and approached his tasks with the carefully-paced energy of a veteran performer. He is a most delightful person--confident but soft-spoken, business-like yet very polite, sincere and possessed of a slightly mischievous sense of humor. Following his electrifying recital performance, Scott was asked if constantly being praised for his work becomes commonplace. He responded simply with a smile, "I don't get tired of hearing compliments."

During one of our conversations, Scott began to reminisce about a childhood experience with organ music. That recollection became the stepping stone for a formal interview, an exchange during which he shared some of the details of his experience as a musician in a great English cathedral and how he got there.

MVO: During lunch on Saturday, you mentioned a recording that made a great impression on you when you were young--G.D. Cunningham playing the Bach D-minor Toccata and Fugue at Birmingham Town Hall. Was that one of your earliest experiences hearing organ music?

JS: Yes, I'm sure it was. It was a scratchy old 78 record that we had at home. When I was growing up the 78's were already out of fashion, but we had an old player at home that I was fascinated by--the wind-up sort of gramophone. I discovered this recording of G.D Cunningham and I was amazed that there could be such music. I had never heard anything like it. It was something entirely new to me and I couldn't stop listening to it. I think I wore the record out in the end.

MVO: How old were you at the time?

JS: I must have been about eight.

MVO: Were you already a chorister by then?

 JS: Yes, I became a chorister when I was seven. I had heard organ music, of course, but it was at about the same time that I discovered this recording.

MVO: At that time, you were singing in the choir at Wakefield?

JS: Yes. It was what we call a parish church cathedral--a church that had become a cathedral in the late nineteenth century. We had a very good choir of men and boys. All the boys were educated at the local grammar school where we had choral scholarships to help pay for our education. From an early age, I was exposed to a wide variety of good music.

MVO: When did you begin playing the organ?

JS: When I finished singing in the choir, I had already been learning the organ for a couple of years--first with Percy Saunders, who very much put me on the right lines and then with the new organist, Jonathan Bielby. He was a great influence on my playing. I studied with him from the age of fourteen to eighteen. He did more than anybody else to develop my technique and my stylistic awareness. He was a very fastidious and demanding teacher, and also a great inspiration. He had been organ scholar himself at St. John's College Cambridge under George Guest. It was he who encouraged me to go for that particular scholarship. I went to Cambridge at the age of eighteen and studied for two music degrees, leaving at the age of 21.

MVO: What were you studying in your lessons with Jonathan Bielby? Repertoire or accompaniment?

JS: A mixture of both. To begin with, the main emphasis was on accompanying. I was in the extraordinary situation of finishing in the choir one week, and the following Sunday I was drafted in to play for the services. I guess my organ playing had become suitably proficient. I went literally from being in the choir one week to accompanying it the next week. After a period of some months, during which I was being tried out, it became a regular process. I was eventually appointed assistant organist at the cathedral. I can remember that first Sunday because we sang an anthem by Basil Harwood called "O How Glorious Is the Kingdom," which has quite a difficult organ part. I dread to think now what it sounded like, but I must have been able to cope with it.

MVO: In the United States, organ study tends to be very repertoire-based, although the vast majority of organists are going to play in churches and need to accompany, not be solely concert artists. I have the impression that your training had an emphasis on accompanying.

JS: That's right. I was a pupil-assistant to Jonathan Bielby. His main job was to direct the choir; I would do most of the service playing. That meant it was in his interest for the success of the choir that the accompaniment be really well-rehearsed and moulded. We spent a lot of time in my lessons working on the cathedral music. That's not to say that we didn't do repertoire. I remember doing a lot of pieces during the four years that I studied with him. When I went to Cambridge, although I was expected to play for services and accompany the choir on a daily basis, I didn't have any specific instruction in that. My music degree was purely academic. I was working on harmony, counterpoint, history, orchestration--that sort of thing. For the first two years, my studies included no practical part whatsoever other than keyboard harmony. Only in my third year was the practical part significant. During that year I had to play a half-hour recital, but it only counted for ten percent of my final marks. During this time at Cambridge, I began studying with Gillian Weir. It was a profound and remarkable experience to study with someone of her eminence and inspirational quality. But it was very much left up to me whether I wanted to study with anybody and indeed, who that person should be. It wasn't a requirement for my university course at all. The same at Oxford. You could be an organ scholar for three years and never have an organ lesson. It's crazy.

MVO: That's incredible! Is that the way it is today?

JS: I'm not sure. I think things must have changed quite a bit since I was there. I think the whole syllabus is not quite so academically based. Practical musicianship has rather more emphasis now. It does seem strange, looking back.

MVO: Based on your experience as a cathedral musician, if you could design the curriculum, what would it include for those aspiring to do what you do?

JS: When I was at St. John's Cambridge, my main duties as Organ Scholar were accompanying and conducting when George Guest was away. As I say, there was no formal training as such, you were thrown into it in a way, and you either sank or you swam. With that in mind, it would be sensible for people who want to focus on church music to have courses in choral direction, service accompaniment, realization of orchestral scores on the organ, and of course guidance in repertoire.

You have to realize the distinction between the English university system and the conservatoire system. If you go to university, you would expect to take a music degree in which the greatest emphasis is on academic study, whereas in a conservatoire it's the other way around. You're basically being trained to be a practical musician, though a certain amount of theoretical study is necessary, of course. I chose consciously to go to university rather than conservatoire because I wanted the broader base that that experience could offer--the chance to meet with people from other disciplines and backgrounds. I found that to be more attractive.

Looking back again, in my first week at St. John's--I was overwhelmed by having this world-famous choir to accompany--I had the scary experience of playing for evensong on the first day of term with basically a new choir and Dr. Guest conducting. On the next day and the day after, he was away and I found myself standing in front of a choir, something I'd never done in my life. Nobody had told me what to do, I just simply had to get on with it. To some degree it's a very English mentality--a very dilettante approach. You make of it what you can and learn by your mistakes. If you're trying to conduct a choir and nobody can follow what you're doing, you have to refine your technique so they can. Of course, I had watched other people conduct. That's the great learning process--observing other people who are  experts. You take a lot of that with you. To this day, I've never had a conducting lesson in my life. It may seem very strange indeed, yet that's the way one functions. And I have the privilege of working with a fully professional choir and many times in the year with professional orchestras.

MVO: Would you say that your experience is fairly typical? Do you have other colleagues who have been similarly plunged into service?

JS: Yes, I think it is pretty typical. A lot of people do come through the cathedral tradition so they're immersed in it. They know the repertoire. Many of my colleagues who are cathedral organists were cathedral choristers. A lot of them have been to university and had very good organ tuition. The other practical skills are acquired rather than instilled. That has its own merits. In this day and age, we're much more concerned with building courses and curricula based on what people wish to do later. All of these things are being examined. In London at the Royal Academy of Music there's a church music course that's been running for ten years which does give people these basic skills which are required for the profession. It's by no means unique now, though it was unique at the time. There are many other establishments which are providing church music degrees which encompass not only the historical background but practical skills and knowledge as well.

MVO: Tell me about your transition from St. John's to St. Paul's.

JS: After four years in Cambridge, I went straight to St. Paul's. I moved to London. I had never lived in London and I was very excited by that prospect. London seemed to be the right place to go. I was invited to take the place of third organist at St. Paul's and assistant organist at Southwark Cathedral, just over the river. Southwark is the cathedral for the diocese of south London, only about a mile away from St. Paul's.  So I was number two at Southwark and number three at St. Paul's, basically playing three days of the week in each Cathedral, usually at Southwark on Sunday. That was a great experience. I did that for seven years--running back and forth over London Bridge. It was a great learning experience, I must say, being involved on the one hand with the professional choir at St. Paul's and the volunteer choir at Southwark cathedral. However two very different liturgical bases as well. St. Paul's at that stage represented all that was very "correct and proper," if that's the right expression--a very traditional form of Anglicanism, whereas Southwark was a more progressive and, dare one say, slightly livelier style of worship.

MVO: Were you working under Christopher Dearnley at St. Paul's when you began?

JS: I was working both with Christopher Dearnley and with Barry Rose who at that stage was in charge of the choir. Looking back, I did most of my accompanying for Barry because I tended to play on the days when Christopher was not there. I worked closely with Barry and learned a great deal. He's a phenomenal and inspirational choir trainer. That was a terrific experience at a time when the St. Paul's choir had made a great impact under Barry's leadership through recordings, developing a more public profile than they had previously had.

MVO: At that time Christopher Dearnley was mainly playing the organ?

JS: He was really. He was the Director of Music, having the overall say in the music program, but after the organ was rebuilt in 1973-1977, he very much wanted to concentrate on playing the organ, to develop its role in the life of the cathedral and beyond. He concentrated on playing the organ for the services and Barry did most of the choir work. I was gradually brought into that. After a while, I took the choir for one day a week.

MVO: So you moved more into Barry Rose's position eventually?

JS: For a year, Christopher took the choir again when Barry left. There's a very nice recording from that time on the Decca label, with Christopher conducting and me accompanying. After about a year, he wished to go back to playing the organ rather more. I think that's where he felt the most comfortable. I was keen to have the opportunity to take the choir on a more regular basis. Although I was sub-organist I found myself directing the choir more and more. I gradually stepped into that position.

MVO: Being in a high-profile position, you're probably under scrutiny a lot of the time. How do you handle that?

JS: To be honest, I don't worry about it too much now. I used to worry about it rather more. You're right, it's a bit of a goldfish bowl. There's never a day, even in the depths of winter, when there are fewer than a hundred people at evensong. You're always conscious that the daily choral office is something that is very visible. Certainly, in the summer months, many more people attend. In July we have visitors from all over the world when we do the orchestral masses. It is a very visible position in that sense. One struggles to maintain standards, but I'm very fortunate in the support and set-up that I have from my assistants, my colleagues and from the choir. We all strive to do the best. In recent years we've reached a pretty consistent standard which is there from day to day. Obviously, every choir has its off days, but they seem to be less frequent than they were when I first started doing the choir work. I'm more established in the position. I don't feel so much the weight of what went on before. I've been there long enough, made recordings and feel more comfortable about what I'm doing in the job.  Of course, I'm always concerned to see who's there from day to day and if they're people I recognize. There might be a day when you suddenly see George Guest or David Willcocks sitting in the congregation! If you worried about that too much, you wouldn't be able to get anything done. Just put your head down and get on with it.

MVO: Do you find the pressure to be a motivating force?

JS: Undoubtedly. The moment you began to relax, to rest on your laurels, is the moment to move on to something else. Every day has its challenge. There's no such thing as a routine week at St. Paul's. There's always something extra. Whether that's ceremonial services, memorial services or whatever, there's never a chance to settle back into a routine. A daily sung evensong is a challenge in itself because for the most part, you pick up the music with the boys first thing in the morning. You've got an hour in which to mould it in the morning, and half an hour with them in the afternoon before the men arrive. The men rehearse at 4:30 with the service at 5:00. As a full choir, we've really only got about twenty-five minutes to practice forty minutes of music. It's a lot to do. There isn't the oppportunity to work much more than a day at a time. On Monday, I try to look at some of the mass for Sunday, but generally we're living from day to day. There's a lot of pressure in that, just to get things done. We have to work quickly, efficiently, and professionally.

MVO: What is the rehearsal schedule?

JS: We rehearse every day except Thursday morning. The choristers are educated in the choir school, which is directly behind the cathedral. They're all boarders--they live there during the term. I see them from 7:50-8:50 every morning except Thursday, which is our day off.  Evensong is sung by the men on Thursday, and the boys sing evensong on Monday. Otherwise, it's full choir on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and three services on Sunday. That's nine choral services each week on a regular basis.

MVO: What do you enjoy the most about your work?

JS: Many things, really. I'm very fortunate being based where I am, having this wonderful building in which to work. It's always an amazing experience just to go into St. Paul's. Every morning I go in and think "wow." It's a building that completely overwhelms you. The sound of music in the building is very special as well. With nine seconds of reverberation, it's a unique acoustical environment in which to work. I'm very fortunate with the choir that I have--30 boys and 18 men--fully professional singers. It's a very dramatic and exciting group of singers with which to work. Of course, the organ  itself is tremendously thrilling. It's a fine instrument in every sense. The Willis part of the organ has great quality and refinement. The part built by Mander in 1973-77 added other dimensions that fit the building very well, further developing the potential of the instrument in a way unforeseen previously. It's a very exciting, versatile instrument. This year I'm playing all the organ works of Bach in twenty-five recitals on Sundays and I'm just amazed at how well it copes with that repertoire. It's been remarkably successful. Obviously, one has to register things in a very judicious manner, but many people have been amazed at how well it does work.

MVO: During your masterclass on  Saturday, I noticed that while you were playing you had a smile on your face. It seemed obvious that you simply love that music and love what you do. What is it all about for you? 

JS: It's very hard to define! I couldn't put my hand on my heart and say that I like this piece of music more than any other. I enjoy all the different styles of music that we sing. It's basically the English cathedral repertoire, of course, and a lot of eighteenth and nineteenth century music. But in the time that I've been responsible for the choir, I've moved the repertoire backwards quite a lot to encompass more polyphony and early music, music which I very much enjoy. The versatility of the group that I have is very great indeed. The men are not particularly challenged by anything you put in front of them as far as notes are concerned. They can basically read anything! There is little need for note-bashing. It's so much been a part of my musical life to be involved with this particular sort of music--Psalms, hymns, canticles, anthems--it's hard to imagine life without it, really. I've often considered whether at some stage in my life I'd like to be a free-lance organist. I'm not sure. That would have its compensations in many ways because I'm really not playing the organ so much at St. Paul's. But I can't imagine life without pieces like the Balfour Gardiner "Evening Hymn" or the Byrd Great Service. I enjoy them so much. Each time I come back to them I try and find something new and keep myself fresh in that way. I don't feel that I'm remotely tired of this music yet. I hope that in ten years time I can still say that. It's the sort of music that does really inspire me still.

MVO: What keeps that musical tradition alive? It's very easy for traditions to become frozen. 

JS: Yes, I know what you mean. Traditions can become fossilized. I think the tradition is continuously being enriched by music from other sources.    The fact is that we're discovering ne repertoire all the time. More and more music is being printed, most notably early music by some very good publishers in England who specialize entirely in Renaissance polyphony--pieces which have not been available before outside of collected editions. The market is being flooded by good quality material. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned, it's wonderful to encourage our best contemporary composers to write for the church. I'm glad to say that the Dean and Chapter support this endeavor. Part of our annual music budget is given over to commissions. For the millenium, we've pushed the boat out a bit. We had a big service on January 2nd which was televised nationally, attended by the Queen and the Government. We commissioned a setting of "Jubilate" from Sir Peter Maxwell Davies for choir, organ and brass. It was a good commission and will work well on its own with organ accompaniment, so we can do it liturgically. We commissioned some brass fanfares from another of our most eminent composers Sir Harrison Birtwistle. They were stunningly well conceived for the building with four different groups of brass playing around the building. It was really fantastic. Later this year, in July, we'll be doing a premiere of a work that we've commissioned from Luciano Berio, the great Italian composer. Our commissions in the past have been from English composers. I felt it was a time to bring in somebody else, so we commissioned Berio who seems keen to write for us. This is an important part of our life at St. Paul's--the church in its traditional role as patron of the arts must be seen to be lively and energetic. Over the years, we've commissioned pieces from John Tavener, Jonathan Harvey, Francis Grier, and William Mathias, among others. Most years we've had a commissioned piece. I've been very pleased and proud of that tradition.

MVO: You seem to view that as a responsibility.

JS: I do. It's all to do with keeping the tradition alive. On the one hand, I like to think that what we're doing is very much in the monastic spirit, as the monks of yesteryear. Our daily office of Evensong has evolved from that tradition. But it has to be renewed of course. We have to be always pushing the boundaries either forwards or, indeed, backwards. That's vital.

The Isle of Man

This article is coming to you from the Isle of Man, an island some 30 miles long by about 14 miles wide, and sitting midway between Ireland and England. Its longest river--the Sulby--stretches for a full 10 miles or more, and Snaefell--the highest mountain--reaches a height of over 2,000 feet. Anyone with a world atlas and a magnifying glass to hand will have no trouble in locating the "Island," as those who live here often term it, off the west coast of England, facing Liverpool.

The Isle of Man may be little known in the wider world (or even on the "adjacent island" of England--we don't say "mainland," of course!) but like most places it does have its peculiar features which mark it out for those with special interests. It is an off-shore finance center, for example, with relatively low rates of tax. It is known for its motorcycle races (the "TT Races") which take place on the public roads--one of the largest (and arguably most dangerous) circuits of its kind in the world. For those who like unspoiled countryside to look at or walk over, and a quiet and relatively unhurried way of life, the Isle of Man is the place to be. It is an island of Fairies, one of the largest water-wheels you are ever likely to see, Celtic stone crosses and much more. Most important to me, and I hope of interest to readers, its small area is home to a surprising variety of some 50 or so pipe organs, and I am more than happy to have been the resident organ builder here for over 20 years.

For those of us with a fascination for the King of Instruments, there is much to be said about life here--too much for one article such as this--and rather than describe the organs as a whole in greater or lesser detail, I thought it might be better to describe some of the incidents which make the life of "the organ man" anything but tedious.

Looking back over the work undertaken in the recent past, I see one job which will be of interest to the great majority of organ players, from the professional recitalist to the home enthusiast who plays only for his own enjoyment. I refer to an ambition which attracts so many organists, and which eludes all but a few--the luxury of a real pipe organ in one's own home.

How many have investigated this possibility, only to find that the cost (and sometimes the space) involved ensures that the pipe dream remains just that? True, there is the electronic substitute--smaller and cheaper, with a great variety of Golden Tones of one kind or another--and then again the organ in church is usually available to the serious player--albeit not so attractive in the winter, nor so convenient for that odd 30 minutes practice at the end of the day. But for those badly infected by the organ bug, the unfortunates with an acute case of "organitis," there can never be any hope of a cure until they can see for themselves those gleaming ranks of metal and wooden pipes and the console with its several keyboards, waiting in the music room for their sole use!

So it was with The Reverend Alec Smith. His love of the organ had actually led him to start an apprenticeship in organ building as a young man, but he quickly saw the light, heard the call, and became an ordained priest in the Church of England. At that time, he assembled a worthy (if somewhat ungainly) collection of pipes, old keyboards, bits of mechanism, etc., into a Frankenstein creation which crouched in the corner of one of the large rooms of the vicarage in his country parish in England. This creation was a credit to its owner, but more than a little ponderous for anything other than a large house (preferably not your own) with plenty of spare rooms. When, in the fullness of time, Alec became an army chaplain, and he and his wife Jean were inevitably posted abroad, the organ was dispersed, almost all of it never to be seen again.

On retirement from the army, Alec settled in the Isle of Man and became Organ Advisor to the Diocese. It was now that the organ-building bug, which had lain dormant for so many years, was re-awakened, and the idea of a house organ was again proposed. There were, of course, several problems. The usual ones--centered around lack of space and finances--were, quite rightly, pointed out by Jean, and in any case there was a seemingly adequate 2-manual electronic, with its equally large speaker cabinet, already taking up far too much room in their small cottage in the Manx countryside. Jean correctly pointed out that it was more room they needed, not a pipe organ!

In a attempt to save some space, and acting on the advice of the local music shop, new and much smaller speakers were fitted to the electronic by an "expert" from Douglas, the Island's capital. After a day spent fitting the new speakers into the ceiling (with the novel use of a screwdriver to create some suitable holes in the plaster), the expert switched on, at which point there was an impressive bang followed by an ominous burning smell. It seemed, on later examination, that the amplifiers (intended to power two large speaker banks in a church setting) had seen the modern speakers as a virtual short circuit in electrical terms, with the inevitable result. The expert withdrew, promising to "work something out." I believe he left the Island, and, in any case, was never seen again. The electronic was no longer adequate. It was dead.

At this point, a further discussion took place on the subject of a new pipe organ, and Jean was persuaded, but only agreed on one seemingly-impossible condition: aside from the console, the new organ must not project into the room any further than the line of the first ceiling beam (some 14≤ from the end wall). Since there was no possibility of siting anything behind the walls (three of them being external, and the fourth taken up with the fireplace) the situation appeared hopeless, and it was at this point that Alec called me in.

Impossible situations regarding space are a challenge to the organ builder. More than one has succumbed to the temptation to push too-large an organ into too-small a space, with disastrous results, and I have seen the consequences of several of these unhappy situations. In one such case, an instrument was built in which the Great and Choir (mounted one above the other and in front of the Pedal pipework) "speak" into a solid masonry wall some 3 feet thick. Tuning/maintenance of such an organ is difficult if not impossible, and a warning to any organ designer. Alec's requirement was for the cheapest possible instrument, with a fair selection of stops over two manuals and pedals, all within a depth of 14≤. It had to fit into one small room of a cottage which has only three rooms on the ground floor (the other two being the kitchen and porch) and it must not be a monster from the tuning/maintenance standpoint.

There was space for only two or three sets of pipes, but Alec stated from the outset that, "I want more than three wheels on my car," so we were obviously looking to something other than mechanical action with two or three stops. This need to make the most of the available pipework suggested an "extension organ" of some sort. This, and the restrictions of the site, dictated electric action, and financial considerations suggested the simple mechanism as shown in the sketch. The question of electric versus mechanical action is one of those subjects likely to provoke strong opinions both for and against. In my view, each system has its merits and I am happy to work with either, but when a client requests more stops than the room or budget will allow, the obvious way forward is for a stoplist extended from a small number of ranks, and this means an electric mechanism. The design shown, if correctly made, is reliable, very quick (giving good repetition) and quiet. Incorrectly handled, it is none of these things, and has thereby acquired a poor reputation in some circles. With sufficient funds, and more space, an electro-pneumatic action would have been more sophisticated, but with enough care taken in its design and construction, direct electric action (as shown) is almost as good.

Some readers may be unfamiliar with the idea of an "extension" organ. This is an instrument in which a set, or "rank," of pipes is available to be played at more than one pitch. For example, a set of flute pipes could be played at 8' pitch (via a console stop labeled, say, Stopt Diapason 8') and the same set could also be available at 4' pitch (via a console stop labeled Flute 4') or at 16'  pitch (in which case the console stop might be labeled Bourdon 16') and so on. Clearly, the idea has its uses and abuses, as in the case of the 2-manual and pedal organ in which every console stop was actually taken from a single rank of Dulciana pipes!

The final stoplist is one which I have used successfully on various occasions. It is based on three ranks representing the three main tone-colors of the organ:  Diapason, Flute and String. Each of the three ranks consists of 73 pipes, and are listed below as:

Rank A/ Open Diapason, running from C13,

Rank B/ Stopt Diapason, running from C1, and

Rank C/ Salicional, running from C13.

In addition there are 12 stopped Quint pipes (shown below as "Q") running from G8 (at 8' pitch) for the pedal 16' stop (see later).

(Reed tone was not included, as it is difficult to have conventional reeds sufficiently quiet for such a small setting. In any case, there was no space available.)

Note that the Open Diapason is of small scale, and this made it much more suitable, for our purpose, than the more usual scaling of such a stop. When selecting second-hand pipes for a home extension organ, a Principal would be the first choice  to provide the Open Diapason--Principal--Fifteenth "stops," as they appear on the console, and I have even known a Gamba to make a very acceptable open metal extension rank, once it had been re-scaled and re-voiced. Ideally, where finances are not a limiting factor, new pipes should be made for all ranks, so that their scaling can be suited to the room and stoplist.

If an "extension" scheme is to work, musically, it is important to avoid the temptation of too many stops from too few pipes. I know of one organ with the stops simply repeated on each keyboard, and though this gives maximum flexibility, it is very confusing from the player's point of view, and the instrument as a whole is strangely bland and characterless. The three sets of pipes for Alec's organ were made available at different pitches, under the guise of different stop names, to make registration more straightforward from the player's point of view. In this way, some 15 speaking stops are available to the organist, instead of three which would result from the use of mechanical action.

The specification shown has only one stop (the Stopt Diapason) actually repeated on each manual. This is because it is so frequently used, and blends with the other two ranks at 8' pitch.  None of the other manual stops are repeats, and they have been arranged so as to discourage the use of the same rank at only one octave apart. (E.g.,  the Open Diapason 8' is intended to be used with the Salicet 4', or the Flute 4', not the Principal 4', as you might expect.) Using the stops of an extension organ in this way reduces or (more usually) eliminates the well-known "missing note" problem, which occurs when one strand of the music runs across another, and both need a pipe from the same rank, albeit from different extended "stops." If, for instance, the Stopt Diapason 8' and Flute 4' are drawn on the same manual and key C25 is held down, the pipes heard, as counted from the flute rank, will be C25 and C37. Now add manual key C13, which will sound pipes C13 and C25 (which is already playing from key C25). In this example a pipe at the pitch of C25 should appear twice, but actually appears only once. The missing note will be most obvious if either of the two manual keys is held down while the other is repeated.

One of the most important criticisms to be levelled at an extension scheme is this problem of missing notes, which can lead to a lack of clarity. For all practical purposes, this drawback can be completely overcome by a combination of the organ builder (in preparing a modest stoplist) and the player (in thoughtful use of the instrument, so that the smallest number of stops is drawn at any one time, preferably from different ranks, or at least from ranks separated by more than one octave). In actual practice, this kind of stop selection becomes automatic to the organist who realizes the limitations of the instrument.

Another important factor in the success of this type of organ is the regulation of volume and tone quality of the pipes within a stop, and also the regulation of the stops in relation to each other. Each stop is regulated with a very gradual crescendo from bass to treble. This requires subtle handling, but when correctly carried out results in a clear ensemble in which the treble parts can be heard above the tenor and bass.

The ranks themselves are regulated with much less distinction in power than would usually be the case, so that equivalent pipes of the Stopt Diapason are similar in volume to those of the Open Diapason, and the Salicional, while quieter, is not far behind. This results in much less contrast in power among the 8' stops and this is a compromise, of course, though you still have variety of tone. The blend between ranks played at different pitches is much better than if they are regulated in a conventional manner, with the Open Diapason much louder than the Stopt Diapason and Salicional distinctly quieter. In an instrument such as this, contrast in power is created more by contrasting combinations of stops than between the ranks themselves. Regulating the ranks as if they were separate stops (a mistake often found in both church and house extension organs) results in the Open Diapason and Principal obliterating everything else, while the Fifteenth screams. 

I have used the specification shown several times, including my own house organ, and find it to behave very much as a 'straight' instrument would. I seldom use the couplers, though there are occasions when they become necessary. While it requires thoughtful registration to get the best from an extension organ, a scheme such as this, with a small number of stops, arranged so as to discourage the use of the same rank in two stops separated by only one octave, is very successful.

To cut down costs, Alec agreed to the use of his old electronic as a console, and also to the use of any other second-hand parts which could be obtained. He was also interested and able to lend a hand in the actual construction, when his earlier experiences in organ building were a great asset. The need to keep within 14≤ maximum depth was easily dealt with, by taking up the entire width of the room, side-to-side.

Knowing the number and range of the ranks and the space available, the first step, in a job such as this, is to measure the pipework, in order to see how best to arrange the pipes, and, indeed, if they will fit in at all!

Metal pipes need to be measured in height and in diameter, wooden ones in height only (including any stoppers). In practice, nearly all metal pipes run to a standard scaling (i.e., the rate at which the diameters reduce from note C1 through to the top pipe). Wooden pipes vary considerably, both in scaling (the internal width and depth) and in the thickness of the wood used, which in turn decides the external width and depth. There is also the question of the foot, which, in second-hand wooden pipes (and some new ones) can be bored well off-center. For these reasons it is best to make a paper template of the bottom of each wooden pipe, as described later.

I already had a small scale (i.e., relatively small diameter) Open Diapason rank, and a Salicional, both running form C13 (so the longest pipe in both sets was about 4' speaking length) and Alec located, from a friendly organ builder on the mainland, the Stopped Diapason pipes (running from C1) and a bundle of miscellaneous stoppered wooden pipes for the pedal Quint.

The necessary measurements were taken and noted down in the form of a table. I find it convenient to have a sheet of paper with the 12 notes C through to B in a column down the left-hand edge, followed by vertical columns headed "1--12" then "13--24" then "25--36" and so on, up to "73--84," placed from left to right across the page. This forms a table which will cover an 84-note rank, the biggest usually needed. (Note C85 is only necessary in the case of a rank which runs from 8' pitch to 2' pitch, where the organ has a manual key compass of 61 notes. This C85 pipe needs an additional square to itself.) Every square represents a pipe, and in each one can be written the length and diameter (if metal), together with other details such as size of a rackboard hole, and toe hole etc., which are also measured at this time.

Notice that only the Stopped Diapason rank has its bottom octave (in organ building terms, a "Stopped Bass") the largest pipe of which is, like the other two ranks, something over four feet long. The Salicional and Open Diapason share this bottom octave, as does the 16' pedal stop (the "Harmonic Bass") which produces an acceptable 16' substitute, in the first 12 notes of the pedalboard, by playing the Stopped Bass pipes with the appropriate Quint pipe (from a separate and therefore very soft, 12-note rank of wooden pipes). The resultant note (actually a low hum) which is created from a combination of any stop of 8' pitch and its quint is at 16' pitch. Admittedly, this is much softer than the two pipes actually sounding. The pedals from C13 up play the Stopped Bass again, and then the rest of the Stopt Diapason, thereby sounding at true 16' pitch. These compromises are necessary to reduce the size of the organ, and, if carefully carried out, are soon accepted by the player and listener, especially in a small room.

While there is no substitue for the soft, heavy, warm tone of a full-length Bourdon bass, I have asked many players (including several professionals) their opinion on this "resultant" 16' pedal stop. So far, no one has realized what he was playing until it was pointed out. They all accepted it as a pedal 16'  stop, like any other. The least convincing notes in the bottom octave are, predictably, the smallest three or four. If there is room for full-length pipes down to, say, F#7, so much the better.

It is worth noting that a quinted 16'  effect which uses the pipes of the Stopt Diapason rank only is almost always a failure, because the quint will be too loud. If you have no room for the extra Quint pipes, it is better to use the 8' octave of the Stopt Bass on its own (from pedal keys C1 to B12) before completing the pedal compass by repeating the Stopt Bass followed by the rest of the Stopt Diapason. Another possibility worth considering is a 16' bottom octave in free reeds.

Full-size card or paper templates are needed to represent the metal pipes, as seen from above. It is not normally necessary to make these for every pipe, as different stops usually reduce in diameter, note for note, to a more or less standard pattern. If this pattern is known, the set of templates need cover only the range of diameters from the fattest metal pipe in the organ (in this case C13 of the Open Diapason) down to the minimum spacing dictated by the pipe-valve mechanism. (As direct electric action was being used and the smallest magnets were 3/4≤ wide, with pipes placed directly above the valves, minimum pipe spacing = 3/4≤ + 1/8≤ clearance [= 7/8≤] no matter how small the pipes.)

Like most organ builders, I have a set of these circular templates for general use, so templates for the metal pipes were already at hand, but the wooden pipes had to have paper templates individually made to show their exact shape and the center of the pipe feet. Such a template is made by taking an over-sized piece of paper, drawing on it a circle which equals the diameter of the pipe foot, cutting this out, and sliding the paper up under the pipe and creasing around the four sides. Once the paper is removed and trimmed to size, the original circle can be taped back into place, resulting in an accurate template.

Alec's wooden Stopt Diapason (reputedly by the well-known Victorian organ builder, William Hill) was over 100 years old, and may have been in more than one organ during its lifetime. Its mouths were rather high, which made the tone breathy, and some of the pipes had been mitred, or were cut too short, possibly where they had been in a crowded swell box. But it was basically sound and we went on the basis that it could be made acceptable by repairs, lowering the mouths and re-voicing. The Salicional and Open Diapason ranks were also Victorian, from a local Methodist church. Again, they were not perfectly scaled or voiced for a house  organ, but were basically well-made and capable of re-voicing. All the pipes were measured, and with the tables of measurements and templates to hand, and a given space into which to fit the pipes and action, the process of "setting out" could begin.

An instrument with direct electric action enables the builder to arrange pipework in almost any pattern, within the limits of the room and the physical space taken up by the pipes themselves (or, in the case of the tiny treble notes, the size of their magnets and valves). My preferred system of setting out is slightly unusual, in that I like to place the taller pipes behind the smaller pipes, regardless of their rank. Most other builders would plant pipes in rows, each row being made up from pipes of the same rank.

Secondly, and in common with many of my colleagues, I prefer to plant pipes in "sides," i.e., pipe C1 on the extreme left of the organ, and C#2 on the right, working down to the treble pipes in the middle. In this way, all the pipes of the "C side" (C, D, E, F#, G#, A#) will be on the left, and those of the "C# side" (C#, D#, F, G, A, B) will be on the right.

These two underlying principles result in a pipe set-out which is visually attractive, compact, and which offers the greatest accessibility for tuning and maintenance. Admittedly, it does lead to some complications in the cabling patterns between the console and the magnets, but this is not an insurmountable problem. (In fact, the many cables for this organ were made up, wire by wire, by my school-boy workshop assistant, with no errors at all.)

Alec and I set out our templates on strips of white paper, as wide as Jean would permit, (the 14≤ maximum) and as long as the space available (i.e., the width of the room: 157≤ or just over 13 feet). After a day or two of pushing the templates around, and, bearing in mind the many details such as how the pipes could be best faced away from each other, the space to be allowed for rack pillars, cable registers, assembly screws and many other essentials beyond the scope of this account, we decided upon the ideal arrangement, with the pipes set out on three chests. The chests were placed one above the console, for the treble pipes, and one on each side at a lower level, for the bass pipes. The central chest was just under 13≤ from front to back, and the two other chests were only 9≤ wide. The whole organ would stand in the maximum ceiling height of 91≤ (barely over 71/2 feet). The actual planting pattern was so tight that every possible space has been used, given the limited width and length available. Even so, no pipes are crowded, and all of them have been accommodated. The fronts of the three chests were made from oak-veneered ply salvaged from the old speaker cabinet and console back of the electronic. Consequently, they matched the finish of the console exactly.

Admittedly, there was no room for any casework or building frame, and we had yet to solve the problem of space for the blower, wind pressure regulator, wind trunks, low voltage current supply and one or two other essentials, but these are minor obstacles to the true organ fanatic!

The actual construction of the instrument started with the chests--comprising the pipe ranks, toe boards, or top boards (on which the pipes stand) "wells"  (the sides and ends) and bottom boards. Details of each chest varied with the numbers of rows of pipes, but the sketches showing the basic mechanism will give a good idea of a typical chest in cross-section.

Strips of mdf (a sheet material available in 3/4≤ thickness) were cut for the top boards for each of the three chests, and the pipes centers were punched directly onto them, using the paper setouts, taped down, as a template. Based on these centers, the magnets, valves, pipe racks and the many other details of the mechanism can be marked out and fitted. Unfortunately, a detailed description of this procedure is beyond the scope of a general article such as this. While the basis of the mechanism is shown clearly in the sketch, there are a great many practical details which must be finalized in design and observed in manufacture, if this deceptively simple idea (drilling a hole, screwing a magnet and valve under it, and planting a pipe on top of it) is to be carried through to create a reliable musical instrument. Such a mass of information has not, to my knowledge, ever been written down, as it is essentially based on practical experience over the years. If any readers are interested in further practical details, it may be possible to describe some of the problems involved, and how they are overcome, in a future article, but only a practicing organbuilder can have all the necessary skills and knowledge to cope with every situation, and this makes it impossible to give a general "recipe" for building an organ.

The wind supply is provided by a small electric blower of course, but this one is unusual, in that it was passed on to Alec by an organ-building friend from the days of his original house organ. Indeed, it turned out to be the very same blower, which had returned to him, after an absence of 30 or more years! It proved to be an excellent machine, and very quiet when housed in a new silencing cabinet.

It was necessary to regulate the wind pressure to a value suitable for the pipes and their setting, and, of course, we had no space for traditional bellows. In a case such as this, I used my own design of wind pressure regulator (basically a hinged plate of 1/2≤ sheet material, "floating" over a rubbercloth diaphragm, and supporting some suitably-tensioned springs). Movement of the plate controls a valve which allows wind from the blower through to the chests. As the pipework makes a demand on the supply, the valve opens just far enough to maintain pressure to within 1/8≤ or less at peak demand. This is an acceptable degree of control, and only a very critical ear will notice the slight fall-off in power. Every builder has his favorite design for such a regulator (sometimes called a 'schwimmer' or, in my case, a 'compensator') and they all bear a strong family resemblance. Not all are equally effective, however, and some are prone, under adverse conditions, to fluttering (creating an effect like a very rapid Tremulant). Again, only experience of such devices can provide a way out of trouble, though there are some basic rules in compensator design.

The steady, regulated wind from the compensator is fed to the chest by a rather broad, but shallow, wind-trunk (made in mdf, like the blower box and compensator). This is fixed to the back wall, out of sight, behind the console.

With all the basic elements designed, there still remained the question of the 14≤ limit on width. Obviously, the blower box and compensator were too wide to keep within the limit, so it was decided to camouflage them, together with the circuit boards, transformer/rectifier unit, and other large components.

In the final design, the three chests were screwed to plates of 3/4≤ ply, previously fixed, in a true vertical position, to the rather uneven stone wall. The console was placed centrally, with the two outer chests (holding the bass pipes) low down on each side. The third chest (containing all the treble pipes) was fixed centrally on the wall, just behind and above the console's music desk. Two bookcases were made to fill completely the gap between the sides of the console and the side walls of the house. They were set rather further forward than would be usual, with a broad top which ran back to the wall behind, effectively disappearing under the side chests.

On the left of the console, the bookcase is a real one, with its top extending over the circuit boards and transformer/rectifier unit hidden behind. To the right of the console the seemingly identical bookcase is, in fact, a dummy. Its shelves and books are only about 11/4≤ deep. (One of the more bizarre scenes in the workshop was that of pushing large quantities of scrap books through the circular saw, leaving their spines and an inch or so of paper and cover. These truncated volumes look convincing when glued, side-by-side, onto the foreshortened bookcase back.) The space under the dummy bookcase top contains the blower box and compensator. The bookcases, blower box, compensator, etc., all sit on 3/4≤ ply panels which have been leveled onto the floor.

Once Alec had installed his real books and ornaments, the organ (while visually dominating such a small room, as it must) blended into its domestic setting beautifully, with a spectacular visual touch being provided by a trumpet-blowing angel, carved in oak, which had been salvaged from a local church altarpiece,

What of the finished product? Naturally, the instrument is a compromise--but then this is true of all but the largest organs. It is a pity, for instance, that there was no room for a swell box, or another rank, but it is a wise builder or player who knows when he has gone as far as space and finances will allow. The wooden Stopt Diapason rank had its top lips lowered, and was re-voiced to produce a charming, rather quaint sound, with none of the original's unattractive, breathy tone. The Open Diapason had to be softened to just short of dullness, and now adds considerable fullness and warmth. The Salicional has made an excellent quiet voice, and is also very useful in its other pitches, where it adds brightness without shrillness. This is most important in a small room, and it is worth noting that, the larger the room (up to cathedral proportions) the brighter and more cutting the treble pipework can, and must, be. But the opposite is true for a small space, where top notes can easily become uncomfortably piercing--hence the lack of Mixtures on small house organs with no swell boxes. Many visiting organists, both professional and amateur, have played Alec's instrument since its completion, and all have been pleasantly surprised by its resources and the fact it is possible to produce satisfying performances of both classical and romantic works, albeit with some ingenuity on the part of the player.

True, it would have been possible to install a "large" electronic with three or four manuals, a wide range of stops and artificial reverberation, and I can see the attraction of such an idea, especially for the player whose interest lies in large-scale, romantic works. But, I cannot imagine anything less convincing than the sound of pedal and manual reeds, with Diapasons and mixtures, echoing with a five-second reverberation, across a room some 16 feet long and 8 feet high. The sound of a small organ in a small room, with no reverberation at all, is an authentic one and has a special charm. Whether it be two or three ranks of pipes offered with mechanical action as two or three stops, or whether, as in this case, the ranks are extended to several "stops," the small domestic instrument has a sound and fascination all its own, and is capable of giving much pleasure, both visually and musically, over many years.

Peter Jones will be pleased to receive comments, either on this article, or relating to readers' own experiences, at: The Bungalow, Kennaa, St. John's, Isle of Man, 1M4 3LW, Via United Kingdom

Manual I

                  8'            Open Diapason A

                  8'            Stopt Diapason B

                  4'            Salicet C

                  4'            Flute B

                  22/3'    Twelfth C

                  2'            Fifteenth A

                                    Man II/Man I

Manual II

                  8'            Stopt Diapason B

                  8'            Salicional C

                  2'            Salicetina C

                  11/3'    Nineteenth C

Pedal

                  16'         Harmonic Bass B & Q

                  8'            Bass Flute B

                  4'            Fifteenth A

                  2'            Salamine C

                                    Man I/Ped

                                    Man II/Ped

Summary

                  A              Open Diapason 73 pipes

                  B              Stopt Diapason 73 pipes

                  C              Salicional 73 pipes

                  D              Quint 12 pipes