Skip to main content

Organ donors

Tradition is a big thing in a small village - but it doesn't always have the right answer. I want to illustrate this with the strange case of the village organ.

Our village church, pictured here, is ancient (though a mere whippersnapper compared to some of its neighbours as it's only six or seven hundred years old), and in it, as is often the case with British village churches, sits a battered and indifferent organ (see below). It's in serious need of overhaul, and the community is in the process of raising £30,000 to give it a serious working over. Fine and good and an excellent display of community spirit. But I would question whether it really should be done up.

Tradition says 'Of course, it must! Churches always have organs!' Well, yes. Though the vast majority of this church's life it won't have done. Until Victorian times, only the big churches and cathedrals had organs - villages like ours would have got along nicely with a village band of whatever instruments came to hand. (Funnily, the modern 'worship group', so despised by the traditionalist, is probably closer to this tradition than an organ.)

In fact, I'm not against having an organ. It's one of the few instruments that one person can play and really fill a building like that - and it sounds right. But what I do doubt is whether it's worth refurbing a never-particularly-brilliant pipe organ. I would at least give serious consideration to spending the money on a decent modern electronic church organ. These aren't like the things granny had in the parlour - they make a serious noise, indistiguishable by most from the real thing, and for that kind of money you'd get one with much more range than our current organ (which can't, for instance, manage that wedding favourite Widor's Toccata), a much wider selection of stops and much less ongoing maintenance. (Tuning? Pah!) It could be fitted in the existing cabinet, keeping the pretty pipes and all.

I could be wrong. But no one asked me, so I thought I'd say anyway.

Comments

  1. Consider a Hammond organ. I have a single-manual XK-1, which can accept a second manual and pedals through MIDI. Although supposed to be a rock/pop organ, it is stocked full of churchy sounds (tibias, diapasons and so on) and would do nicely, I'd have thought. You could mount it in place of the old console, and relay the sound through a suitable stereo amplification system concealed among the pipes. Total cost, I imagine, even with the remedial joinery, would be less than £5k.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope