ENGLISH ORGAN

Our latest project is The Tonal Architecture and Music of the English Organ; tell us about it.

Perhaps twenty years ago I began writing a book. It was inspired by some conversations with Ian Bell and Dr Harry Bramma. We used to meet regularly in pubs before the pandemic and formed a club named Omphiangelon – after the obscure stop provided in the 1870s for an organ in St Martin’s, Scarborough. I was interested to explore a specific question: What makes a ‘Father’ Willis organ of the 1870s sound so different from examples by William Hill & Son or T.C. Lewis from a similar period? As a group we agreed we could tell the difference – but the answers as to ‘how’ and ‘why’ seemed elusive.

I also realised that there have been landmark studies of the organ, including Peter Williams’s The European Organ (London: Batsford, 1966), Nicholas Thistlethwaite’s The making of the Victorian organ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Stephen Bicknell’s The History of the English Organ, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). These are examples of authoritative, scholarly works which are now cornerstones of organ literature. Off the beaten track there are important, detailed studies by David Wickens and others. But what seemed lacking is an examination of how the sound of the pipe organ relates to the music written for it.

The German music historian and organologist Gustav Fock (1893-1974) posed (and answered) a question in relation to the North German and Brabant organs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: