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Mmmm Manuals Originally uploaded by mattyturner. This week i’ve made a new friend at Church, Compton the organ. While I was away in Nepal my Dad was on Ebay and picked one up, had it installed, serviced and David (our resident organist) kitted it out with some new sound making capabilities! (A 25w Cyrus amp, Jamo bass speaker and a pair of Bang & Olufson speakers). David – who has this stuff lying around in their house?

So for the first time this Sunday morning, I played the hymns on the organ, which is about the third time i’ve ever played an organ. What can I say? The organ, as an instrument, is a lot of fun! I got the train into Winchester yesterday afternoon in order to have a bash at the first movement of Bach’s Organ Concerto I in G Major. I also have a book of eight short preludes and fugues (Bach again) so there is plenty to keep me busy and get me more acquainted with organ playing.

Coming from the piano, having a lack of touch response or a sustaining pedal feels very foreign. The first soon becomes liberating as you can concentrate on just hitting the notes! However the articulation becomes more important, whether you play notes legato (smoothly) or staccato (distinctly), as altering the gap between notes is the prime (maybe sole?) means of adding emphasis and phrasing to the music. Not having a sustaining pedal along with an instant cessation of sound when you lift your fingers means you play very differently to a piano. No touch response also means you have no volume control at your finger tips as it were. There is a swell pedal, which is one way of controlling the volume. What’s much more fun though is to adjust the stops which adds or subtracts the instruments being ‘played’ as you press each note. (On a real pipe organ this literally adjusts which pipes are having air pushed through them.) By doing this you not only add to the volume but you can completely change the sound being produced. I played the hymn ‘Immortal, Invisible, God only wise’ and only used the same registration (how the stops are arranged for a manual) twice, so almost every verse was a bit different.

For those that are interested, I played verse one with the Diapson, Rohr flute and something that was a 2’ on the great manual for the first verse, up to the swell for verses two and three (Diapson, Flute and Flageolet), the great manual with the addition of the IV mixture for the fourth and full organ on the great for the final verse (repetition of the first if you’re wondering what the fifth verse is).

I should probably quickly explain what the ‘great’ and the ‘swell’ are. These are the names of the manuals (keyboards) on the organ. Our organ has two. Great is on the bottom and swell on the top. Organs that have three manuals typically have a great, swell, and choir. Then organs that have more, well I don’t really know what the manuals are called after that. Up to five are common though on pipe organ, though some have even more! If you’re interested in how pipe organs work there is an excellent article on Wikipedia.

In other news I met up with Jamie in between all my organ practice. It was such a great day he was determined to get a proper ice cream. Well, it was the smallest scoop of ice cream i’ve ever seen, i’m surprised they had the nerve. So to you people at Presto underneath the Butter Cross in Winchester who think it’s okay to sell a single, miniscule, scoop of ice cream in a cone for £1.55 —here’s a picture of the offending, at the time of photographing unlicked ice cream.