Page 42 - BBC Music (January 2020)

The English organ
Windsofchange
Over the centuries, social upheavals and changing
musical fashions have both ravaged and transformed
the English organ. Daniel Moult tells its story
hat does the term ‘English organ’
conjure up in your mind? Rich
sounds in a generous acoustic,
W underpinning a cathedral choir?
The pomp and ceremony of a royal occasion
or the Last Night of the Proms? Or maybe just
background muzak to a church service or
civic event: sometimes saccharine, sometimes
bombastic? The English organ has fulfilled all
of these functions and more, but it has its own
musical significance, too. At its best, it is the
medium of some of the finest national music
ever written, and its story is also a fascinating if
quirky mirror of our musical and social history.
Although the earliest known reference to an
English organ dates from the tenth century,
when St Dunstan gave an organ to Malmesbury
Abbey, nothing exists of an instrument in
unaltered form until the 1680s or so. But with
a bit of digging around, we can work out what
some of these earlier organs sounded like. And so
our musical story begins in the 1520s.
Our knowledge of the sort of organs played
by Byrd and Tallis and the so-called ‘English
virginalists’ was, until recently, limited to the
odd surviving stop-list and much conjecture.
Why do no organs survive from this era? Sadly,
wanton destruction and changing tastes are to
blame. The 16th-century English Reformation
under Henry VIII saw the destruction or
terminal decline of many English organs. Unlike
some of the impressive and relatively large
organs found in mainland Europe’s churches
and cathedrals at this time, English Tudor organs
GETTY were modest in size and expectation. A handful
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of stops were all that was required to accompany
or play alongside the choir. It could simply be
that they were not perceived as impressive
enough to be saved from zealous Reformers.
In 1977, a man renovating his farmhouse in
Wetheringsett, Suffolk, was intrigued by a piece
of timber that had served as a door in centuries
gone by. Why did it have rows of grooves and
holes? Eventually it was identified as an organ Important principals:
soundboard (on which stood the pipes) dating the Royal Festival Hall’s
Harrison & Harrison;
from around 1525, which enabled organ builders (below) the 17th-century
Goetze and Gwynn to recreate a Tudor organ Adlington Hall organ
in 2001. They were able to do this because the
soundboard of an organ tells you how many
pipes and stops the organ had, and therefore
allows for a complete reconstruction.
The resulting ‘Wetheringsett’ organ reveals
some fascinating aspects about organ playing of
the time. The very high pitch has implications
as to how we perform solo pieces of Byrd et al
on more recent instruments, suggesting that
any piece using the whole tessitura of the organ
would have sounded nearly a fifth higher than
notated. With that in mind, there’s no doubt that
Tudor organists would as a matter of course
have had to transpose accompaniments to
match the choir’s pitch. And what did these
instruments sound like? It turns out that
English organs had a sound similar to southern
European ones, with a thin, overtone-heavy
tone akin to a stringed instrument – nothing like
the grand tone of those found in Germany and
the Netherlands.
More destruction followed of those organs
that had survived the Reformation, due to the