Organist Felt 'At Home’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31209, 5 November 1966, Page 16

Organist Felt 'At Home’

Dr. Sydney Watson practised last evening on the Christchurch Cathedral organ “a delightful organ, a splendid organ” and felt quite at home.

He is organist at Christ Church, Oxford, which is both the cathedral and the chapel for the university college founded about 1540 as Cardinal, renamed Canterbury, and eventually called Christ Church.

“Your founders were Christ Church men, they built this cathedral and your university in the heart of the city, and gave familiar names, so I feel very much at home,” said Dr. Watson.

Dr. Watson said he had also found an affinity in community music-making. Christ Church choristers had a tradition as old as that cathedral. The Bach Society, which he conducts, was formed many years ago to perform Bach,

but its choir of 400 (drawn from the town and countryside of Oxford and the university) would now tackle anything. The Oxford Orchestral Society, which he also conducts, drew players from the same sources. All three musical bodies worked closely together. Asked whether he thought the traditions of great pipe organs would ever die, Dr. Watson promptly replied: “Never.”

The electronic organ allowed “enormous savings” in money, time, and space and was serving thousands of churches well, “but there is no alternative to, no equivalent of a pipe organ,” he said.

Modern trends, he said, supported his view because the pipe organ builders of Britain were “crowded with orders” from home and abroad.

Dr. Watson said these projects were made possible by the sacrificial giving of humble individuals, handsome

bequests, and other finance, but all were directed to the ■ provision of pipe organs. Dr. Watson will give a re- • cital in the Christchurch i Cathedral on Sunday afteri noon.