ORGANIST’S COMPLICATED TASK

Manawatu Times, Volume LIII, Issue 6733, 9 October 1928, Page 3

ORGANIST’S COMPLICATED TASK

“Who would have thought an organ loft could bo such a chamber of complicated mysteries?” writes a special correspondent of the Evening Standard, on the Albert Hall organ. “The four key-boards or manuals, facing one like a broad flight of steps; the multitude of draw-stops on cither side (176 altogether,' each bearing its name on its -white nob) controlled by rows of thumb stops below the manuals; the imposing array of pedals —these things the eye takes in at a glance. But they are only the epitome, of the organ. The organ itself is an edifice of over 9000 pipes. The tallest is 32 feet, a regular chimney shaft; the shortest a little fellow no more than three inches high. But numbers and measurements merely confuse. You have to see the organist at work to gain anything like a concrete idea of the complexity of the organ. *. His hands are sometimes on all four manuals at once. The highest manual controls pipes so far back in the organ’s recesses that in order to make them agree with the conductor’s, beat ho has to depress the keys a fraction of a second before he needs the sound. His thumbs flash on and off the stops below the manuals, opening and closing batches of the draw stops on either side. Every now and then ho needs not a batch of stops, but one individual stop; one hand must leave the keys to fly to right or left and pull out that one of the 176. His feet are busy with the pedals. His eyes are divided between the score in front of him, the stops beside him, and the image of the conductor in the mirror just above. “His mind is following the music as it proceeds and remembering what is on the next page ,of the score so as to bo ready to change the stops. His judgment is deciding whether the volume of the strings needs extra assistance from the organ, of if the choir should bo helped out with Vox Humana. A musical instrument! Rather the organ is a musical engine—an engine that can growl, whistle, sing, hum, roar, shout, coo, or swear at the will of its master in the console. He, the god of the engine, can loose anticyclones from the musical Azores to sweep through the upper galleries, or send such sweet Zephyrs of song sighing along the outer corridors that the waitresses in the tearooms drop' adulterating tears into the milk jugs. And often it happens that his cars cannot hear the music ho makes with his hands and feet. What reaches him is a confusion of sound that flows past him into the auditorium, there to take form and beauty. Ho is a sort of musical artilleryman firing at a target far beyond his ken and aware of nothing but tho explosion.”