E. Power Biggs

[Don Richard]

And you're right about contemporary keyboards/guitars/drums infiltrating today's congregations, with the organs suffering neglect and total exclusion from the worship service. Traditional hymns that once stood the test of time for centuries have now become old fashioned and out of touch with today's society, and to attract (and maintain) younger church-goers, music directors have given way to today's pop-style of music to keep them entertained!

I'm sorry, but I don't condone this practice at all, not at the expense of the organ and its rich heritage.

Biggs encouraged churches to buy a real organ instead of a piano or electronic organ. Many pipe organs are in churches today because of his efforts.

[jt1stcav]

Don't most of the hymn melodies come from old bar tunes? It's a bummer that some people get scorned for communicating in their native language while others are revered...

I think you're confusing bar drinking songs with common folk tunes:

http://www.music-for-church-choirs.com/hymns.html

I could say more but it would be threadcrapping and way off topic to Don Richard's original post...

[Mallette]

OK, this is still in line with Biggs, if only by a thread (as it were).

When we began the organ campaign, I queried my old friend and former music minister Daniel John Susan about how to respond to the "Why not an electric? They sound just as good and cost much less." argument.

His response:

"Sure, and while we are at it, let's get plastic alter flowers because they are cheaper and last much longer. Oh, and let's get some electric candles. They are also a lot cheaper. It's good enough for Him."

Dave

[MD1032]

And you're right about contemporary keyboards/guitars/drums infiltrating today's congregations, with the organs suffering neglect and total exclusion from the worship service. Traditional hymns that once stood the test of time for centuries have now become old fashioned and out of touch with today's society, and to attract (and maintain) younger church-goers, music directors have given way to today's pop-style of music to keep them entertained!

I'm sorry, but I don't condone this practice at all, not at the expense of the organ and its rich heritage.

Biggs encouraged churches to buy a real organ instead of a piano or electronic organ. Many pipe organs are in churches today because of his efforts.

Of course, he also encouraged many churches to throw away many excellent E.M. Skinner organs...

But you're right, and my church's organ is a victim of such a transformation. I'm easily the only one that plays it any more or even cares about it. It's a fine instrument too. A bit of a frankenstein, but a II/17 turn-of-the-century Moller at its core with some A.R. Schopp ranks (two trumpets and a III-rank Mixture). Not bad!

Anyway, I'm a huge pipe organ nut as well. The organ is the biggest and best instrument ever made in many aspects. I literally have gigs and gigs of organ music, even though I'm a clarinet player as my primary. Some of my favorite recent organists include Pierre Cochereau, Michael Murray, Gordon Turk, Olivier Latry, Daniel Roth, but my all-time favorite is Virgil Fox. That man played the music with such emotion that the world will probably never see another organist like him. I have some really old, terrible quality recordings of him, in fact, but a bad recording can't hide a good musician!

The Hi-Fi recordings I do have of pipe organs sound great on my B3's, though. They have a lot of gusto for a bookshelf speaker! I can't wait to really crank this stuff with the Fortes I'm getting this summer. If anyone's looking for a good organ CD to start out on, I'd say "Great Toccatas" with Marie-Claire Alain at St. Sulpice is a safe bet.

As for me, I'm home for the summer, and already filling my schedule up with organ concerts to attend! Good stuff.

[Mallette]

Our builders in Texas are pretty backed up. Of couse, we have a lot of catching up to do...

Biggs was pretty biased, but I do not hold that against him. He was fighting a pretty entrenched dilution of organ building. He argued against swell boxes as "unnecessary" even though French organ music without them is pretty awful.

I have a few Virgil recordings, and was privileged to hear him live (red lined Count Dracula cape and all) playing his 200 speaker Rogers traveling organ when I was in college. Performance wise, I tend towards E. Pluribus Biggs though, as Virgil's stuff gets a bit too schmaltzy for me at times.

Dave

[jt1stcav]

It's the "schmaltzy" that I dig, and on a few Bach pieces I had arranged and edited thru the MIDI/Cakewalk 4.0 DOS sequencer on the computer, they were fair representations of Virgil's own lively arrangements.

Since I couldn't actually "play" the music (since I'm not an organist), I could transcribe what I heard from a Fox recording and manipulate it on the computer keyboard one note at a time just by figuring out what notes/chords Virgil played at any given portion (usually a measure at a time on the original sheet music). Talk about a tedious, time-consuming process...I had a cheap Yamaha portable keyboard (before General MIDI was even established) that I would use on its own to figure out certain Fox chord structures...once it "sounded" like what Virgil played, I then went to the computer and typed each note onto the sequencer program - per track, per measure. Once the music was typed in, I would set the tempo and timing, and either stretch or shorten the individual notes to give it that "played live" sound and not have it sound mechanical or perfectly timed like a computer with no feelings was playing the music.

Once all the editing was done, I'd set the pipe organ's registration and expression changes thru MIDI patches that coincided with the organ's own relay and the homemade MIDI playback device my dad designed instead of the Roland GS SoundCanvas sound module I also used when the organ wasn't turned on.

I also did Biggs arrangements on a few preludes and fugues, and included one by Jean Guillou as well because I enjoyed his playing technique for that particular piece. As long as I had a CD to listen to (the "play", "pause", and "repeat" buttons on the remote got pretty worn out), I just listened by ear to what each organist performed one measure at a time, and went from there. A month or so later, I'd have a fully arranged piece of music the MIDI playback device on the organ could perform (like a computerized player-piano)...when the music sounded like an actual organist was seated at the console bench performing it live, as opposed to a computer playing it back perfectly in time (with no speed variations whatsoever), that's when I would be totally satisfied and eventually make a DAT recording (after the organ was thoroughly tuned, natch). Unfortunantly, so much finished music never got recorded at all...the arranged MIDI files still sit in the hard drive of that old 8088 (10mHz speed) DOS-only computer.

What a shame...but what few pieces we do have recorded sounded excellent thru the Cornwalls, my bro's KG-5.5s (both sold), and my current RB-75s and ProMedia 2.1 PC speakers! Now I just have to find a way to transfer the DAT masters onto a CD-R...

[jt1stcav]

MD1032, welcome to the Fox club!

My dad's residence pipe organ was a Frankenstein as well, but with well chosen and properly voiced ranks, the II/19 sounded much bigger than it really was, especially when he added a 16' Contra Bassoon stop in the pedal division...pretty dramatic it was!

Wish there were loads of summer recitals to go to here in Florida. Unfortunantly, they are far and few between, if at all. Maybe I should move back to CT or NY where I lived as a kid...at least up there you'll find much in the way of culture and the arts.

[Mallette]

Jim:
Unless you did the DAT masters at 48 khz, you should be able to direct burn them to CD.

In reading your post, I can fully appreciate your labors. Back in the 80's I did something similar (though nowhere near either as painstaking or authentic) note at a time transcriptions from Handel, Gabrieli, and such to the old Amiga OS using Deluxe Music. For those of us who cannot play, it's sort of like translating a painting to Braille.

That was an INCREDIBLE amount of work, but if I had the instrument you had sitting in front of you demanding to be heard I would have obeyed the call as you did.

I hope others here are able to realize both what you did and, most importantly, WHY. When you played those back, your were realizing the audiophile fantasy: perfect playback. Infinite S/N. 0 distortion. Flat from DC to light, and instantaneous dynamics from 0 to whatever.

WHAT A RUSH!

Dave

[MD1032]

It's the "schmaltzy" that I dig, and on a few Bach pieces I had arranged and edited thru the MIDI/Cakewalk 4.0 DOS sequencer on the computer, they were fair representations of Virgil's own lively arrangements.

Since I couldn't actually "play" the music (since I'm not an organist), I could transcribe what I heard from a Fox recording and manipulate it on the computer keyboard one note at a time just by figuring out what notes/chords Virgil played at any given portion (usually a measure at a time on the original sheet music). Talk about a tedious, time-consuming process...I had a cheap Yamaha portable keyboard (before General MIDI was even established) that I would use on its own to figure out certain Fox chord structures...once it "sounded" like what Virgil played, I then went to the computer and typed each note onto the sequencer program - per track, per measure. Once the music was typed in, I would set the tempo and timing, and either stretch or shorten the individual notes to give it that "played live" sound and not have it sound mechanical or perfectly timed like a computer with no feelings was playing the music.

Once all the editing was done, I'd set the pipe organ's registration and expression changes thru MIDI patches that coincided with the organ's own relay and the homemade MIDI playback device my dad designed instead of the Roland GS SoundCanvas sound module I also used when the organ wasn't turned on.

I also did Biggs arrangements on a few preludes and fugues, and included one by Jean Guillou as well because I enjoyed his playing technique for that particular piece. As long as I had a CD to listen to (the "play", "pause", and "repeat" buttons on the remote got pretty worn out), I just listened by ear to what each organist performed one measure at a time, and went from there. A month or so later, I'd have a fully arranged piece of music the MIDI playback device on the organ could perform (like a computerized player-piano)...when the music sounded like an actual organist was seated at the console bench performing it live, as opposed to a computer playing it back perfectly in time (with no speed variations whatsoever), that's when I would be totally satisfied and eventually make a DAT recording (after the organ was thoroughly tuned, natch). Unfortunantly, so much finished music never got recorded at all...the arranged MIDI files still sit in the hard drive of that old 8088 (10mHz speed) DOS-only computer.

What a shame...but what few pieces we do have recorded sounded excellent thru the Cornwalls, my bro's KG-5.5s (both sold), and my current RB-75s and ProMedia 2.1 PC speakers! Now I just have to find a way to transfer the DAT masters onto a CD-R...

You should get in touch with my friend who runs a website called Reuter822.com. If you're on the organ forum, you'll already know him as NYCFarmBoy, but he's already miditized the 822 and he's adding another small unit organ and quite a few ranks... will be around 21 ranks when he's done this summer, and it'll all be MIDI-controlled. Extremely cool stuff

But yeah, admittedly, I am quite a Virgil Fox fan. I have all of the Legacy CD's, the Art of Virgil Fox CD's, and about 7 or so other CD's of his. I'm just a big pipe organ fan in general! And what can I say? My B3's can chunk out the 32's (16 hz!) without too much of a problem... what's wrong with this company?!

[colterphoto1]

One of the great rock star names of all time. Right alongside Mars Bonfire (Steppenwolf) and Aerial Bender (Mott the Hoople).

[jt1stcav]

Jim:
Unless you did the DAT masters at 48 khz, you should be able to direct burn them to CD.

In reading your post, I can fully appreciate your labors. Back in the 80's I did something similar (though nowhere near either as painstaking or authentic) note at a time transcriptions from Handel, Gabrieli, and such to the old Amiga OS using Deluxe Music. For those of us who cannot play, it's sort of like translating a painting to Braille.

That was an INCREDIBLE amount of work, but if I had the instrument you had sitting in front of you demanding to be heard I would have obeyed the call as you did.

I hope others here are able to realize both what you did and, most importantly, WHY. When you played those back, your were realizing the audiophile fantasy: perfect playback. Infinite S/N. 0 distortion. Flat from DC to light, and instantaneous dynamics from 0 to whatever.

WHAT A RUSH!

Dave

Have you ever seen a grown man cry?[:'(]

It was a rush, and now that the organ's gone, it's left a void in my creativity that I can't seem to fill anymore. When I was home alone some nights I would fire up the organ, select, say, The Nutcracker Suite on the Cakewalk sequencer, and press play...every movement was there, utilizing every one of those 19 ranks at my disposal...registration and tempo changes, along with swell shade expression (volume control for those not in the know) throughout the music just as organist Frederick Hohman had transcribed them (I was fortunant enough to have both his sheet music arrangement and the Pro Organo CD to listen to as I transcribed his efforts to MIDI files). As I sat there on the sofa in the dark, staring at the empty, dimly-lit console, I imagined an organist actually sitting on the bench performing the music I was listening to...it was the ultimate audiophile fantasy just as you described it!

I'm listening to Holst's: The Planets that's been sequenced to the Reuter Opus 822 residence organ as I type this, and the music I sequenced to MIDI for our own organ is quite frankly just as good (if not better...IMHO)! Listening to this piece I can already point out that if it was me, I would've edited more extensively with timing and phrasing...the music is just too exact and precise in tempo to my ears and sounds artificial; some of the notes bleed together where I would've shortened them enough to hear a slight break (as when an organist's fingers leave the keys and reposition themselves to strike another chord)...it's hard for me to describe into words what I would edit as far as tempo changes is concerned, but I can hear thru these digital recordings what I would change to make this work sound more like an organist is actually playing it live! I guess after almost 10 years of arranging and editing MIDI files for my own residence pipe organ ('89 to '99), I am a little biased with the results. I'm not dissing the massive amount of work the owner of this Reuter organ put forth in sequencing Holst's and Bach's compositions for his instrument...I'm just saying I would've done some more editing to the final sequences to make them sound like a live performer was playing them is all.

I need to get my few recordings mixed to CD...and I believe the DAT masters are 16/44.1 standard...

[Mallette]

[:'(]

Dave

PS - That one NEVER works for me. Makes me want to cry...