The Pipe-Organ as a Site for Musical and Technological Innovation – Part 1 Conference report.

On 6 September I had the opportunity to attend a one-day conference at City University London with the title The Pipe-Organ as a Site for Musical and Technological Innovation. In over 60 years as an organist this was the first time I had attended a conference about organ technology, and it was well worth the wait!

The Conference was devised by John Forster, a researcher at the University. John had visited the Orgelpark in Amsterdam a few times and had given a paper there. Hans Fidom has been the director of the Orgelpark since 2010 and John thought it might be good to get Hans to participate in a conference in the UK. He approached City, who were supportive and provided funding, but they suggested he also reached out to the Royal Musical Association to increase visibility. The RMA Student Liaison Officer, Maureen Wolloshin, helped John secure further funding and support from the RMA for a dedicated Study Day.

There were ten presentations, a concluding panel session and (at the close of the conference) a recital at St. John the Evangelist. In this report I can only provide a brief note on the scope of the papers, and provide links to the speakers and their topics that you may find of value.  There is more detail on the papers in the abstracts in the conference programme.

The day started with a fascinating account by Martin Renshaw of how the organ has developed as a musical instrument since Roman times, with a particular focus on the disposition of organ blowers in churches. Cassian Southwick (Viscount Organs and formerly with Harrison and Harrison) brought things into the 21^st century with a proposal for how the range of an organ could be expanded through digital technology to provide (for example) the percussion required for workshop groups in churches. I liked his idea of using the lower half-octave of a Swell manual as a means of interfacing with these digital resources.

Next up was Owen Woods (Harrison and Harrison) who is undertaking research into the impacts and challenges of using leather on the top edge of the mouth of a flue pipe. (It’s worth reading a very comprehensive article by Colin Pykett at this stage to gain an understanding of the physics of flue pipes.) This ‘leathering-up’ changes the harmonics of flues, especially larger-scale open diapasons. This approach was developed by Robert Hope-Jones, an English organ builder who was one of the master innovators of organ building.  Owen is currently engaged on a PhD on the history of the tonal development of Harrison and Harrison.

Until this conference I had no knowledge of the work of Georges Cloetens (1871-1949), though a show of hands suggested I was in a minority.  Elizabeth Salverda described the efforts that Cloetens made to expand the total range of (and pianos with his Lutheal device, which even impressed Ravel.   In 1910 Cloetens also invented a related instrument called the “orphéal,” which was capable of imitating the timbre of string instruments, wind instruments, the accordion and the church organ on the piano.

I gave the final paper in the morning session, taking an information scientist-approach to optimizing the user interface of the machine that we call an organ. In my view we need to take account of eye gaze and working memory factors in both the design of organ consoles and also the support we give to current and potential players who have cognitive conditions such as dyslexia.

The highlight of the conference for me was the presentation from Hans Fidom, director of the Orgelpark in Amsterdam. I liked his concept of ‘musiking’ as a description of improvisation, interpretation, recording, composition, new music and performance history. One of the objectives of the Orgelpark (which was established by the Utopa Foundation in 2003) was to move the organ away from being a ‘church’ instrument and provide an environment which supports new technical and musical approaches to expanding the range of organ technology.

Sitting in a corner of the conference room was a small set of organ pipes and a digital keyboard. These were used by Tony Decap and his colleague Seppe Verbist to demonstrate Tony’s smARTvalve technology which is small enough and responsive enough to support individual pipes with varying pressures and hence acoustic outputs from each the pipe individually and as a rank. The vision and technology for Orchestrionix instruments is based on four generations of building dance organs.

Lauren Redhead (Goldsmiths University) and Kjel Sidloski took the organ-expansion scheme to the next level with the integration of live electronic signals with a conventional organ. Lauren demonstrated this approach at the evening recital given together with Alistar Zaluda , which I was not able to attend.

Sonically the most impressive presentation came from Robert Scholl and Justin Paterson. Their starting point was the 1925 silent film version of the Phantom of the Opera. Many organists have started to accompany silent films but Robert and Justin have taken it a step further in integrating improvisations recorded individually on the organs in Arundel Cathedral and Coventry Cathedral in 2022. Listen to an extract from their CD on YouTube or purchase the CD, the web page for which provides a very good overview of the objectives and the technology. Both organs have quite a long reverberation period which enhances the sonic impact.

The conference ended with a very lively discussion with a panel comprising Hans Fidom, Katharine Pardee (University of Oxford) and Andrew McCrea (Royal College of Organists) that defeated my attempts to take notes.

Overall a very enjoyable and instructive conference that certainly opened my eyes to the possibility of enhancing the resources of even a large cathedral organ. My reflections on the event are in Part 2 of this week’s blog post. Let me finish this part by thanking John and the RMA for their vision in setting up this event and creating an excellent programme of speakers that spanned so many aspects of the 21^st century organ.