The UK's leading Digital Church Organ specialist
Here at Viscount, a vitally important part of our job is to make sure we know each and every product inside and out, not just from an operational perspective, but also technical. Every now and then we will get a call or email from a customer informing us that their instrument has a problem which…
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We are living in an age where technology seems to be moving at a remarkable pace. I wonder if our Victorian forbears felt the same? I doubt it. Never before has technology so much entered our daily lives. Smart phones, video links and apps that allow us to turn off the home lights from far…
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I am delighted to tell you that September 2019 saw the addition of this important place of worship to our list of prestigious organ hire clients. Its also amusing that it seems we are constantly bumping into staff from Harrison & Harrison as they strip out the pipe organ while we install our speakers. Not…
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For the fourth tutorial in our 2019 series, Francis Rumsey discusses the registration of Franck’s organ works with Jonathan Kingston. They decided to use his Chorale in A minor as an example, because it typifies a number of the challenges faced by organists who need to create sounds similar to those Franck might have expected….
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Almost two years ago now we took an order from the United Reformed Church in Muswell Hill who were planning a £3.0 million refurbishment of their building. It is unusual to get this much notice of a firm order but the church were anxious to fix the price in the context of the looming Brexit…
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David has kindly asked me to introduce myself as the new part-time member of staff based at our Bicester office. Most of my career has been spent in the musical instruments industry, although for five years during the 1990s I worked in the publications department of the Royal School of Church Music, located in the…
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La Révolte Des Orgues, composed in 2007, originates from Jean Guillou’s conceptual design for an organ in the new concert hall in Tenerife (completed 2003). The composition came into being when he devised the distribution of the organ pipes among multiple cases arranged around the audience. The formal go ahead for this UK production of…
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Later this year we are providing a new digital instrument for this lovely little country church. The charming small pipe organ works quite well but as you can see from the pictures could do with some TLC and also good clean. Here is its NPOR entry from which you will see that the builder may…
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Earlier this year we wrote about how RTE in Ireland televise a religious service every Sunday morning. This is normally recorded in a TV studio in Dublin but there is also an outside broadcast from some church around Ireland. Generally a Yamaha grand piano is used in the studio, or the musicians bring in their…
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On Tuesday July 9th 2019 we installed a hire organ in St George’s Cathedral Southwark. The 10th instrument currently on hire and for quite an unusual reason that I will explain below. The following day I went in with my new colleague Richard Goodall to check out the installation and carry out some basic voicing….
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I was recently in Manchester for the launch concert of a Theatre Organ project I am involved with and I met Ian Wolstenholme who introduced me to an interesting programme he produces on a monthly basis for Oldham Community Radio. The programme Community Keyboards covers all aspects of the organ world from Theatre to Classical…
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In the third tutorial in our Organ Registration Tutorial series we’re using extracts from Herbert Howells Psalm Prelude. Jonathan and Francis discuss and demonstrate a challenge that most organists will have to master at some stage in their careers — what could be termed the “seamless crescendo”. Of course there’s no such thing as a…
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