Interesting organs I’ve got to know and play

When I first experienced an organ, I became utterly transfixed by it. Discovering that they sounded so different from location to location was a great surprise to me.

I’ve been lucky to experience many organs during my time playing, with some being more influential than others.

I will talk about some of the interesting instruments that I have played over the years and how my fascination with the larger organs turned into imagining my own bespoke creations.

Ruth Norsworthy’s personal 9-stop organ

Ruth Norsworthy, of Steen’s Bridge, Herefordshire, was a family friend of ours and had recently built the most magnificent 9-stop organ in her barn.

As a young boy, this was one of the first instruments I played, the experience sparked a life-long interest in the instrument, both as a player and as someone extremely fascinated by its construction and history!

St John the Baptist, Mamble

I was around 11 when I found myself playing my first church. The organ was at St John the Baptist, Mamble. Despite being a small and under-winded instrument, it laid the foundations to take my delight for the instrument further.

I remember quite vividly attempting to play BWV 565 there; for the poor instrument it must have felt like being rudely awoken from a long sleep by a small, very over-excited child.

St Michael’s, Tenbury

I was invited to play the enormous four-manual instrument at St Michael’s, Tenbury.

Imagine my delight at being asked to do a recital on this organ with the Herefordshire Organist’s Association of the Boellmann’s Toccata, from the Suite Gothique.

I remember being completely overwhelmed by the host of colourful flues and powerful, dramatic reeds, and imagine I ended up making rather a hash of the piece in performance, but again; another experience and opportunity to practice.

St Michael’s, Witley

Around that same time, I got my first experience playing the most delightful instrument in St Michael’s, Witley. I had been invited to play the organ there on a couple of occasions and for whatever reason I hadn’t been able to attend the services themselves.

But the organist at the time invited me to “just come and have a go” whenever I fancied, which in retrospect was extremely kind of them!

So, I found myself playing a completely different style of instrument; the action was enormously heavy, several stops had confusingly split basses and trebles, and both the manual couplers and expression pedals were operated by lever foot pedals.

Despite this, it was an astounding organ in an even more astonishing rococo-style chapel – quite unexpected for the quiet local Worcestershire area.

In time I found myself balanced extremely precariously in the organ loft up there for the odd service; the magnificence of the instrument and the chapel were not proportionate to the amount of space in the loft, and even the slightest wrong move could have resulted in a nasty and unceremonious fall.

The most dramatic moment, however, was the day that the church was caught in a nasty thunderstorm while I was practising, causing the whole church to lose power. It remains the only instrument I think I have ever played to retain its original hand-blowing mechanism in its entirety, and luckily, I was able to coax my siblings into winding the instrument for me for a little while after the power went off.

It wasn’t remotely sustainable, however, and I felt for the many persons whose Sunday job that used to be before the invention of electric organ blowers!

St Anne’s, Bewdley

My first substantial experience of a digital organ was in St Anne’s, Bewdley – I spent a few afternoons playing there in the run-up to a young musicians’ competition, in which the classical performance ended up being thoroughly out of place, but nonetheless gathered me a 2^nd place.

For a small church, however, it seemed magnificent to have such a range of available stops and playing aids – especially when I thought back to the tracker at St Michael’s, Witley – and it never really dawned on me until quite a long while later how that church retained the gift of music long after the pipe organ itself had failed.

St George’s Cathedral, Southwark

In my post of organ scholar at St George’s Cathedral, Southwark I played their 1958 Compton organ with an impressive number of ranks, a polyphone bass, and the loudest Tuba I have ever heard, before or since. I gained a huge amount of experience and found myself practising several afternoons a week in a vast acoustic.

St John’s, Brandon & St Margaret of Antioch

When I moved up to Durham I soon found myself playing regularly at St John’s, Brandon and an ancient church in the centre of Durham, St Margaret of Antioch both having fine, colourful Harrison & Harrison organs.

I was invited to play weekly at the latter for the choir of St Cuthbert’s Society. There I got to accompany a host of more unusual repertoire, as we aimed to promote marginalised composers’ music as much as possible, and even took some of it to occasional services at Durham Cathedral!

Imagining my own custom creations

The experience of all these varieties of organs prompted me to spend hours drawing up specifications of imaginary organs and reading various bits of slightly archaic literature. I picked up various books from local organists who were passing on copies, as we all do, and of particular delight were the two volumes of “The Art of Organ Building” by G.A.Audsley.

I cannot say how many hours were spent poring over those books, but anyone attempting to have a conversation with my teenage self would have likely got several quotes from them as a standard in conversation! Of particular delight were the gorgeous architectural drawings contained within the books, and after reading them I would often go and take a little sketch of some of the beautiful organs I got to go and visit.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of every instrument I have played by any means, but it shows part of the journey I have taken to get to where I am today.

Please do get in touch with me if you have any questions about where I have played, or please share your story of the organs that fuelled your love of the instruments.