An Idiot's Guide to the Organ

I’m conscious that it’s a while since I gave you a slice of Cathedral Close life. So at random I will select a topic. The organ. Organs are like Marmite: people either love them or hate them. If you are in the latter category, this post is for you. In the following paragraphs I will attempt to woo the hostile into a life long love affair, by providing a brief history of the organ. (Church organists, look away now.) This Part I. Part II will follow in a later post.

Organs are associated in the public’s mind almost exclusively with church music. And boring church music, at that; ponderous, funereal, menacing. You hear organs in the background of films where doors creak, birds explode from the undergrowth, and the heroine is obliged to flee in her negligee during a thunder storm. The exception is the popular wedding repertoire. I’m sure you are familiar with these pieces, but here are the top five anyway, complete with notation for the musically illiterate:

1. Wagner: ‘Here comes the bride, all fat and wide, stepped on a banana skin and went for a ride’.

2. Mendelssohn: Diddly-dum! [pause] Diddly-DUM! [pause] Diddly-DA-da-de-dadada, da-dum-diddly-dum-dum-DUM!

3. Handel’s ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’: Diddle-iddle, iddle-iddle, iddle-iddle, iddle-iddle, iddle-iddle-iddle-iddle-um.

4. Thingy’s trumpet tune: Tah. Dah Tiddle-um-ty tah, dah! Tah, dah, dah, tiddle-um-tumty-tum!

5. Widor: Diddle-ee, dee-diddle-ee, dee-diddle-ee, dee-diddle-ee.

Today’s cathedral organs trace their origins back to little hand-held keyboard instruments powered by bellows; the sort of thing renaissance St Cecelias are depicted playing. Who could have foreseen what these apparently harmless accordion-bagpipes would become? But as the years passed, they evolved into ever larger and more complex creatures, and in time the player sat at the keyboard, while someone else worked the bellows. It was here that the first seeds of megalomania were sown.

Why stop here? the Ur-organist thought. Why settle for one rank of pipes, when by adding another manual (keyboard), I can have two ranks? Or three? Or four? And wait a moment—I’ve got a pair of perfectly good feet here dangling idle. I could add a pedal-board—and another set of pipes. If only there was a way of getting each manual to control more than one rank of pipes! Quickly, invent me a device, somebody! Organ stops—thank you! Now I can have as many different ranks as I like: brassy pipes, flutey pipes, pipes with a blast like Satan’s foghorn! AT LAST! I shall have ALL THE PIPES IN THE WORLD, from shrew in a spin-dryer down to the rumble of tectonic plates! All controlled by ME, from my Secret Console of Darkness, mwa ha ha!

For around three hundred years, until the advent of the telephone exchange in the late 19th century, the pipe organ was the largest most complex device ever made by human hands. Yokels came to gawp. A cathedral organ was nuclear power, it was stealth bombers, it was the internet. Over the centuries new technology was pressed into its service—hydraulics, wind turbines, steam, electricity, computers. There were those who named it The King of Instruments. And the cathedral organist thought: ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ Hence the joke, popular in choral circles: Q. What’s the difference between a terrorist and an organist? A. You can negotiate with a terrorist.

The Close is Foreign Country...

...they do things differently there. They speak a foreign language. Even those fluent in Anglican-speak need to get their ear in to understand the local dialect of a Cathedral Close. Firstly there are the bits of technical jargon, often abbreviated to make them even more impenetrable to the outsider. ‘Mag & nunc’, ‘can and dec’, ‘volly’.

Before I go any further, a little disclaimer: I am naught but an ignorant Nonconformist in origins, daughter of the Baptist Manse. It is possible that one or two errors may creep in to this blog. I have already been informed that it would have been the Royalists trying to climb into my back garden via the moat, as the Parliamentarians mainly attacked from the south. Yes, yes. I'm a novelist, not a historian. AN historian, I should say, to head off any more nit-pickers. Pedants seem to thrive in the eccentric conditions of your typical Cathedral Close. They don't watch 'Doctor Who', round here, they watch 'Doctor Whom'. I get a bit fed up with pedanticism, to be honest. (Ooh, nearly got you.)

The terms mentioned above are concerned with the Choral Foundation (music stuff), and mean ‘Magnificat and nunc dimittis’ (the two anthems sung at Choral Evensong, i.e. ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’ and ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace’.) ‘Can and dec’ refer to the two opposite sides of the choir aisle, and by extension, the two halves of the choir who sit facing across the chancel (top bit nearest high altar). This is a historic arrangement which enables the lay clerks (choir men) to smirk at each other when the Psalm for the evening contains the verse ‘Neither doth he delight in any man’s legs.’

‘Can’ is the precentor’s side (the precentor being the canon in charge of music stuff) and ‘dec’ the dean’s side (the dean being the one in charge of everything). There is some Latin explanation for can and dec, but you’ll have to google it. (It will ask if you mean Ant and Dec.) If I'm not careful I will end up with parentheses within parentheses, like Russian nesting dolls, and you will get bored and start looking at porn instead. I daresay you can buy an iPhone cathedral phrasebook app to help you navigate your way round the linguistic labyrinth.

A ‘volly’ is an organ ‘voluntary’ played at the close of a service; a strange term my sons think, as it is involuntary from their perspective. ‘I have wasted hours of my life waiting for the voluntary to end,’ lamented my younger son at the end of one (long) piece. He went on to compose his own volly on his computer software, capturing perfectly the tedium and discord of the French style, and the well-known 'False Dawn Syndrome', in which the piece appears to end several times… but no, another movement. This work came to an abrupt stop with the sound of a gun-shot, followed by a final thunderous discord as the organist slumped dead on the keyboard. Or manual, I should say. My sons have not learnt to love the Cathedral Choral Tradition in all the four years we have lived on the Close. But then, other residents of the Close have perhaps not learnt to love their drumming and electric guitars, so fair dinkum.