Music and Worship: Organs and Organ-playing, Part 1

Until a few years ago, the only instrument normally heard in church services was the organ (unless you go right back to the old church and chapel bands of the nineteenth century).

The history of the organ began well before these West Gallery bands. The ancient Greeks had a type of organ known as the hydraulis, operated by hydraulic pressure provided by hand pumps. The sound was apparently more noisy than musical. The Romans also used the hydraulis in events such as gladiatorial shows, and the emperor Nero is said to have been a player.

Organs, no longer operated hydraulically, eventually came to be accepted in Christian worship. In the tenth century Winchester Cathedral had a monster instrument with 400 pipes, operated according to the monk Wulstan by 70 strong men working very hard at more than 20 sets of bellows. Needless to say, the sound was extremely loud at close quarters. Long before aircraft and traffic noise, it must also have been heard for miles around on a still day. Such an instrument was just as much at the technological leading edge in the tenth century as some computer applications are today.

The organs on which J. S. Bach, the greatest of all composers for the organ, played in the early 1700s were the result of centuries of experiment and refinement. They will always be regarded as models of clarity and beauty of sound, but were still pumped by hand (as the old pipe organ at St Boniface Church, Chandler’s Ford was when first installed in the early 20th century). Today, although pipe organs such as the present one at Winchester Cathedral have all kinds of electrical and mechanical aids, the tuning of each pipe continues to need regular checking, an expensive and labour-intensive task. Increasingly churches favour low-maintenance electronic organs without pipes.

Of course, almost all organists will say that the sound of a pipe organ is much preferable to that of an electronic organ. For example, the sound is spread around the building better, because instead of a handful of electrical speakers each of the many pipes can speak. But in terms of the overall mission of churches such as St Boniface and St Martin in the Wood, could we have justified installing very expensive smallish pipe organs rather than more economical electronic ones with larger ranges of sounds?

The electronic organ at St Boniface was installed by Allen Organs in the late 1980s, about 10 years before the St Martin’s organ was bought. Neither needs tuning, and both are likely to be trouble-free for many years. Siting of speakers is vital, and has recently been the subject of experiment at St Martin’s. At St Boniface we re-sited three of the four speakers higher up in the chancel in 2009, and this has helped greatly with the projection of the sound.