Repertoire

‘The organ exists for the sake of the music, not the music for the sake of the organ’ wrote Knox ¹ and an assessment of an organ builder’s work should not ignore this dictum. No other musical instrument is capable of producing such a wide variety of tone and, although orchestral players may point to the differences between Baroque and modern versions of their instruments and to differences in timbre due to geographical variations, as for example in the French and German versions of the bassoon, the differences in tone and construction of the pipe organ over the last three hundred years far exceed anything found within the orchestra. Only in recent years has the practice of designing organs for a particular repertoire become at all usual and replaced the so-called eclectic designs of the 1960s. Such problems did not worry English organ builders at the start of the nineteenth century. Their instruments had evolved slowly, being influenced by the occasional injection of foreign ideas brought by builders returning from the continent after the Restoration (Robert Dallam) and the occasional foreign builder taking up residence (Schmidt, Schultze, Schreider), and the style of music evolved alongside. The arrival of Mendelssohn began to change all of this and music in England, with the encouragement of Prince Albert, took on a more Germanic look, which led to the Hill–Gauntlett revolution in organ building and the eventual standardization of the compass and adoption of equal temperament. The erection of organs in public halls made music available to a much wider audience at a moderate cost (since only one performer required payment) and this created a demand for imitative orchestral tone colours from these organs. Barger ² considered that the organ could serve as a one-man band to popularize serious music in the same way that Jullien’s Promenade Concerts did for the symphonic repertoire. She noted also that the dances which provided the ‘sugar coating’ on the pill in Jullien’s programmes were inappropriate to the organ with its religious associations and this gap was filled with small-scale genre pieces of a light melodic nature or larger-scale works with a ‘programme’ usually including a ‘storm’. Coupled with this secular demand was the performance of oratorios and similar works in churches and chapels with the accompaniment played on the organ. Catholic and High Church Anglican choirs also required organs which were capable of reproducing the accompaniments of masses by Mozart, Haydn and Schubert which would be performed liturgically. Thus the repertoire of the nineteenth-century organist expanded beyond the voluntaries of the likes of John Stanley and William Walond to include orchestral transcriptions.