rfg@hound.UUCP (R.GRANTGES) (09/06/85)
[] Thank you, Mr. Pierce for correcting me about mutation stops. Everything else stands. I will not argue what is or is not good taste in organs. I am something of a disciple of ...Harrison, myself. But the point is you made one of your usual flat statements - organs are not loud - backed up by actual data (wow! real spl readings). You now acknowledge that some organs are quite capable of much more than that. Swell. The fellow that asked the question in the first place now has the correct information - mostly from you. By the way, the Riverside organ I was referring to was part of the older one. They always apologized for the organ because much of it was out of action during conversion. I never heard the new improved version as I moved out of Manhattan in early 1954. Fox was a consumate artist. I did not care much for his idiosyncratic rendering of the classics, but live, he was a real entertainer. On tour he always wore his black cape with the scarlet lining which he knew how to swoosh most dramatically. Every large cathedral <ought> to have a stop like the state trumpet at St. John the Divine. I su pose most of them don't, but they should. The regular organ there, at least the one they had in the early '50's, always sounded lost, but the state trumpet was marvelous anywhere in the building. As a final small point, large classic pipe organs distribute their sound source over quite a large area. A good diapason chorus with, perhaps several mixtures as well as ranks at 16,8 and 4 ft pitches (at least) produces not only fairly high sound intensities but those over a large area - after all, that was the original point of the instrument in the large churches. Thus the total amount of power can be quite large. I have read that a couple of acoustic watts is not unusual. -- "It's the thought, if any, that counts!" Dick Grantges hound!rfg
rdp@teddy.UUCP (09/06/85)
Well, I think Mr. Grantges and I have beaten the organ horse to death by now. It seems the major difference of opinion is not how loud the instruments really are, but what is defined as loud. My impressions of things are thus, I think, that at the 85 or so dB I have actually measured instruments at, that they are quite loud, but not so loud as to tax the capabilities of modern direct-radiator transducers. Mr. Grantges takes the view, and I do not wish to denegrate his viewpoint, that, in his opinion, they have to be louder than that, because they SOUND louder than that. Well, I really can't disagree with his viewpoint. Nor can I agree. But such is what the world is made of. What we seem to have great differences on seems to be more style of performance, Suitability of instruments and musical genre, etc. This is a debate I could engage in for hours. I have heard many different organs playing many different pieces. I have my likes, and he has his, and you have yours. Much of my non-personal data comes from quite a few large texts on organs and organ music. Here is, if anyone is interested, a (corrupted by less than perfect recall) a list of texts I use as references: Sumner, William Lesley: "The Organ" Andersen, Poul Gerhardt, "Organ Building and Design" Barnes, W. "The Contemporary American Organ" (most notable for his description of his tour of European organs, which he considered to be aneamic, thin, underpowered, etc!) Audsley, G. A. "The Art of the Organ Builder", Dover Press Audsley, G. A. "The Twentieth Century Organ", Dover Press Austin Niland "The Organ" Hill, Norman, Beard (???) "The British Organ Today" Dom Bedos, "L'Art de Factuer D'Orgue" Mark Wicks "The Amatuer Organ Builder" Bonavia-Hunt, L. "The Organ Reed" Ochse, "The History of Organ Building in the United States" Plus many others that don't immediately come to mind. One further point about the Riverside Church (and many others like it). One wonders if the feeling of inadequacy in the instrument that arose about the same time as the installation of Acousto-lith tiles is some- thing more than purely coincidental. I am not sure whether Riverside suffered this fate (but I seem to remember that it did) but quite a few large churches in this country were subjected to mis-guided acoustic absorbtive treatment in the 30's, 40's and 50's, all in the name of improved speech audibility. Invariable they made the matter worse. I think we have cluttered net.audio enough with this discussion on organs. We should return to the more appropriate debate about snake-oil Dick Pierce