Music

THE PROBLEM

Good serious music continues to flourish in Great Britain. The Classic FM radio station has a wide following, despite the awful advertisements which interrupt the music every few minutes. Music societies throughout the country continue to be well subscribed, and promote regular concerts of the very best music, played by fine performers. Throughout the Summer thousands of music lovers, many of them from the younger generation, flock to the Royal Albert Hall, and sit or stand in conditions which are far from ideal, to listen intently to a wide spectrum of music. And all this is in spite of the fact that the world's best performances of the whole repertoire can now be heard well reproduced in almost everyone's living room.

But organ music is different. Organ recitals often attract just a handful of listeners; and most of these will be themselves organists, or people with a special interest in the organ. Why is this? The audience at a piano recital does not consist entirely of pianists, or at an opera of operatic singers. And it is depressing to meet so many music lovers who admit that they do not enjoy organ music.

This essay attempts to find reasons for these sad facts, and asks whether there is anything we in the brotherhood can do to bring enlightenment to the wider world.

THE INSTRUMENT

The organ is the most inflexible of all musical instruments. Just compare it with the most perfect, the human voice. A good singer has intimate control over every note, and when the requirements of musical expression so demand, can alter the pitch, intensity and timbre while a note is sounding. Further, the necessity to take breaths ensures that the music is divided into phrases to aid its comprehension, allowing each phrase to be shaped into a beautiful whole. Fine singers make use of all these capacities in every phrase they sing, and yet all of them are denied to the organist. The singer's voice is part of the body, and so enjoys the same delicacy of...