PROSPECTUS

...you perhaps know it to be called, and if you have ever stepped inside a great church while the music of the organ was resounding, the aptness of that phrase is very likely to have been impressed on you. Lofty and imposing, ornate yet dignified, many-voiced, and thrillingly powerful when the organist has "pulled out all the stops", the organ at its finest seems kingly indeed, compelling the interest and admiration of everyone within sight and sound of it.

Having once heard it well played, many people are captivated by the organ - by its magnificence, aural and visual. And the more they see and hear, and the more they learn about it, the more impressed and absorbed they are liable to become. Its fascination lies in its variousness. A grand organ is to a whistle what a cathedral is to a block of stone: it is a musical edifice, founded on all the apparatus needed to cause and control the "speaking" of the organ-pipes, and built up out of rank upon rank of these, different from each other in proportions and pitch, and in materials and vocal character. Its tonal range is immense: its sound can have almost the dainty charm of a musical-box, or be more thunderous than a symphony orchestra at its mightiest - and between these extremes there are to be heard an extraordinary wealth of tones both simple and combined.

With a tonal logic all its own, an organ is a compendium of musical sounds, some of which are the counterparts either of olden or of modern orchestral instruments (hautboy, flute, viola da gamba, trumpet, for example) and some of which are peculiar to it, and imitative of nothing else (e.g. diapason, dulciana, nazard, mixture). It is part of the organist's skill to use these "tone-colours" selectively and to the best effect, and the organ's vast repertoire, spanning some six centuries, certainly exploits its properties as the most diverse and chameleonic of musical instruments.

Each in itself variable as to sound and flexible in use, organs are also very different from each other - in scale and complexity of construction, in placement and architectural context, in period or regional style or in modernity, and in the craftsmanship they display. Organ-building is a multifaceted craft whose history stretches far back through phase after phase of technical and stylistic evolution.

It was some musical mechanician of the ancient world who first contrived that rows of pipes could be blown and played upon mechanically, as a kind of enlarged and elaborated Panpipes. In the periods of the Renaissance and the Baroque, the master-organbuilders of Europe brought the organ to the apogee of its decorative and tonal development. In their time, the Victorians left upon the organ (as on a great deal else) the print of their energy and inventiveness, applying to it pneumatic technology, for instance, and, later, electricity. Today's organ-makers combine in the best examples of their work all the vitality of contemporary design with established principles of construction that make the organ what it is.

As no other musical instrument does, the organ crosses the boundary between the craft of instrument-making and the art of architecture. Down the centuries of its history, the architectural cladding of the organ - the organ-case - has been a fascinating mirror of changing tastes in building-styles and ornament. Monuments of specialised design, many historic organ-cases are works of art in their own right, and matter for particular appreciation.

So long and rich a past (and an infinite diversity in the present) means that the organ provides ground for serious study as well as admiration and simple enjoyment. And the features it uniquely combines - the pageant of its evolution as architectural furniture, its constructional ingenuities, the physical and acoustical grandeur it can attain to, and of course its wonderful music - together make for a peculiarly potent magnetism, happily yielded to by the devotees of the organ, King of Instruments.