My first encounter with music was my elder sisters playing piano duets at home when I was a small boy. My parents then got rid of the piano after woodworm was found, and so I was not able to learn. In my second year at secondary school the school band were recruiting, and so I had the chance to learn the tuba. Later on, I thought that the trombone was more glamorous and so made the difficult switch. Nevertheless, I managed to gain a place in the Lindsey County Youth orchestra which included a wonderful tour to Germany in 1971. I then started to teach myself the double bass as the orchestra had lost its only bass player, but I found that very difficult. Yes, some instruments really are more difficult than others. At 16 I simply had to start piano as I decided I would like to do A Level music and by some stroke of good fortune managed to pass Grade VI within eighteen months. It was to take another four years before I could manage the leap to Grade VIII.
After attaining my A Levels, I studied music at King's College, London in the 1970s, with no regard for career, and obtained the degree of BMus in 1977. I subsequently completed my teacher training at Keswick Hall College of Education in Norwich and started work in a very strong music department at a mixed comprehensive school in north London. It was not until my second job at Alleyne's School in Stevenage in 1982 that I met, so to speak, the church organ. The outgoing head of music had held the post of organist at Holy Trinity in Stevenage and, as he was moving to a different part of the country, I was offered the position. I thought it would be a good way of meeting people as I was also moving and so I decided 'in for a penny, in for a pound' and began to play and study the organ. Learning the pedals was not easy – it took a good year or so – but I practised hard. I then moved to the church of St Nicholas where, after some hard work, I had a reasonable boys' choir, and took some lessons with Malcolm Hicks, an international name, who lived in the area.. At Alleyne's, which was a boys' school, I loved directing the music, productions, the band and the choir. It was part of my job to organise the services for the end of term, which, looking back, was a huge privilege and pleasure. Since that time I have always adored the sound of a boys' choir, particularly for English church music. When the LEA decided to merge Alleyne's School with a girls' school – a very cutthroat business – I left, moved around quite a bit, got married, and found my way into teaching languages as I was not at all in sympathy with the revolution which was taking place in music education around the end of the 1980s. But as I had no qualifications beyond A Level in German and Russian, I went back to university in the evening, studied and eventually earned a PhD degree in German. I continued to play the organ at various churches on and off including for the baptism of my own children at High Cross.
For the next few years I had virtually given up playing the organ, but recently I thought the time was right to restart. I set myself the goal of getting all my previous repertoire up to speed, on which I am still working!
People often ask musicians what their favourite music is. It is an understandable but exasperating question for a serious musician as most like different music for a different reasons and simply cannot give a definite answer. I sometimes reflect and wonder why, when we live in what is meant to be a literate age where we all have access to the finest things in life, the vast majority of people still listen only to 'popular' music. To my mind, much of it 'designed' for young people seems to be brutal and to possess a rather primitive character.
I certainly enjoy playing the organ, the variety of sound, the quality of the music and composers, and, of course, the power it has appeals to megalomaniacs. And there is one composer whom I really cannot avoid playing. It is no surprise: J S Bach. There is no other composer to touch him in organ music. Yes, many other composers such as Händel, Haydn, Mozart and particularly Mendelssohn have all composed for the organ but their music comes nowhere near the depth of feeling and expression that Bach's music affords both the player and listener and the sheer inventiveness and originality which which the works are constructed. The other feature of Bach's repertoire is that there is something for everyone. Even the simplest pieces for the beginner display a profound charater, are uplifting and are worth the attention of even the most skilled player. Many of his pieces are based on hymn tunes (chorale preludes, and so on) and therefore, as Hans Keller has said, God has all the best tunes. So for the organ, my favourite would be J S Bach. Perhaps Max Reger comes somewhere near Bach. However, Reger's music is like several wild animals all running through a dense forest in different directions – difficult to get hold of and full of unexpected twists and turns. I wonder whether Reger had twelve fingers.
Of course there is much repertoire which we only seldom hear nowadays. I was recently introduced to a very old one-manual pipe organ without pedalboard, and I remembered I had a volume of 'Old English Organ Music for Manuals' at home. One of the finest English Renaissance composers, albeit with a small surviving corpus, is Thomas Tallis (1505-1575). The pedals, already a feature de rigueur of continental organs before Bach, only reached England in the mid 19th century. Therefore the whole corpus of English music for organ before this time is written for manuals only. Maurice Greene was roughly contemporary with Bach and knew Händel, who by 1712 had settled in London, and William Boyce with Bach's many children, but one hears of them only rarely. The pieces are simpler and rather shallow when compared to the great Master, but still fun to play and easily digested by the listener.
Significant changes have taken place since I started playing the organ in 1982. The organ I played on at St Nicholas, Stevenage was a heavy tracker-action organ with 23 stops. It took all one's strength to depress the keys when all the stops were out. Pipe organs with electric or pneumatic action had already existed for a long time, but a digital organ was unknown. Unlike the older synthesizer-type electric instruments, today's electronic organs, of which the organ at Highlands is a fine example, use recordings of real (and often famous) pipe organs for each note of each stop. There are naturally purists for whom no digital organ is satisfactory, and I was inclined to take this view until I visited a church some years ago, heard the organ and simply could not work out where the pipes were. Digital organs are a fraction of the cost to buy and maintain. And for this lower cost a greater range of stops can also be had: a double bargain. I consider that they are for the average church a very practical solution and enable the organist to play just about anything he wishes.
TF