ORGANISTS' HABITS
By REGINALD GIBBON
WHEN our organist (a distinguished amateur, but with a distinction that happens not to be musical) meets with an E sharp, he feels for a black note which is not there, decides that he is confronted with a printer's error and plays F. flat. With deplorable after-effects ! Fortunately E sharps are not commonly met with in our hymnal. We dodge most of them, and keep so far as possible to the friendly beaten track of C major. An attempt to rescue E sharp from abuse ended in failure. Knowing how easily our organist will fly off the handle, we made ourselves altogether too polite and circumlocutory. He assumed us to be mentally unbalanced, and gave no heed to our wanderings. So now we put up with E flat instead of E sharp, accepting it philosophically as just one of those things.
A scat on an organ-bench, hard itself, has a hardening effect on the organist. It hardens his spirit, and develops a strain of ferocity. The late Sir Hugh Allen used to invite choristers to the organ-loft, and allowed them to sit beside him on the bench. During the course of the psalms, under pretence of reaching a distant stop which he did not actually require, he would take oppor- tunity to impart a tremendous lateral shove. The boys crashed. They climbed up again, only to be displaced again in the next psalm. There was a strain of violence in Allen. When playing an organ he looked as if fighting a battleship. He delighted in violent exercise. When organist of Ely, he would play for Matins (which might finish at about half past ten if it was not a Litany morning), then walk the sixteen miles to Cambridge, catch a train back to Ely, and be in time to play Evensong at 4 p.m.
In his youthful days he had a succession of intractable organs to play upon. They had stirred his fighting spirit to strive against adversity. Later he came to Ely. Conditions were not much better. The Ely organ was an instrument of some antiquity. The touch was very heavy, in spite of the addition of something which was vaguely described as an "ingenious pneumatic contrivance." Upon this ancient instrument a shirt-sleeved Allen would hurl himself as though he intended permanently to vitiate its constitution. _One can imagine his accompaniment of the stormier psalms. ' Why is it that organists seem either to hate the psalms with virulence or to love them with all their hearts ? There is no middle course. Psalm-haters have punished their victims and "lamed them" to be psalms in different ways. In Wales it used to be customary to sing psalms at break-neck speed. They ended, and, the congregation, which had rightfully insisted upon joining in, was seen to be mopping its brow. The sound of painful panting obscured the reading of the First Lesson. Howbeit, that was Wales, where' everybody can sing, and more than a few can articulate. The result was not too bad—better anyhow than the phlegmatic psalm-treatment to be met with in some parts of rural England. There are churches where the speed adopted resembles that of cart-horses (heavy Shires, not Pcrchcrons) when they take their unstimulated way to a distant field which they do not at all desire to reach.
Any organist may develop a strain of ferocity, and the female of the species is not less .deadly than the male. Before the coming of our present distinguished unmusical amateur, we had a lady- organist. Sweet-tempered in the life of every day, she was tigrine on the organ bench. She was at continual war with us of the congregation. We were denied reasonable time in which to find our hymns. There is a youthful half of us, unspectacled, its atten- tion apt to be divagatory ; there is also the other half, elderly, uniformly spectacled when reading, as uniformly unspectacled when not. A hymn is given out. We .;ome promptly to attention only to find ourselves unspectacled. Time is essential that vi c may unsheathe and fix spectacles. Do we get it ? No. She plays rapidly on the Swell manual a fragment of the tune—perhaps it is a gentle simple little thing like " Mcicombe "—then whisks het hands down to the Great, as if the Swell scorched them, and roars diapasonically away like a racing car with a frenetic exhaust.
Of course this is enough to put any congregation's back up. We cannot do anything about the first verse. It has got away from us before we have found our places. But the second verse finds us ready to take the strain, and by the time the third verse is reached our communal effort is beginning to tell. Gradually we slow the tempest and ride the storm. Will she draw the Trumpet ? She does not. Thank Heaven, it's out of tune and she knows it is. The diapasons fade and are changed. We sing grimly on, thrilling with a sense of our triumphing right. The hymn closes its benedic- tion. The Amen is splendid and serene ; and in our heart "a late lark twitters from the quiet skies."
Though we arc able to look back upon such tugs of war with malice toward none and charity for all, there is no desire that they should become repetitious, still less endemic. We cannot help recalling nostalgically a time when our organ, afflicted with some organic disturbance—I forget what—was out of action for several months. During that time we sang the services to the accompani- ment of the rector's second-best piano which he kindly lent to the church. How notably our .singing improved 1 Lacking the organ to cover up our faults with its sustained harmonies, and having instead of it the piano to deal its percussion raps to our musical consciousness, our singing had its vices suddenly exposed. We discerned them with humility and corrected them with diligence. It was our noblest hour. Too soon the organ recovered from its indisposition. The rector took away his spare piano. We returned to unqualified organ. •A musical slump ensued.
Choirs and congregations ought to accustom themselves frequently to sing with a piano as their accompanying instrument. Not that the organ should be discarded. The cathedral tradition would forbid that. But in parish churches organ and piano might work on a fifty-fifty basis. Instead of craving a large and then a larger organ, let us be content to have a modest organ and a competent piano.
The piano is to singers what hard wickets arc to batsmen. When we exchanged from organ to piano, we were like cricketers who after a long course of soft wickets suddenly find themselves batting on a hard and lively pitch. Our singing came to life. So did the congregation. It got its spectacles fixed and its places found ill record time. Indeed the record still stands, with little probabililY that it will ever be broken until the organ falls into a decrepitude again. We arc looking forward to that happy recurrence. But we don't quite know what we shall do about a piano next time. The rector, perennially hard up, has gone and sold his
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