TIMOTHY MCEWEN

We are very sorry to be losing the services of Timothy McEwen for two years. He has moved to Fort Wayne Indiana U.S. where his wife Hannah, who develops artificial knees at orthopaedics company DePuy, has been awarded a two year secondment leading an R&D team at HQ in Warsaw Indiana. Tim has been with us for nine years and became an important part of our team.

ST BOTOLPH ALDGATE BOOKLET

A 28 page booklet with colour illustrations on the history of the ca1704 Renatus Harris organ is available from the builders, or the church, for £5 (£4 for visitors to the church). The profits go to the maintenance of the organ. It has a certain amount of technical information, but is mostly historical, and written to appeal to the interested public as well as the organ nut. Apart from the information on this website, there is also a restoration report and a technical and historical report giving the documentary sources and measurements, drawings and photographs of the surviving parts.

SANTIAGO CHILE

In 2003 Martin was asked to inspect a few organs in Chile, including the main organ in the Cathedral of Santiago, and was amazed to find a virtually unaltered English three manual and pedal GG compass organ. It was made by B. Flight & Son in London in 1849/50. He gave various options for restoration, and recommended that the organ be restored to its original condition, which is perfectly possible.

In 2010 Chile will celebrate 200 years of independence, and the cathedral will take an important part of the festivities. For many years, Maria Elena Troncoso, the honorary curator of the cathedral museum, has hoped that the organ will be playable for this occasion. Unfortunately, it looks as if the only feasible option is the cheapest possible, so they are at present trying to put the organ into playing condition, using six voluntary workers.

In November 2007 Martin visited Santiago again to see how work was progressing, and to provide guidance. It is obvious that the organ needs a complete restoration, for there are splits in the chests as well as damage to the pipework which needs restoration from specialists. Nonetheless the organ works after a fashion, and a short concert by a young local organist, Jose Manuel Izquierdo gave an idea of the wonderful sounds that a musician might get out of this instrument. Details of the organ are to be found on Flight Organ

RESTORED THOMAS PARKER ORGAN FOR LEATHERHEAD PARISH CHURCH

In October we will be completing the restoration of the 1766 Thomas Parker organ at Leatherhead Parish Church. News about the restoration is available on
http://www.parishchurch.leatherheadweb.org.uk/parkerorgan/

VERNERS AND SANDRA RETURN TO LATVIA

On November 25th Verners Kalacis and Sandra Grugule are getting married in Ugale, Latvia, where they have returned to help Sandra's parents set up a shop selling home-produced bee products. We wish them well, but are very sorry that they have left us.

CONCERT AND CD AT ST BOTOLPH ALDGATE LONDON

On September 28th Timothy Roberts gave a recital on the 1704 Renatus Harris organ at St Botolph Aldgate, of music by John Blow, John Reading, Daniel Purcell, Henry Purcell and by James and John Worgan, organist at the church, as well as a jeu d'esprit of his own. The programme included solo psalms sung by Julia Gooding and congregational psalms, sung by the audience. The music by John Blow and his contemporaries, including the psalms, was recorded by Timothy in the days before the concert, and is to be issued as a CD shortly, available from the builders and Timothy (see the contact details below).

The evening started with a showing of one of the films of the restoration of the organ made by David Allen (available on this website under St Botolph Aldgate), and ended with sparkling wine and cakes to celebrate publicly the silver jubilee of Martin Goetze and Dominic Gwynn in 2005 (see below).

BOOK AND CD OF THE 1709 ORGAN AT SANTA CLARA IN SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA RESTORED IN 2004

Sergio del Campo Olaso has written a history of Spanish organ building leading up to the 1709 organ by Manuel de la Vina at the Convento de S. Clara at Santiago de Compostela and Martin Goetze has contributed an account of the restoration of the organ, in a book published locally and sponsored by the Banco Gallego. The book is available from the builders for £15 (€25) including postage. The CD costs £10 (€15), and the book and CD together cost £20 (€30).

LISS ORGAN MOVES TO KEW PALACE

The ca1740 chamber organ which we restored for the United Reformed Church at Liss in Hampshire in 1994, was bought by Historic Royal Palaces in April 2006, for the dining room at Kew Palace, which has undergone a spectacular restoration in the last few years.

HARLEY MONOGRAPHS

The Harley Monographs listed are all now available seperately on CD for £6.00 each inc p&p UK

THE COMPANY CELEBRATES 25TH ANNIVERSARY IN ORGAN BUILDING 1980 - 2005

Martin and Dominic started making their first organ in 1980, and since April 1st seemed as appropriate a date as any for their birthday, we decided to celebrate our silver jubilee in Santiago de Compostela, where our latest restoration project was being inaugurated. The current members of the firm, including Chris Wells who restored the decoration of the case, and their wives and partners, made the trip, and stayed in the Seminario Mayor next to the Cathedral in this most wonderful of cities.

The restored organ belonged to the Convent of Santa Clara, where a closed order of nuns inhabit a very grand granite monastery, in a very simple way. Mother Superior, Sor Maria de los Angeles Couto Amido, had been determined to restore the organ, and the completion of the project was for her an emotional affair. Our introduction to the project had been made by Maria Iglesias, a friend of the convent who works in London. After some abortive efforts at finding an adviser or organ restorer willing to take the project on, Maria was asked to find an English gentleman to entrust with the work.

It was Maria who organised our trip, and most of the events associated with it. There were three concerts, the first by Colm Carey on Thursday March 31st, Timothy Roberts on Friday April 1st and Aitor Olea Juaristi with trumpeters Josu Ayarzaguena Aguirre and Pablo Martinez Esparza on April 2nd. In the evening a celebration dinner was held at the Franciscan monastery, for those who had assisted with the project, and assorted bigwigs. On Sunday April 3rd Galician television broadcast morning mass from Santa Clara, with a choir made up of some of the organ builders and their families.

A wonderfully evocative CD of Spanish organ music from 1555 to 2005, played by Timothy Roberts is available from the Martin Goetze and Dominic Gwynn (martin@goetzegwynn.co.uk) Timothy Roberts (www.tramu.com and timr@talk21.com) and Lindum Records (www.lindumrecords.co.uk and info@lindumrecords.co.uk). A book about the restoration will shortly be available from the builders.

PILGRIM TRUST CONSERVATION AWARDS

Our restoration of the 1829 J.C.Bishop organ at St James Bermondsey was nominated for the 2004 Conservation Awards, competing with the restoration of the 14th century Thornham Parva Retable (the winner), and the restoration and display of the Grinling Gibbons carvings in the Carved Room at Petworth House. It is unusual for an organ restoration to feature in what could be seen as the Oscars of the Conservation world, and we are assured that our project did creditably. For more information see www.consawards.ukic.org.uk

DOMINIC AWARDED LEVERHULME FELLOWSHIP FOR 2004

Dominic Gwynn is taking a year’s sabbatical from organbuilding (October 2003 -2004), to achieve a lifelong ambition, to research and write a book on the early British organ. It will study the organ culture of Britain from 1500 to 1770, studying what people thought of the organ, why they bought or destroyed them, what they were used for in cathedrals, parish churches and noble households, how organ projects were set up and paid for, what kind of organ people bought, how the builders made them and how the traditions were passed on. It will be complementary to the chapters in Stephen Bicknell’s definitive History of the English Organ that deal with this period, though with the addition of a considerable amount of primary research into the church records and organ remains of the period. A year seems very short for such an exercise, and it remains to be seen how long it takes for the book to be offered to the attention of the public.

NEW WORKSHOP

In March we moved to a new workshop, close to the old Tan Gallop, in a group occupying the space of the old pineapple pits in the former kitchen garden at Welbeck Abbey. These workshops were built in 2000, designed by John Outram. Design and photographs, with explanation of the iconology can be found on the Outram website www.johnoutram.com. The advantage for us is increased height (5.5m) and compactness, and designated areas for office, drawing and canteen area. The machine shop is larger, which will allow us to invest in larger woodworking machinery.

CONSERVATION WORK AT ST NICHOLAS, STANFORD ON AVON, LEICESTERSHIRE

In 2002, Martin Goetze and Stuart Dobbs cleaned and restored elements of the famous organ case at St Nicholas Stanford on Avon in Leicestershire. The organ is part of the instrument made by Thomas and Robert Dallam for Magdalen College, Oxford, in about 1631. In 1730 the organ house at Magdalen College was demolished, the main part of the organ being stored until 1737, when it was bought by the parishioners of Tewkesbury Abbey where it survives, having been rebuilt a number of times. The Chair organ was possibly rebuilt at Magdalen College for use in the chapel until the new organ was installed in 1736. This is the instrument that is now at Stanford on Avon.

The work consisted of treating for woodworm and cleaning the organ of debris resulting from the church being restored and occasionally open to the elements during the last few years. Some of the work of the 1966 restoration was replaced. The heavy resin replacement carvings had fallen off, and were replaced with carved oak like the original, and the replacement embossed pipes, which hardly resembled the originals, were replaced with new. An example of the latter, a repair by Stuart Dobbs, is shown in the illustration.

In October and November 2002, Dominic Gwynn, James Collier and Timothy McEwen repaired this historic organ, and carried out a measuring and drawing exercise to prepare for the making of a replica, planned for 2003.

The organ was bought by the Lestrange family of Hunstanton Hall near Kings Lynn in 1630. It is not impossible that a label marked <Allestree 1631> is that of the original maker. The musical importance of the organ is that John Jenkins, one of England’s greatest composers, was retained by the family as their professional musician in the 1640s and 1650s. The organ seems to have spent its life at Hunstanton Hall until it was sold to Captain Lane in 1949, and then bought and donated to St Luke’s in 1958. St Luke’s was an Anglican church, supposedly itself built in 1631

bass side

Principal Bass Fifteenth Bass Stop Diapason Treble Open Flute Stop Diapason Bass

treble side

Principal Treble Fifteenth Treble

The compass is C AA D - c³. The Stop Diapason, Principal and Fifteenth are divided bº/c¹. The Open Flute starts at cº, but was originally intended to have a bottom octave with Stop Diapason Bass and Principal.

"HISTORIC ORGAN CONSERVATION", the book

Historic Organ Conservation: a practical introduction to processes and planning, a book published by Church House Publishing and available from:

Church House Bookshop,
31 Great Smith Street,
London SW1 3BN,

a snip at £9.95

For most of the last ten years Dominic has been a member of the Organs Committee of the Council for the Care of Churches. In that time the attitude to historic organs (and, one would like to think, organs in general) has changed considerably, thanks in large part to the framework which Nicholas Thistlethwaite put in place for grant applications to the Heritage Lottery Fund, and to some extent to the CCC, which tightened up its criteria and increased the grant money at its disposal.

For much of that time I had been thinking about the problems of forming general criteria for historic organ restoration, including lectures to the annual conference of Diocesan Organ Advisors, the 1996 congress of the International Society of Organbuilders and elsewhere, which in their turn engendered discussion. One of the conclusions was that it was very difficult to form general criteria, especially when almost every word except 'organ' is loaded.

In around 1995 Jonathan Goodchild asked me to replace the existing CCC publication on organs, which was running low, with another concentrating on restoration issues. About a year later I produced a proposal which had grown from our original intentions to a book of some 20,000 words. It took another four years to write, in the cracks of the days of a busy organbuilder and family man. By the end parts of the book looked unfamiliar to their author. Rigorous editing from Thomas Cocke, then Secretary to the CCC, stimulating more rigorous editing from the author, lead to the final text.

If it has one merit, it is that nothing similar has ever been produced (for the organ) to my knowledge. The idea is that it brings together information which had to be searched in a variety of places before. It provides more information which tends to stay on the workshop floor, but of which advisors and custodians ought to be aware. And it aims to encourage constant care and conservative restoration by providing detailed examples as much as by precept and exhortation. If it does its job properly, we should end up with more organs representative of their age and builder in years to come, instead of the anodyne hotch-potch which organs are in danger of becoming if subjected to modernising organists and standardised workshop practices.

I hope the book is updated in years to come, particularly by those better able to comment on 20th century key and stop actions. Being published by Church House Publishing, and being to some extent the product of a committee of the CCC, I hope the book is the basis for better things to come, and that it has a life beyond its first author.