It was clear from the start that the new firm (‘Martin Goetze and Dominic Gwynn’) would concentrate on building and restoring organs in historical styles. They soon established connections with the Early Music movement, building and hiring instruments for groups such as The Parley of Instruments, the Amati Ensemble, the Scottish Early Music Consort, and individual players including Christopher Hogwood and Sheila Lawrence, for whom they made a replica seventeenth-century Italian Positive organ (1988). Their knowledge of historical instruments also brought them work for the National Trust (including a seventeenth-century chamber organ at Canon’s Ashby – one of many similar consort instruments that they restored – the 1826 Elliot organ at Belton House and a Snetzler chamber organ of 1759 at Hatchlands), the Russell Collection in Edinburgh (a chamber organ by Thomas Parker, 1760), the Royal Collection (a clock organ by Charles Clay (c.1740), and museums including the Horniman Museum and the National Museum of Wales.
Martin and Dominic, and occasionally Edward, alternated responsibility for the projects, designing the new organs, reporting and estimating for the restorations, and leading the projects. In fact you can hardly tell which of them had been in charge, and for larger projects much of the decision-making was collective.
Unsurprisingly, the firm’s early work tended to focus on smaller pipe organs including, for example, the Samuel Green chamber organ in Edith Weston Church (1787/1981) and Robert and William Gray’s chamber organ in the shape of a harpsichord at Burghley House (1790/1986). Later, they were given opportunities to work on larger instruments. One of the first was the famous John Byfield organ at St Mary’s, Rotherhithe (1764/1991). This was followed by a reconstruction of the Renatus Harris organ in St Botolph, Aldgate (1704/2006), and restorations of J.C. Bishop’s ambitious and innovative instrument in St James’s, Bermondsey (1829/2002), with its manual keyboard for the Pedal stops, and H.C. Lincoln’s organ in Thaxted Parish Church (1821/2013), which Dominic always declared to be the most complete surviving Georgian church organ. These restorations were only the most notable in a long list of historically-significant projects. Most pre-dated the Victorian period, but a small number of later instruments appeared, among them organs by Gray & Davison, Hill, and T.C. Lewis, and also Grant, Degens and Bradbeer’s pioneering instrument in New College, Oxford, on which Martin Goetze and Edward Bennett had worked (1969/2014).
It was a fortunate coincidence that the emergence of a firm committed to the restoration of historic organs occurred at a time when the old National Heritage Memorial Fund was being transformed into the higher-profile (and much better-funded) Heritage Lottery Fund. The Fund’s criteria for applications seeking grants for organ projects were tightly-drawn in its earliest days, and in the 1990s and early-2000’s a significant number of Goetze and Gwynn’s restorations received generous support. These included the Bermondsey and Aldgate organs, and also Great Budworth (Samuel Renn, 1839/2004), Crick (Elliot, 1819/2007) and St Swithun, Worcester (Gray, 1795/2008).
One of the first substantial new organs made by Goetze end Gwynn was for the English Church in the Hague (1987). Like nearly all the firm’s new organs, it was influenced by the work of an earlier builder, in this instance Richard Bridge (c.1688-1758). It had two manuals and seventeen stops. Organs of similar size were subsequently made for (among others), St Matthew, Sheffield (1992), Magdalene College, Cambridge (2000), St Endelion, Cornwall (2001), All Saints, Odiham (2011) and the Public Theatre at Trinity College, Dublin (2017), the latter being housed in a richly decorated case made originally in the 1660s for an organ by Lancelot Pease. The scaling and voicing of the Magdalene and Odiham organs were influenced by a close study of the work of Bernard (‘Father’) Smith at Edam and the University Church in Cambridge.
Dominic published articles and conference papers representing an invaluable source of information for organ-builders, organists and students. Many appeared as the Harley Monographs, accessible online, and now almost sixty in number. Among them are reports on one of the most remarkable projects undertaken by Goetze and Gwynn – the building of three ‘Tudor organs’ based on the remains of two original soundboards, probably dating from the 1530s or 1540s, which came to light in Wetheringsett and Wingfield in Suffolk in 1977. Meticulous examination of these fragments, together with exhaustive research in contemporary archives and musical sources, enabled the organ-builders to create initially two replica Tudor organs (2000-2002) to support the Early English Organ Project (now administered by the Royal College of Organists), and later a third instrument for St Teilo’s Church in the grounds of the Welsh National Museum at St Fagans, Cardiff where it was used for teaching purposes by Professor John Harper (Bangor University) for his course on ‘the experience of worship in late-medieval cathedral and parish church’. The study of the surviving fragments, together with the painstaking research undertaken by Dominic and his colleagues to re-create these instruments has transformed our understanding of the Tudor organ, and he was rightly proud of the firm’s achievement.
Martin and Dominic carried out research on many organs, mainly in England, but some in The Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, U.S.A., writing, examination and reports. Martin usually provided the immaculate sketches and drawings, developed ways of measuring pipework and mechanical parts, etc. while Dominic tended to do the historical research, and wrote the description. Much of their work was shared, but Martin assembled and wrote the report on the organ now at St Nicholas Stanford on Avon, Harley Monograph no5.
Goetze & Gwynn were founder members of the Institute of British Organ Building, and meetings at their workshops have always been characterised by an emphasis on practical training sessions, especially in metal pipe making and conservation disciplines. In due course Martin served on the Board of the IBO, latterly as President, where he championed the development of a standardised national apprenticeship scheme and qualification.
It has to be said that our conviction that the small neo-classical organs which we were making with Grant Degens and Bradbeer and Hendrik ten Bruggencate were the future has proved not to be the case. Our future has been more the restoration and reconstruction of historic British organs, underpinned by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Our faith in the British historic classical organ has proved durable, but mostly in restorations rather than new organs.
Dominic’s words about the early days: It has to be said that we approached the business of organ building with innocent enthusiasm, or more correctly in this case, amazing naivety. Not for five years did I know what a budget was, a cash flow forecast against which we could compare our meagre income. But we at least had that essential thing in any business, that we knew exactly what we intended to do, and did it. So that now we, and our trusty partner Edward, and the twenty full-time organ builders and all the others who have worked with us over the years, have finished over a hundred projects, a third of them new organs and the rest restorations, and in the process have helped to revive the historic classical organ in this country.
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