New Year

It's been a while since last time so I thought I would drop a few lines. I have had a long Christmas break, but I did not do anything of what I planned to do. Almost no music related activities. Not even on Christmas morning. What is the world comming to?

I am looking forward to get my harmonium back from the repair shop. The organ builder guy said that it would be ready by spring-time. That could be any time from March through May. I have tried to get the Karg-Elert harmonium music on sheet music, but I have not succeeded as of yet. I wonder how it will be like, because now I am playing on a Roland RD100 digital piano with headphones. I would of course prefer to have a real pipe organ with pedals, but the Chicago Lakeside organ will do fine as well. If the electricity goes out I can still play beucause I operate the bellows with my feet.

I did not take the time to record the specification of my harmonium before I handed it to the organ builder, but there are 12 drawknobs. 3 or 4 of them are couplers, I think. I know for a fact that there is a sub-octave, a super-octave and a third treble couple. I know that there is a 16' stop which goes up to the third F (including the lowest key which is an F, not the slightly higher C as in pipe organs). The keyboard thus spans over a larger range than the usual pipe organ. There is a Vox Humana that did not work. And there is one "wing" on each side that can be operated by the player's knee. The left one is for crescendo (adding stops) and the right one is like a swell pedal (increasing or decreasing sound volume). So I reckon this is a fun instrument to play with lot of possibilities for variation.

And that was all I had time to write. I am very busy these days. My wife shall be giving birth anytime soon now so there are lots of things to be done...!