Who was Charles Macpherson, anyway?

• He was born in 1870
• He was a chorister in St. Paul's Cathedral 1879-1884
• He was the sub-organist in St. Paul's Cathedral 1895-1916
• He was the organist in St. Paul's Cathedral from 1916
• He wrote Andante in G published in A little Organ Book in
  memory of Hubert Parry (1918)
• He died in 1927
  

Please write a comment if you have more facts!

Listen to my Lakeside organ

I had a friend coming over with some recording equipment and recorded the sound from my beloved reed organ. We had to do some fiddling about before we got a recording that wasn't too embarrassing to put on the web, but still it could have been a lot better. Anyway, the point isn't to show off, but to get an idea of how the organ sounds like. Below you can hear Andante in G by Charles Macpherson which I adapted for my one manual reed organ: You can hear me taking the 16' out and in a couple of times; The Vox Humana is very hard to hear, but it is used in a two bar passage; Right after the Vox Humana I pull out the Celeste in a similar reponsorial passage before returning to the opening theme; Then I use the crescendo knee "pedal" or "wing" (left hand side) followed by the swell pedal (right) at the beginning of the loudest passage.

Download the mp3 file at The Organ Amateur Page

Geistliche Lieder

I went to a second hand book shop in Oslo last Wednesday. I do that from time to time, but I never find anything related to church music. I don't know why that is. Perhaps there aren't many books out there, or perhaps there are some very keen collectors that hoovers (british word for vacuum cleaning) the market constantly. This time, however, I found something: J. S. Bach's Geistliche Lieder (35 of them) translated to Norwegian with simple melody scores. I'm not sure how useful this little book is to me, but perhaps I can get some fun out of it sometime in the future. Maybe I can use some of the words in an anthem. Maybe I can compose arrangements and then compare what I have done to e.g. Bach's own arrangements.

This book of Geistliche Lieder (Sacred Songs) is not strictly speaking church music, but could be used as such. The words are written after the reformation, so I think anyway, jugded from both credits given and the content. There are very much "Herz" and "Schmerz" (heart and pain), in a sort of a pietistic style. I'm not sure if those are true pietistic poems, but they could have been, anyways. That's why I am not too excited about this little book, because I don't like Pietism very much. All this focus on life after death and overly self-repenting stuff.

Anyway, this is none-the-less the most exciting thing that have happpend since my last blog entry...