Next year’s Journal of the British Institute of Organ Studies will feature an article in which I explore a little-known aspect of the late seventeenth-century English organ, namely the use of sash-windows on case fronts. I’ve found just four organs that had this peculiar feature, and all were associated with buildings in which Christopher Wren was at work, so I suspect he was the instigator of the idea.

I first came across the feature whilst researching the so-called ‘King James’s Travelling Organ’, a consort organ that was sold to an American many years ago and of which the whereabouts are now unknown. I suspect it was an organ built, or possibly adapted, by Renatus Harris for one of the royal Catholic chapels, I think most probably the Whitehall one. In England the use of consort organs was an unusual feature of the royal Catholic chapels at this time and was based on the contemporary Italian practice of employing a small organo di legno with the choir. James II then used the organ in his temporary military chapel on Hounslow Heath during the Glorious Revolution, hence the ‘travelling’ epithet. More on the use of consort organs in the royal Catholic chapels will be coming soon.

Look out for the JBIOS article for more on this and some thoughts on the origins of the swell box…