It was a great pleasure to speak at the VdGS meeting at St John’s church in Chichester recently. My talk focussed on aspects of the consort organ’s role in the string consort repertoire with an emphasis on the viol player’s perspective.

There were some interesting questions afterwards from Peter Holman, Jo Wainwright and others, and I’ve had some stimulating feedback via email from some of the other participants. Robert Carrington was even inspired to write a piece for consort organ in response – an unexpected but delightful outcome!

There are some further potential spin-offs in the pipeline from the day that I hope to share in due course.

I am delighted to announce that I have agreed a contract with Routledge for a title in the Ashgate Historic Keyboard series. The Consort Organ and its Role in Seventeenth-Century Ensemble Music is due to be published in early 2025 as a hardback and e-book, and in 2026 as a paperback.

The book is the first in-depth study of the seventeenth-century English consort organ. From the refined confines of the royal court to the lively entertainments of the post-Restoration music-houses, in aristocratic households, universities, and royal Catholic chapels, the consort organ found itself employed in a colourful range of instrumental and vocal repertoire involving the leading composers and musicians of its day. Drawing on an extensive corpus of primary sources, the book traces the story of the English secular organ during the Jacobean and Stuart periods, contrasting its role with that of the contemporary church organ and placing its usage in the context of wider European trends in chamber and devotional music. Alongside chapters focussing on the instrument’s organology and varied playing contexts, a wide range of manuscript sources is used to illustrate in detail performance practices relating to the organ’s use in the string consort and devotional vocal repertoires. In the absence of an English treatise on organ playing from the seventeenth century, the book provides valuable insights into the approaches taken by secular organists of the time in interpreting musical texts at the keyboard and seeks to widen awareness of a neglected instrument in ways that are applicable both to practising musicians and to those interested in the repertoire.

Peer review comments on The Consort Organ:

‘Exemplary. The author’s organological and historical knowledge is exceptional’

‘A skilful combination of organological research with historical and repertorial/performance practice comment’

‘A significant contribution to the subject and will be valued by scholars of the early modern period… and early music performers’

‘A vast amount of historical and musical source material is marshalled into a coherent argument’

‘Well researched, minutely documented and clearly explained’

‘Of interest not only to organists and organologists, but a wide range of performers as well as those whose interest is the place of music in the social history of the period’

Not the woodwind instrument, though, but the organ stop, as found on many of the larger seventeenth-century church instruments. In my article in  BIOS Journal 47 I investigate the nature and provision of these stops, linking them to the mysterious ‘antheme’ stops that appear in a few specifications. I propose that Recorders were mainly intended for the accompaniment of solo vocalists in the verse anthem repertoire, and the most plausible explanation for the ‘antheme’ stops is that they were Recorders pitched in C rather than the more usual (at that period) F.

At Belchamp Walter Hall in Suffolk is a very late and rather unusual consort organ, probably dating from around 1700. Legend has it that it was a gift from Handel to his pupil Isabella Raymond. Unfortunately, not so – but my research has revealed a no less interesting story. You can read all about it in the next BIOS Reporter (45:4) due in November 2023.

https://bios.org.uk/publications/index.php

The autumn volume of Early Music Performer, the journal of the National Early Music Association, will include my article on the performance practice information to be gleaned from the L’Estrange manuscripts with particular reference to the organ. The L’Estranges were a staunchly royalist family who maintained a strongly musical household at their home in Hunstanton, Norfolk, in the mid seventeenth century. Their household musicians included Thomas Brewer and John Jenkins, both of whom assisted Sir Nicholas L’Estrange in compiling an important collection of consort manuscripts. Among the many fascinating details within the collection are the annotations that shed hugely interesting (and vanishingly rare) light on the ‘humouring’, or expressive realisation, of the music on the keyboard. We are fortunate in that we can link the manuscripts to the personalities, the place, and even the organ itself (which survives at Historic St Luke’s, Smithfield, Virginia) to provide a detailed context in which this music was played.

On Friday 9th April I am a guest on the podcast series Gin & Topic. I’ll be waffling about medieval and renaissance music with hosts Sarah and Áine whilst quaffing the splendid Anno Extreme95 – the world’s strongest gin. Not sure how coherent I was as a result of that, but it was good fun to record..!

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…

Despite the unexpected onus of having to transfer my teaching online during the COVID 19 lockdown, I have managed to complete two articles for publication. The first of these appears in Journal 14 of the Viola da Gamba Society and can be accessed here:

Titled Richard Cobb and Domestic Music in the Household of Henry Bourchier, 5th Earl of Bath, 1638-1655, it is a detailed examination of the musical provision within an aristocratic domestic household during the civil wars period, based on the extensive accounts that survive from Tawstock House in Devon. Additionally, the article identifies the composer Richard Cobb, known for his consort and keyboard works in a handful of surviving manuscripts, not as the servant of Archbishop Laud, as has hitherto been thought, but as the domestic organist of the Bourchiers at Tawstock.

The Tawstock accounts paint a vivid and detailed picture of the musical provision in the Bourchiers’ household, including the purchase of instruments, music and materials (including several consort organs, of course!), the engagement of professional musicians and tutors, and also the involvement of the wider household, including family and servants, in the music-making there. The narrative reveals that the Bourchiers, although sited remotely in rural Devon, were very much up-to-date with the latest musical trends being developed at the court in London.

I am delighted to report that the Open University has granted me Visiting Fellow status starting in August 2020, which will enable me to continue my research under the auspices of the university and to contribute to the work of the music department there. Many thanks to Professor David Rowland for his proposal and to Dr Byron Dueck for acting as my sponsor. My initial work will focus on preparing a series of sample chapters expanded from my thesis with a view to publication.

The Belgian viol consort L’Acheron have been recording a CD using the new organ built for them by Goetze & Gwynn, which is based on Dominic Gwynn’s extensive experience of documenting, restoring and copying consort organs. It is splendid to see a project like this taking place and hopefully it will illuminate our understanding of how the consort organ and viols interacted. I am not convinced by the use of the organ, virginals and viols all at once  – I can find no evidence for this at all – but I was intrigued by Francois Joubert-Caillet’s comment that the virginals has tonal similarities to the consort organ: there is some food for thought there! I’m looking forward to the release of the disc – let’s hope it’s not delayed too much by the present distracted times.

Here is a link to a video about the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRkgXGJ1YBI