Organ mirror on a stand – St Giles Cripplegate in the Barbican, London

I try to control the trainspotter* tendencies in my personality, but I do like taking pictures of organ mirrors (wait for my fully-illustrated coffee table book Organ Mirrors of the World, Part 1 - it’s going to be a wow)  because they are often a makeshift and inappropriate afterthought to the case design.   However this one is pure genius.  The Chancel Organ at St Giles Cripplegate is awkwardly placed (so what’s new, I hear you mutter) and for services on the Summer Course we are often conducted by a relay of Course Tutors, which is little unnerving (though naturally they are very good at it).

Since last year someone has commissioned this impressive mirror on a stand.  I think you can see how it was made – you could even make your own!  You have to get used to looking downwards, rather than upwards, but hey, we’re organists, we adapt.

This is probably a silly request, but if you have any organ mirror pictures, please send them in – to theladyorganist@gmail.com.  If (when) they are published, you will get full credit – unless you are too embarrassed, of course.

*For non-UK readers who may be baffled by this term, trainspotters are men (almost always) in anoraks, clutching thermos flasks, who stand in bunches at the end of railway platforms, recording the identification numbers of the engines that pass.  That’s it.

Jingle Bells and an Oliphant

RCO Summer Course – name that pipe

A Big Name at Bloomsbury Central

RCO Summer School 2014 – our feet go marching on

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Carl Hemann (JT Biltcliffe) (1857-1930) and sisters. Women weren’t so much clothed in those days, as upholstered

I have been delighted at the global correspondence that has hit my inbox and Twitter feed since my first post on my great-grand-uncle, composer and organist Carl Hemann.   At least two people have made the effort to tell me about their strong childhood memories of his music.

Below, therefore, is another FREE download, this time of arguably his most famous piece, the British Cavalry, Grand March-Galop de Concert for pianoforte. It has been carefully fingered, according to the preface – using the old English system of a + for the thumb, and then 1,2,3,4 for the fingers.  (We Brits were very suspicious, in the early 1900s, of the now universally accepted Continental fingering.)

It’s a pdf of the full size original – bigger than A4, but you should be able to print to A4 if necessary.

Carl Hemann – British Cavalry, Grand March-Galop de Concert for pianoforte

You might like the original post:

Carl Hemann, neglected Yorkshire composer – free download!

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Carl Hemann (J T Biltcliffe) 1857-1930

I wear this distinguished connection lightly, but I am in fact the great-grand-niece of Carl Hemann – ‘Barnsley’s leading composer of music’ according to his obituary in the Barnsley Chronicle of January 1930*.   A church organist all his life, his real name was John Thomas Biltcliffe but he wrote under the name of Carl Hemann as ‘English people and other nationalities took more notice of a piece when it was under a German composer’s name’.

Perhaps his best known work is Carl Hemann’s First Six Months at the Pianoforte which sold all over the world, and is still (amazingly) in print, and still a fine introduction to the repertoire of the Victorian family soiree.  Long evenings trawling ebay and the Amazon Used listings have provided me with further works from his considerable oeuvre of over 100 solos and studies.

Below is a typical example of his less demanding compositions for the salon. Note the economy of musical material, and use of slow harmonic progression and repetitive motifs, arguably anticipating Philip Glass by almost a century.

Extract from Spring, Rondo in C major, by Carl Hemann

Carl Hemann’s most popular piece was entitled British Cavalry – Grand-Galop de Concert.  To this tune (according to the Barnsley Chronicle) generations of Barnsley children marched into school every day.  Modern children sadly do not have this privilege.  So to stimulate a revival of interest in my great-grand-uncle’s neglected music, I offer a charming morceau de concert, Laughing Waters, recorded by world-renowned pianist John Lenehan, as a FREE DOWNLOAD for readers of this blog.

*For my overseas readers I should explain that Barnsley is a small-ish town in Yorkshire, England, built on now-defunct heavy industries such as coal mining  – but still ‘a lively shopping and social hub’ according to the Welcome to Yorkshire website.   Other celebrities from Barnsley include chat show host Michael Parkinson, and Arthur Scargill, NUM leader, who crossed swords with Margaret Thatcher in the miners’ strike of 1984.

John Lenehan

John Lenehan is of course one of Britain’s finest pianists and it was awfully good of him to bend his talents to such inconsequential stuff.  He can normally be found accompanying the likes of Kennedy, Tasmin Little, and John Harle, or playing with leading orchestras in concert halls around the world.   His solo recordings include Nyman, Satie, John Ireland, and his recitals often include film projection and jazz repertoire.  With the London Soloists Ensemble he is about to commence a residency at St John’s Smith Square, London.  For more about John visit his website.   He retains copyright in the recording, by the way.
 

Thank you St Edward’s Church, Barnsley for sending me the obituary of John Biltcliffe and the splendid portrait.

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My Pleyel-Moor during some serious regulating and maintenance

Apologies to Klavier-Moor fans who have been waiting for me to post more.   I’ve added two pages – one with some downloadable pdfs taken from Herbert Shead’s book, The History of the Emanuel Moor Double Keyboard Piano which is the Moor piano bible, certainly for enthusiasts in the UK.  Herbert Shead died recently, but he was a driving force behind the Trust which owns several Moor pianos in the UK, including mine.  You can find this page here.

Secondly there are galleries of images from the book, and also of my own Pleyel-Moor upright, here.

Note that book is still in copyright, and these extracts are published for private study purposes only, to further the cause of the Moor piano.  I am delighted that after so many years people are interested.  Please comment or email if you would like more.

For those who missed the original post:

My secret weapon – the Moor double keyboard piano

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I have no excuse for feeling uncomfortable about manual hopping on the organ, with this piano to practice on.

This splendid instrument belongs to a trust, but lives with me. The keyboards are essentially an 8′ and a 4′ working on a single set of strings – on the upper keyboard a linkage operates the hammer an octave higher than the key you have depressed.  You can even couple the two keyboards together, like a harpsichord.

The idea is that octave passages, 10ths and so on can be spread between the two keyboards, making Rachmaninov, Chopin and the like much easier to play.

The system was invented by Emmanuel Moor in the 1920s and 30s.  He was a Hungarian composer and  pianist (had lessons from Liszt), who developed strong ideas on the reformation of the piano.

Winifred Christie-Moor

His wife, concert pianist Winifred Christie-Moor, promoted the instrument tirelessly across Europe and America, and it was taken seriously enough for Pleyel, Bosendorfer, Bechstein and Steinway all to produce examples – the trust also looks after several Moor double keyboard grand pianos.

As pianists would need to relearn their whole repertoire to play on it (and pianists, I suspect, also like using thunderous octave passages to show off), the idea was probably doomed from the start, and once the European piano manufacturers had picked themselves up from the destruction of WW2, no one was interested any more.

Mine is probably the only upright Moor piano to survive.  It’s got a lovely sonorous tone, particularly in the bass.  Quite a heavy action because of all the coupling inside – but good practice for surviving on a tracker organ!

I have loads more information about Moor pianos.  If you are interested, make a comment, and I’ll post some more.

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