Author: Matt Dixon

The Family Law Reform Act 1969 reduced the age of majority to eighteen, so that the summer of 1994 may be said to have witnessed the passage of BIOS into adulthood, its first official meetings having taken place in July 1976, in Cambridge. It was a passage celebrated neither officially nor, so far as we…

Questions continue to be asked about the organ in Worcester Cathedral, and in particular about the Gilbert Scott case which houses the section in the south transept. Along with the two 32-foot flues, it is substantially all that remains of the Hill organ donated to the cathedral by the Earl of Dudley, in 1874 –…

The third of the Society’s aims includes the phrase “historic organs”. What does it mean? It was briefly considered at the January meeting of Council, in connection with a proposal to draw up guidelines on the conservation of such instruments, and though it can hardly be said to have created division, there was no consensus…

In the first editorial of a new year, it is appropriate to review the events and the achievements of the old year, to try to see what conclusions can be drawn, and to attempt to look ahead. Only its most ungenerous critics could argue that 1993 was other than a modestly successful year for the…

The May 1993 issue of Organists’ Review provides further evidence of an increasing interest in foundation stops, and an increasing rejection of the type of upperwork considered desirable in the 1960s and 1970s. Mr. Geoffrey Coffin, in an article on the recent work at York Minster, seems to have been at pains to stress the…

The words of Harold Atterbow, the kerb-crawling cinema organist brilliantly portrayed by Roy Hudd in Dennis Potter’s television play Lipstick on your collar (London, Faber and Faber Limited, 1993, p.196). By this stage in the play, Atterbow’s infatuation with the appalling but undeniably nubile Sylvia has got him into serious trouble, so much so, in…

In times such as these, one might expect rebuilding schemes to be increasingly modest in their scope, confining themselves more and more to essential matters – the repair of worn-out mechanisms, for example – and rejecting more and more the electrification of good, mechanical action instruments, the replacement of useful foundation stops with exotic (and…

The organ lives! With these words, Stephen Bicknell concluded what we hope can be described as the most recent of his contributions to this journal. That the organ does indeed live is evident from the organ builders’ advertisements that appeared in JBIOS 15. One of them relates to “two famous pneumatic organs” recently restored by…

The console itself told a story. Stop-names such as “Block Flute” and “Larigot” were not characteristic of the work of the distinguished builder whose name appeared below the music desk; and for anyone ignorant of that builder’s work, there was a clue in the somewhat maladroit way in which the stop-heads had been re-engraved. (Why…

Volume 16, no. 1 has generated considerable controversy. Whether the Archdeacon of Rochester actually exists or is simply a devil’s advocate created by a mischievous contributor is something we hope to discover on 17 October, at St. Anne’s Church, Underwood Road, London El [see later. Ed.]. His remarks nonetheless raise very important issues, issues which…