Articles: Why the history of the organ matters: in homage to Peter Williams

My task this afternoon, if not exactly to offer a representation of chaos, is to offer some reflections on a subject that is germane to the activities of the Cambridge Academy of Organ Studies. I have decided, therefore, to tackle a question which seems to me to be fundamental, and that is Why the history of the organ matters.
I am so certain that it is fundamental to our mutual interests that I am not even phrasing it as a question but offer it baldly as a statement of fact. The history of the organ does matter. But lest anyone needs persuading, I propose to summon the support of the Academys eminent and distinguished inaugural Patron, Professor Peter Williams organologist, performer, curator of historical keyboard collections, pedagogue and musical editor. Peter was an intellectual polymath at a time when that was becoming increasingly unfashionable in academia. He relished asking questions (the pages of his books were notoriously peppered with question marks) and had a healthy and refreshing scepticism about contemporary educational trends, possibly engendered in Cambridge when he read Part II of the English Tripos under the spell of a like-minded critical maverick, as John Butt put it, referring to Dr F. R. Leavis, a famous dissenter from the prevailing mores of literary criticism in 1950s Cambridge. Peters frame of reference was vast, enabling him to illuminate the dark corners of organology in unexpected ways. As David Ponsford wrote in an obituary notice, Peters teaching philosophy could be summed up as not so much answering the questions as questioning the answers.
Whilst sadly (now) lacking the man, we still have his voluminous writings and musings in print. I will be calling them in evidence as we consider Why the history of the organ matters.
Shortly before his death, Peter wrote a piece for the BIOS Journal about the development of his interest in the organ and its history. It begins with his youth in the West Midlands, where he was a choirboy at St Peters, Wolverhampton, before moving on to Cambridge in the 1950s. There, Thurston Dart and Peter le Huray were major influences, supplemented by keyboard studies in Amsterdam with Gustav Leonhardt. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation on English organs and organ music under the first four Georges in 1962, and was then appointed to a lectureship at Edinburgh University, followed by further appointments as curator of the Russell Collection of historic keyboard instruments and Professor of Performance Practice. He moved to Duke University, North Carolina in 1985, where he founded its new Center for Performance Practice Studies before returning to the UK and a professorship at Cardiff. There, he supervised Ph.D. students, and in David Ponsfords words, performed memorable concerts including Bachs Goldberg Variations.
A paragraph from the piece in the BIOS Journal provides an introduction to our subject. Peter wrote,
…from the start … my interest in the organ and its history always came from seeing it as a means to certain ends, primarily musical (for playing the great repertories of organ-music, also for composing) but also cultural-historical (researching its origins as a unique part of western culture and history). So much in these interests became for me inter-connected [including] planning organs tours, writing histories, playing recitals, teaching fugue and counterpoint, working in a [curatorial capacity] in a University collection, focusing increasingly on J.S. Bach that I could see little break between them 1
This assertion that the organ is not simply a musical instrument, but has a wider significance arising from its origins as a unique part of western culture and history recurs time and time again in Peters publications. In his pioneering book, The Organ in Western culture (1993), he asks, How did we come to have the organ in church, and what difference did it make?…, continuing, that question leads to many others, for organs cannot be understood in isolation … the subject seems to involve more and more topics … church history, monastic culture, advances in technology … architecture, liturgy, political history and of course music theory….2 In other words (we might say) the organ does not have a single history, but rather a series of histories that impinge on other cultural, liturgical, technological and even political events and cultures.
How are we to discover those histories? In part, of course, by experiencing and studying surviving historic organs. It follows that if these are key to understanding the cultures that fostered them and interpreting the repertoires for which they were created, their preservation and (when necessary) informed restoration is a cultural imperative. Only with reference to these instruments, and by studying the historical information that they present, can we discuss adequately issues such as authentic fingering, pedal technique, key touch, the effect on musical performance of the winding of the organ, the musical balance between the different manual divisions and registers, and the radical changes brought about by a whole series of technological innovations including the introduction of pneumatic key actions and novel console accessories in the nineteenth century. We need to discover the cultural contexts in which those who first played these instruments and their music worked, together with the practical challenges that they faced. Not that any of this research need prevent us from exploring other performance styles, any more than the existence of the Globe Theatre should tie us to authentic productions of Shakespeares plays, but it is important to understand the stylistic conventions of the original organ-makers and players.
Peter was clear about this. He describes his approach to historic organs, exploring the repertoire for which they were conceived, and, as he put it, studying how well each organ-type realized the music. He then lays his cards on the table, continuing,
…it was this musical emphasis that led me to recognise something I still believe to be true of organs: that unless you are concerned mostly with modern or experimental music, you cant mix organ-types. There is no eclectic organ; choose a type and stick to it.3
For many of us, this will resonate with our own first encounters with (for example) the musical resources of a Schnitger Hauptwerk, the Tierce en Taille of a Clicquot, the sonorous principal choruses of Gottfried Silbermann, the characteristic flutes of a seventeenth-century Dutch Rückpositiv, or (for that matter) an intact Willis Full Swell (there arent many). The music makes sense in a way that it does not on a lesser, or musically more compromised instrument. History matters, and not only for what it can teach us about the tonal character of an organ. In the same article in which he dismissed the eclectic organ, Peter wrote, To this day, I would rate the touch of an instrument, of whatever kind it is, more important than its tone….4 Experiencing the touch of an historic organ can help us to empathise with those who played it when it was first made. This applies to earlier organs with mechanical actions, but it also applies to more recent instruments. I suspect nobody forgets their first encounter with an intact Cavaillé-Coll organ and its Barker lever action, or with a large Hill or Willis organ that retains its original tubular-pneumatic action. These instruments demand that you play the repertoire in a particular way, and our predecessors developed strategies for doing this. For Peter, this musical engagement with an historic instrument was critical, and elsewhere he quoted approvingly the organ-builder, Dirk Flentrop, who declared, It is not easy to write about organs; they need to be played or listened to.5 (Surely a salutary warning to organ historians!)
I hope I have said enough to establish that the history of the organ matters because it offers critical insights to those players who want to explore its repertoire. But I want now to return to the question of the organs relationship with the history of Western culture generally, and to that list of topics which Peter Williams identified as being essential to understanding the evolving history of the organ in the West over the last 1500 years or so. They were let me remind you church history, monastic culture, advances in technology … architecture, liturgy, political history &hellip ; musical theory and practice. To these I would venture to add aristocratic and bourgeois culture, and popular culture, comprising a sort of organological Decalogue.
We will begin with political history, on the face of it, an unlikely starting-point, but it seems increasingly likely that it may actually have been politics that led to the appearance of the earliest pipe organs in Western Christendom.
In his book, The King of Instruments: how churches came to have organs, published in 1993, Williams made the important point that the earliest instruments of which we have records were not intended to be used for liturgical purposes. They were extravagant gifts, heavy with symbolism, sent from Constantinople by the Byzantine emperors to the kings of the emerging nations of the West, to accompany imperial ceremonial in royal palaces. Tradition relates that the Roman emperor in the East sent an organum to Pepin, King of the Franks, in 756 or 757. Now the term organum needs to be treated with great caution as Peter Williams taught us: it could be used to describe a wide range of tools, pieces of equipment, liturgical texts, and even (eventually) musical notation, but here we can be fairly confident that it refers to a complex machine able to produce sounds to accompany court ceremonial. Similar gifts were allegedly sent by later emperors to Charlemagne in 812 and Louis the Pious in 826.6 It seems likely that one of these instruments was placed in the royal throne room attached to the chapel at Aachen where it was used to announce the arrival of the king. We can conjecture that its proximity to the chapel eventually suggested a role for the organum in ecclesiastical ceremonial too.
The gift of an organ was therefore an act of recognition, a sign of political favour, through which the imperial descendant of Rome recognised the kingship, perhaps even the imperial sovereignty, of the Carolingian royal house. It is frustrating that we dont know more about the musical character of these instruments, but we know enough about their technology and construction to be confident that these wondrous machines (to use John Miltons later phrase) would have made a great impression on those who were their fortunate recipients even if they didnt quite know what to do with them.
The story then shifts to Winchester in the late-tenth century, and to the famous poem composed by one Wulfstan of Winchester, cantor of the monastic community there, celebrating the life of St Swithun. The poem includes a description of a remarkable organum (or, strictly, organa) located in the Old Minster at Winchester and credited by Wulfstan to Bishop Alphege, who became bishop in 984. As Williams rightly says, In its references to music and to technicalities of the organ, the poem leaves many uncertainties.7 The language of hyperbole is much in evidence. Wulfstan claims there were forty bellows blown by seventy strong men, four hundred pipes, and two brothers of harmonious spirit who operated sliders or levers to raise the jubilant song, which was said to be so clamorous that people covered their ears and the thunderous voice was heard throughout the city. (Well, he would say that, wouldnt he?) But setting aside the uncertainties of Wulfstans text, and the question as to whether he actually knew what he was talking about, three critical points emerge. First, this Winchester organum is indisputably a musical instrument, however primitive in conception. Secondly, it is a technological wonder to those who experience it. Thirdly, it is a permanent fixture in a royal church, standing alongside the palace of the royal house of Wessex, where both liturgical celebrations and royal ceremonies take place regularly including those occasions when the king appeared wearing his crown, almost certainly in a gallery at the west end of the building. It is therefore impossible to avoid a comparison with Aachen and the Carolingian kings; impossible, too, not to see a connection with the development of organ-building and the acquisition of organs in Benedictine communities across Western Christendom over the next three centuries.
Well return in a moment to the connections between organs and monastic communities, but for the moment lets stay with their use in a political context as an accoutrement of monarchy and royal ceremonial.
By the late-fifteenth century, organs (now equipped with rudimentary keyboards and drawstops), were an essential resource for celebrating the arrival of royalty. In England, both Richard III and his successor, Henry VII, were greeted with a solemn Te Deum which by them of the Quere was right melodiously songen with Organ as accustomed when they visited the City of York.8 In the Holy Roman Empire, the emperors outdoor processions included wagons bearing consorts of musicians, including small organs. The instruments also came in handy as royal gifts. In a surely unconscious echo of Charlemagnes organ, Elizabeth I of England in 1599 sent an ingenious combined clock and organ with a barrel mechanism as well as keys to the Sultan of Turkey; being Elizabeth, she managed to get someone else (the Levant Company) to pay for it.
By then, organs had become embroiled in the politics of the Reformation. Broadly speaking, Lutherans were content to retain organs in churches and Calvinists were not. The Synod of Homburg in 1526 condemned organ-playing in church, but Luthers own fancy for music, and the congregational possibilities of chorales, seem to have saved the day, whilst in the Protestant Netherlands, the Synod of Holland and Zeeland in 1574 banished organs from church worship, only to encounter resistance from the secular authorities who took a certain pride in their stately and often architecturally splendid instruments, and also enjoyed the public recitals that took place outside times of worship.
England, of course, took its own path. During the mercifully brief reign of Edward VI there was a concerted attempt by leading reformers to silence organs in cathedrals and college chapels. Under Edwards Catholic sister, Mary, organs were brought back into use, but it was all change again when she was succeeded by Elizabeth. She favoured the use of choirs and organs in worship, but had to play her cards carefully, and the Calvinists almost succeeded in passing a resolution in the Lower House of Convocation in 1563 to ban organs in churches. But they had overplayed their hand, and most cathedrals, and some college chapels and parish churches managed to retain and use organs in the new vernacular liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer. Meanwhile, the Chapel Royal became a safe haven for some of the most distinguished musicians of the period, including Catholics such as Byrd and John Bull, and Elizabeth and her successors, James and Charles I, equipped the royal chapels with organs. They figured regularly in court ceremonial christenings and royal marriages, the Epiphany and Holy Week ceremonies, receptions of foreign ambassadors and other guests no doubt to the horror of the Puritans. But there was a price to pay. Implicated as they were in the religious practices of the royal family and their support for Archbishop Laud, it was inevitable that, when Civil War broke out, organs would be a target for iconoclasts and religious fanatics. The verbal and physical attacks on organs, culminating in Parliaments order in 1644 that church organs should be demolished, were in part an expression of religious outrage, but they were also an expression of political opposition to the King who had authorised and encouraged their use. Once again, organs were caught up in the politics of the day, this time, destructively.
The restoration of the King in 1660 was followed speedily by the restoration of church organs in many places, and since then, their part in national politics in this and other countries has been more low-key (although we shouldnt overlook their accompaniment of revolutionary hymns in France when many churches were briefly transformed into Temples of Reason at the time of the French Revolution). But in general their role has been to provide musical support for occasions of national celebration or mourning, from the service of thanksgiving in St Pauls Cathedral in 1713 for the Treaty of Utrecht, including Handels settings of the Te Deum and Jubilate, to the huge funeral of the Duke of Wellington in 1852, to coronations and countless services of national thanksgiving and remembrance, often with specially-commissioned music. These are not overtly political occasions, but they are surely part of the ceremonial and symbolic culture which holds our national life together, and to which organs regularly contribute a stirring soundtrack.
So much for politics. But now I want to take us back to Winchester in the tenth century to consider the monastic context of that remarkable Anglo-Saxon organ, and also to ask what we know about the evolution of the organs technology, for the two are inextricably linked.
I think it is often forgotten in our secular world just how significant the growth of monasticism was in early-mediaeval Europe. In a world without universities, monasteries became centres of learning and places of record. They built impressively tall and spacious churches, many of which housed shrines to the saints which attracted pilgrims and stimulated the development of settlements and markets. They maintained schools, almonries for the poor, and also infirmaries where the sick were cared for. And in order to equip and enhance their churches, they practised and then went on to develop a wide range of crafts.
Williams is very clear that the dissemination of knowledge about, and the practice of, organ-making in Western Christendom depended critically on Benedictine monasticism. The monks were responsible for (or sponsored) feats of technology including the casting bells, the manufacture of candelabra, the engineering of complex structures, and the making of organs. This dissemination was made possible by the existence of the network of Benedictine monasteries which spread throughout North-West and Central Europe, France and England, enabling skills to be transferred from one monastic house to another. The various crafts and technologies studied and applied in these monastic houses provided a resource on which someone wanting to make an organum could draw. Wood-working techniques for making wind-tight soundboards and casework; leather-working techniques for building reservoirs and feeders; metal-working techniques for making some of the pipes. Engineering techniques could assist in the design of mechanisms, whilst someone with an interest in mathematics could explore the mysteries of pipe-scaling and tuning.
The result of this inter-disciplinary enterprise as the pagan tribes retreated and the Church of Rome strengthened its grip was a machine of awesome complexity, only to be compared at the time with weight-driven clocks, carillons which had obvious similarities to an organum windmills, water-mills, and siege machines like the trebuchet. Written documentation suggests that the making of organs remained largely the preserve of monastic communities until the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, although it does not answer the question of how they were used and why they were so valued in the context of monastic liturgy. Is it significant that organs and organ-players begin to appear more frequently in secular cathedral and church accounts after the fourteenth century, when there is also increasing evidence of the introduction of vocal polyphony, or is that simply due to the random survival of records? We really dont know. What we do know is that, by the fifteenth century there is evidence that organs with keyboards were being routinely used for the instruction of choristers and other singers in polyphonic technique, that groups of lay clerks were expected to include someone who could play the organ, and that small or little organs were being placed near the choirstalls or on the pulpitum to play verses of psalms or canticles alternatim with the singers.
It is therefore no coincidence that Peter Williamss pioneering The European Organ (1966), commences its survey of the various regional organ types in 1450. For by that date the instrument was poised for great developments which would transform its potential and give rise to stylistically distinct schools of secular organ-building in different parts of Western Europe. Let me therefore close this section by quoting Williams again, writing, this time, in The Organ in Western culture, to endorse the idea of a watershed in the mid-fifteenth century:
The end of the story is clear enough by the 1480s, with the great organs of Haarlem and Saragossa and Bologna. But what were the steps that led to them? What one can say with some confidence is that such church organs as these do not, in any traceable way, derive from the Greek hydraules. The organ is an entirely isolated Western Christian achievement, like Gothic architecture.9
There we have part of the answer to the question of why the history of the organ matters. It is a distinctive product of the Christian West. Another part of the answer is that it has an important place in the early history of technology in the West. Later, organ-builders would tend to borrow from other technologies developed initially for other purposes: pneumatic levers, for example, which enabled Aristide Cavaillé-Coll to rescue his pioneering organ for St Denis from potential disaster in 1841, and later enabled Henry Willis to divide his instrument for St Pauls Cathedral on both sides of the chancel the organological equivalent of splitting the atom; electromagnets, applied successfully to organ actions by Péschard and Barker in the 1860s; hydraulic engines for raising the wind; Robert Hope-Jones with his telephone engineering and, today, digital technology to provide all sorts of wonderful console accessories. But during those long centuries between Charlemagnes organ and the end of the middle ages, the organ pioneered technological developments to claim its place among a small number of wondrous machines that amazed Western Christendom.
There is so much more that we could say about the development of the organ in a liturgical context in the early-modern period, not only about distinctive repertoires (German chorales, French organ masses, English voluntaries and choral accompaniments) but also about the architectural contribution that the organ cases of town churches in Holland and Germany, of abbey churches in South Germany and Austria, and of the City churches of London following the Great Fire made. They all have their place in a discussion of why the history of the organ matters. However, in this concluding section of my talk, I propose to close the church door behind us, and say a little about the organ and secular culture, for there is a story to be told there, too.
First, organs in a domestic context.
Though costly and space-consuming, a small chamber or house organ was within the reach of a prosperous, musical household such as that of Alderman Samuel Newton, here in Cambridge. In 1680, he met the local organ-builder, Thomas Thamer, at the Rose Inn, and agreed to purchase a 3-stop organ, with a Stopped Diapason, Flute and Fifteenth, for £11. Alderman Newton had a son who was receiving music lessons from George Loosemore, Organist of Trinity College, and the organ was no doubted intended to encourage him to practise his lessons. Loosemore also had a small house organ. We know that, because, in the scramble at the time of the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to equip the Cambridge college chapels with organs again, he lent it to Trinity until Thamer completed a new permanent organ for the chapel in 1662; the college then paid for returning it to Loosemores home. Small organs of this type, often with wooden pipes in England, were quite common at this period, and they would have been used in consort music as well as to accompany vocal and solo instrumental pieces. Their equivalents were found in all the main European organ cultures. Larger domestic organs might be installed in the great halls of the gentry and aristocracy. Adlington Hall in Cheshire is an example, with its 2-manual organ probably installed in connection with a family wedding in 1692.
That brings us, secondly, to organs in an aristocratic cultural context.
In eighteenth-century England, the building of large country houses in the newly-fashionable classical style fuelled the demand for correspondingly elegant chamber organs. Located in music rooms or salons, sometimes housed in cases designed by an architect or furniture-maker, such as William Kent, Robert Adam, or Chippendale, these instruments were status symbols, proclaiming the discriminating taste of those who had commissioned them. They allowed the musicians of the household to perform the keyboard arrangements of oratorios and operas, songs and instrumental pieces which poured from the London music publishers at this time. A flourishing trade in chamber organs for the aristocracy and nouveau-riche mercantile families provided a secure base on which to construct a business for an organ-maker like the Swiss émigré Johannes Schnetzler, who duly became John Snetzler in mid-eighteenth-century London. Chamber organs in elegant cases commanded good prices; church organs were financially much riskier. The well-heeled patrons who heard Snetzlers chamber organs whilst visiting their peers in their country residences, encountered larger versions of these instruments in the London theatres and pleasure gardens during the Season, accompanying Mr Handels oratorios during Lent in company with a band of other instrumentalists, and also in performances of Handels newly-invented organ concertos. Here, I cannot resist quoting Peter Williamss observation on these concertos: How curious that one of Englands major contributions to the repertory of organ-music was made by a German composer imitating Italian concertos!.10 Of course, in the pleasure gardens such as those at Vauxhall, Marylebone and Ranelagh, the repertoire was decidedly more secular, including excerpts from popular Italian operas, sentimental or satirical songs, and a variety of instrumental pieces showing off particular players. Significant, too, was the fact that admission to the pleasure gardens was available to a much wider cross-section of the population than the theatres staging operas (or oratorios), thus enabling a surprisingly diverse audience to experience the organ outside its ecclesiastical context.
That brings us to my third and final topic: the organ and popular culture. My main focus is (again) England, but similar developments took place throughout Europe and North America.
In the nineteenth century, technological innovation, the building of new public halls, and a campaign on the part of reforming politicians and philanthropists to expand the educational and cultural horizons of the poorer classes combined to favour and make possible the construction of pipe organs of a scale and musical versatility that was wholly novel. These town hall organs were increasingly viewed as orchestral substitutes, designed to accompany massive choirs and enable the performance of technically-demanding transcriptions and medleys of popular music by an organist employed for the purpose by the town or city council. Players, such as William Thomas Best at St Georges Hall, Liverpool, and James Kendrick Pyne at Manchester, were highly-paid local celebrities, whose weekly recitals had elements of theatricality. Best would have a chair and table placed beside the console on which his musical scores were neatly stacked; he would then briefly retire between pieces to study the next score before he returned to the console. Pyne was driven to the door of Manchester Town Hall in a carriage to give his Saturday evening recital; he made his way through the auditorium to the console, where he removed his cloak with a theatrical flourish before mounting the bench.
The organs themselves were celebrities. Huge and architecturally imposing, often with painted or stencilled front pipes, they dominated the auditorium and orchestra. The consoles with four or occasionally five keyboards, and bristling with drawstops and (increasingly) pistons, hinted at the mechanical wonders behind the music desk. Unlike church organs, it was usually possible for the audience to see the player at work, performing (apparently effortlessly) complicated scores. The first of these monster organs, William Hills pioneering instrument for Birmingham Town Hall, completed in 1834, was a sensation. Local newspapers and railway guides regaled their readers with statistics including the number of pipes, the dimensions of the 32 Pedal pipes in the case front, and the length of the trackers in the organ if laid end to end. And when, a few years later, Hill added the worlds first high-pressure reed, his Grand Ophicleide on the unheard-of wind pressure of 15-inches, the local press waxed lyrical in describing its colossal voice. It was the same with later instruments, including Gray & Davisons organs for the Crystal Palace and Leeds Town Hall, and Henry Williss organs for St Georges Hall, Liverpool, the Alexandra Palace in North London, and the Royal Albert Hall (the latter with 111 stops). The builders endeavoured to out-do their rivals by introducing novel mechanical accessories and more refined orchestral effects. Meanwhile, large audiences attended weekly recitals where many people made their first acquaintance with mainstream orchestral repertoire. Philanthropic factory-owners in the industrial cities of the midlands and north would sometimes purchase blocks of tickets for their workers, who otherwise had no access to this repertoire.
What may prove to have been the final chapter of the organs relationship with popular culture occurred at the very beginning of the twentieth century with the development of the theatre or cinema organ. In his book, A New History of the Organ (1980), Peter Williams felt compelled to describe this period as the Nadir of the pipe organ. He complained that
Whether it was that builders cared less about the musical use of their instruments, or that the music itself is poorer than that composed two centuries earlier is impossible say. Certainly, technical ingenuity outran musical demands, or at least reduced their importance.11
It is hard to dispute that, at least as far as church and concert organs are concerned. But precisely that technical ingenuity which the distinguished author clearly regretted, enabled some organ-builders to cater for a new if short-lived market in building a type of pipe organ that could provide a musical soundscape to the earliest silent movies, and later provided interval entertainment when the talkies came along. This may seem far removed from Winchester in the tenth century (or possibly not), but it was another way in which the instrument we have been considering engaged with popular culture, and provided an outlet for some accomplished players, including, for example, Norman Cocker, Organist of Manchester Cathedral, whose surviving scores are marked up with two sets of registrations, one for the Cathedral organ, and the other for the Kingsway Cinema down the road.
To conclude. The history of the organ matters, first, because it helps us to understand the heritage of historic instruments entrusted to us and their repertoires: Oosthuizen and Alkmaar, Weingarten and Ottobeuren, Poitiers and Souvigny, Adlington and Spitalfields, and so many more precious and illuminating survivals. But more generally, the history of the organ matters because of the extraordinary way in which this most complex and fascinating of musical instruments has engaged with the wider culture of Western Europe and its tributaries for more than one thousand years, embracing politics, ecclesiastical history and liturgy, technology and architecture, musical theory and practice, aristocratic, bourgeois, and popular cultures. How right was Mozart when he termed it The King of Instruments.
Nicholas Thistlethwaite ©2024
1 Peter Williams, Organs and organ music: one BIOS members involvement, JBIOS, 40 (2017), 10 [back]
2 Peter Williams, The Organ in Western culture [OWC] (Cambridge, CUP, 1993), i, 23 [back]
3 Williams, Organs and organ music, 14 [back]
4 Ibid., 17 [back]
5 Peter Williams, The European organ [TEO] (London, Batsford, 1966)), i [back]
6 In 826, the gift took the form of an organ-builder, Georgius, sent to make an instrument at Aachen. KI, 37-8.6 [back]
7 Williams, OWC, 187 [back]
8 Nicholas Thistlethwaite, The organs of York Minster, 12362021 (Oxford, Positif Press, 2021), 20 [back]
9 Williams, OWC, 23 [back]
10 Williams, Organs and organ music, 21 [back]
11 Williams, NHO, 182 [back]