Hello pipe-organ lovers,
 
A few questions and remarks from somebody *outside* the USA, hope you don't
mind :-)
  1)  stops <--> ranks,  ongoing confusion (with me :-)
  2)  synthesizer info, please ---> rec.music.synth
  3)  turn mailing-list into "normal" newsgroup please.
 
-1-:
 Cory Edelman <[log in to unmask]> wrote on Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1993 17:50:06 PST
an interesting article on a nice recital, sorry program :-)  of organ-music
she attended at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California,
on January 24th.
> The instrument is by Steiner-Reck (of Louisville KY, I believe) with
> mechanical action and some sort of electric stop action
> It has 28 stops from 39 ranks and 2,109 pipes, and a gorgeous modern case.
 
The concept of "stops" versus "ranks" has confused me for a long time, from
a discussion in newsgroup rec.music.classical long ago, I had the idea I did
understand that a "rank" is a set of pipes of one specific "property", say
a Principal, and that it is rather usual in the Anglo-American organbuilding
to "map"/"borrow"/"extract" (?? sorry about my English :-) more than one
"stop" onto/from it, say 8' and 4'. (I am not talking about full "unification"
(??) here).
This would mean that, with you :-) the number of stops is usually higher than
the number of ranks. In Cory's article however it is just the reverse, so am
I (still) wrong?
And to add to the confusion: the number of "speaking" stops, that "we"
usually count here, was 11 + 12 + 10 = 33, which is neither 28 nor 39!
Born and raised in the North of The Netherlands, in an area "full" of historic
Schnitgers (18th c.), Baetz's (18th and early 19th c.) etc. etc., borrowing/
mapping (?) of stops from/onto ranks is an almost unknown concept, only quite
occasionally a manual reed may be borrowed by the pedals, but it's really rare.
"Here" each stop has its own set of pipes, so "stop" equals "rank" I think.
Can somebody enlighten me?
 
BTW1: the organ's stoplist looked really good, very much alike the organs
build in the best W-European classical and modern traditions.
BTW2: I was pleased to see a program (Russell, Corrette, Bridge, Krebs, Pinkham
and Rheinberger) that was much more "original" I think than what seems
to be "the" standard program in your part of the world:
   1: JSB - Tocc/fuge d,
   2,3,4,5,6,....X: Franck/Widor/Vierne (pick your choice :-)
and then is said to "cover a wide range of organ-literature" :-(
 
-2-:
in the last few weeks there was a lot of synthesizer info/propaganda (? :-)
Can that *please* be taken to the newsgroup rec.music.synth as it has nothing
to do with pipe-organs and saves us lots of mail?  There are shiploads of
articles on synthesizers daily in that specific newsgroup for those who
are interested.
 
-3-:
Personally, I would be *most* pleased if this mailing-list is turned into
a normal newsgroup *as soon as possible*. In that way many more organists may
get to know of it and decide to participate, and it saves us, at least
me, *lots* of mail which only make my boss suspicious. [ :-) ]  Please.....
 
Groeten uit Nederland,
Louw Talstra
 
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#  Louw F Talstra, Digital Equipment Corporation, Apeldoorn, The Netherlands  #
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