Pembroke College Cambridge

A First Album and a Unique Organ

PosterJay Richardson (2015) is Composer in Residence at Cambridge Corn Exchange, Chapel Organist at Peterhouse and has just released his first album, I BREAK, for solo organ.

It’s now available on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and Spotify.

Not only was the piece written by a Pembroke student, but it's also directly connected to the Pembroke Chapel Organ. Organs generally have the most variations between individual instruments of any family of instruments, because they’re built into a space and differ in the number and type of manuals, and the shape of their pedal boards. The Pembroke organ for instance is particularly good for playing Bach, something we make good use of with the annual Bach-a-thon.  It also has a straight pedal board, which is unusual. Organists are often used to playing one particular instrument, and may have to spend considerable time preparing a piece for a different organ when playing elsewhere. Jay’s piece – a mammoth work at just over 55 minutes – was written for, and recorded on, the Pembroke Chapel organ. What makes our organ so special in Jay’s eyes (and ears)?

[caption id="attachment_31733" align="alignnone" width="667"]Pic1 Recording and mixing the album[/caption]

“It’s an incredibly beautiful and unique instrument, and there’s nowhere else I would’ve wanted to record the album. I wrote it basically for that organ, and I wrote it on that organ - the piece is very much tied to the organ. It’s a very historic instrument; it was built during Bach’s lifetime – in 1708. It has a very calm, flat tone. It doesn’t do the Anglican Church vibrato that most other organs in Cambridge do. It’s a very small instrument comparatively as it’s only got two manuals. Also, it’s both mechanical key action and mechanical stop action. That basically means it’s more sensitive than other organs – you have more control over the attack [the start of the note]. What’s also quite fun is that when you pull the stops out, if you pull them out slowly the pipe opens slowly. Whereas on a pneumatic stop action organ, you pull it out and it’s binary, on or off.”

[caption id="attachment_31734" align="alignnone" width="667"]The Pembroke organ The Pembroke organ[/caption]

“It feels very intimate and personal to play and it also has these amazing spatial effects.  The Chair is the lower manual, and the pipes of the Chair are behind the organist. This is very unusual in that, what you usually have on a two-manual organ is the Great and the Swell. The Pembroke organ skips out the Swell and goes straight to the Chair, and that manual has the original 1708 pipes, and that’s what you see as you look up from the Chapel floor. Those pipes sound absolutely gorgeous, they’re really amazing.”

How to record your organ

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“When we were recording this piece I pulled out all the coupling stops to couple both manuals and the pedals together. Every note I played got distributed around the organ. When I was playing pedal notes we realised that we would have to pan both bass mics to the middle of the mix rather than left and right. The pedal pipes are distributed between the far left and the far right sides of the organ case. We close-miked both sides to get the lower notes in isolation, but when we panned them we realised that some of the notes were on the left, and some were on the right. I would change pedal notes and suddenly the bass would jump from your right ear to your left ear, so we had to mix them together.”

These unique aspects of Pembroke’s organ presented a challenge for Aidan Kitchen of the University of Suffolk, Jay’s long-time collaborator and recording engineer. With a total of seven mics pointing at different parts of the organ and Chapel – to capture everything from low bass notes to the resonance from the wooden panels in Chapel – it was a considerable setup. And the process of recording revealed unusual effects:

"When we were recording this piece I pulled out all the coupling stops to couple both manuals and the pedals together.  Every note I played got distributed around the organ. When I was playing pedal notes we realised that we would have to pan both bass mics to the middle of the mix rather than the left and right.  The pedal pipes are distributed between the far left and far right sides of the organ case. We close-miked both sides to get the lower notes in isolated, but when we panned them we realised that some of the notes were on the left, and some were on the right.  I would change pedal notes and suddenly the bass would jump from your right ear to your left ear, so we had to mix them together."

[caption id="attachment_31736" align="alignnone" width="671"]Photo taken through the organ loft camera Photo taken through the organ loft camera[/caption]

You can follow Jay on Facebook for updates on his work.

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