BY DAVID WILLIAMS
THE HEART OF THE CHAPEL – AFTER 25 YEARS THE MARCUSSEN PLAYS ON
O
n the day after the fire, Sunday, around 4pm, a fire officer told me that the enormous pile of debris the organ had created was not yet safe, it was still burning. It would have burnt well, all that wood, leather and pipework melting away. The gaping roof and crumbling walls stood silent after the frenzy of the previous day when the whole school had watched from the safe distance of The Head. A new Chapel needed a new organ and the organ builder would require a ‘brief’ from the committee formed for this task. The primary use of the organ was to accompany School congregational singing in services six times a week, using hymns, liturgy, and settings largely drawn from the Anglican tradition. This tradition at Tonbridge included the playing to the school of voluntaries before and after every service, which meant that many boys listened to as much as eighty minutes of good organ music a week. In addition, the organ should be a fine teaching instrument, and it would also be used for recitals throughout the year. All the builders considered that the deliberately eclectic stop list, even
when reduced in size – and possibly all the more when reduced – would produce an organ with the weight, clarity, and blend to serve the School’s principle purposes. Among other stops, they noted, the inclusion of two Tuba stops which would contribute to the electrifying effect which a school organ can have when the School are singing at full throttle. However, in order to give potential builders a good idea of the size and
scale of the future organ a ‘specification’ was necessary. In other words: What pipes? How many? What variety and what combinations are possible within the constraints of space and cost? This specification is vital. It is like a recipe for the sound. Each ‘stop’ gives the player access to a set of pipes which can be chosen by their pitch and type. For example a Trumpet stop will produce a reedy sound; three of them
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