Firm gives new life to Priory's organ

HAVING lived in Malvern for many years I had seen the Priory's organ in the church on many occasions.

There it sat, a keyboard and a frontage of pipes. Bigger than a piano, certainly. Safe to say, a fairly substantial musical instrument.

But now it's the subject of a major refurbishment and the whole structure has been painstakingly extracted and moved to Nicholson's Organs' workshop in Leigh Sinton.

And crikey, it's big.

When it was is situ in the Priory, one could only see the front, and not the 3,500 pipes sitting behind the frontage. That's a lot of pipes.

Add all the wood needed to keep the pipes in place and all the electrics, and you're looking at an instrument comparable in size to a bungalow.

So, it's hardly surprising that restoring this 153-year-old behemoth also costs a few bob: £375,000 to be exact, money painstakingly raised by the Priory over the past few years.

Nicholson's has been charged with the task of repairing and refurbishing the organ, parts of which date back to the 19th century.

Andrew Moyes, the firm's managing director, is in charge of the 15-man project, continuing a historic relationship between the Priory and Nicholson's.

The firm's involvement with the church dates back to around 1850, soon after Nicholson's was founded in 1841. It built the original organ and one of its past managing directors, William Haynes, was himself the Priory organist.

After carefully taking the organ apart and labelling the components, Nicholson's team of staff set about making the existing components ship-shape, a process preferable to making new parts. After 70 years as part of the organ, all the parts are as 'seasoned' as they will ever be, meaning they will not warp as newer wood could.

"Wherever possible we try and keep the old material if it's good and suitable for reuse," Andrew said. "Nowadays people are very conservation-conscious."

As a result, some 80 per cent of the new organ will be constructed from original components. But each of those components will have been painstakingly brought up to scratch and added to by a wealth of modern technology.

After demonstrations of how the various wooden soundboards work, the tour of the factory moves into a side room where Richard Sanders is working his way through a vast array of pipes of all shapes and sizes.

Richard is responsible for ensuring each pipe is in good nick. Any bent or damaged parts have to be straightened or cut out and replaced. In extreme cases, he fashions new pipes. Tuning is controlled by metal slides at the top of each pipe that restrict the vibration of the air blown through it.

The pipes then pass along one room to where tonal director Guy Russell is hard at work. One of several organ veterans at the firm, Guy is responsible for fine tuning Richard's work. He has what looks like a Meccano organ with dozens of holes on the top.

A pipe is popped into one of the holes, Guy presses the corresponding key on the keyboard and then adjusts the pipe to the correct pitch and tone, using a combination of modern technology and a very experienced ear.

One crucial difference in this new modern Priory organ will be its brain. Instead of wood and wire, the finer details of operation will be controlled by a microprocessor and 18km of wiring, all put in by hand.

After all the bits are up to standard, the organ is assembled in a giant wooden frame at the back of the factory to make sure everything is in approximate working order. Then the entire structure will be taken back to the Priory, where the fine-tuning can begin.

The new organ, according to Andrew and his team, will project far better into the church because the pipes have been relocated towards the front. The softer voices in particular will be clearer.

Tuning an organ is no easy task and it will take several days after everything is installed in its rightful place.

The plan is to get the organ back to the Priory in March or April, and it should be ready to play again in July.