All Saints KingstonA moment of vision |
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Matthew Copley, organ builder, in conversation with David Nield
DN: I believe you were born locally, Matthew? You lived in Kingston originally? MC: No, but quite near, in Richmond. DN: How did your interest in organ building begin? MC: My father was musical, sang in various choirs and loved choral music. From him I inherited my love of music, but in my case it was organs specifically that interested me. I think this came about because when we went on holiday, instead of going to the seaside we went to the country and always visited the local churches to look at them. The most fascinating pieces of the churches for me were the organs because I could fiddle with them and touch them and invariably move something and watch something else move without my parents seeing. DN: That wasn’t your Father’s interest? MC: He wasn't interested in organs particularly at all. I suppose like most people he accepted them as an accompanying machine waffling away somewhere in the background. No, father preferred other things; chamber groups and of course choral music. I suppose when you are very young choral music is a bit difficult to understand, organs are a bit easier. I loved to see them move inside when I pressed a note. Later on I made my mind up that I wanted to be an organ builder, and this was reinforced when I used to listen to one of my teachers who would practise the organ every lunchtime at school. My father , of course, had other ideas. He said ‘You are not going to be an organ builder you are going to do what I want you to do.’ DN: What was that? MC: Oh he wanted me to go into education like him. He taught at Latymer school. That was where I was Christened, in the school chapel. It’s so very sad isn’t it that males very often do the complete opposite of what their parents want them to do? But I was determined to have my way and I set out to find an apprenticeship. Everyone warned me that it would be quite impossible to find someone to take me on. Fortunately for me they were wrong and I was thrilled when I eventually found one with Henry Willis III. DN: That of course is the first of several coincidences to do with the Kingston organ – because it was a Willis organ originally. MC: Yes and of course my association with Kingston Parish Church goes right back to the late 50s and the beginning of the 60s. I sang in the church choir as a treble but once my voice had broken I was no good as a choral singer DN: Let’s return to your time at Willis. MC: My time at Willis was an immensely interesting period for me because it was under Henry Willis III who although he was an elderly man still had his finger on the pulse of the firm. He would come along through the workshops every morning and every afternoon at 10 o’clock and 4 o’clock sharp and see how the voicers had done. He only ever spoke to voicers, anybody else was well beneath him. He once remarked that as a voicing apprentice I was the cream of the trade. I remember being ill advised enough to repeat that near him on one occasion. He turned round, looked at me over his glasses and said, ‘That’s correct, but in your case my boy, the cream is clotted!’ He put me straight back where I belonged! Of course just being in the voicing room was really exciting because in that very room all the great reeds for the great cathedrals had been voiced including the militaire for St Paul's Cathedral. Indeed all the interesting instruments had been created in part in that very workshop, not only under the voicer of that time, George Deeks, but his father who was head voicer for Father Willis himself. DN: On the subject of voicing, Mogens Pederson, who voiced our own organ, asked Eric Frobenius before he came over to Kingston how he should voice the 32-foot reed because he had never done one before. In fact I’m not sure if Frobenius had ever done one before, and Frobenius said, ‘Do it as if it’s a 16-foot reed’ and that was the end of the conversation MC: That was all the help he gave him? DN: Mogens had never used reeds that size and he had no spares. He was absolutely terrified in case he curved a tongue too far. He was voicing at the rate of a rank a day at one time and suddenly he came to this thing and it took five days to do that one pipe. MC: It would have taken me longer, far longer than that. Mogens was a very experienced and clever voicer. The reed he has produced on the pedal is not to everybody’s taste necessarily, but its still very good, very precise and it does what its meant to do DN: You were at Willis in the 60s when the continental influence was beginning to make itself felt in English organ building circles. Did they start to feel the effect then? MC: Only slightly in my time because I left Willis in ’67 and tracker organs were a very rare breed indeed then. People in England were just beginning to talk about this new type of instrument and nobody really knew the thinking behind it. You had to come into contact with this animal first hand to begin to understand it. The movement that came over from Germany, the Werkprinzip, was the way that all the great organs of Europe and of the world had ever been built. It was like a skeleton, a chart by which you knew how to design an organ. The instrument would be philosophically and intellectually interesting and it would have a reason for the way it was designed. It wasn’t just a stop list thrown together by someone who wanted a sprinkling of different sounds, as is so often the case. Werkprinzip organs were built in to specific choruses, which of course is how the Kingston organ is designed. Yet that was something that did not appear to happen at Willis at that time. DN: To return to the continental organ influence. Were you yourself already being influenced by the continental way of thinking? MC: I was aware of the ideas but I wasn’t involved in the movement until I joined Grant Degens and Bradbeer, a firm set up by Morris Grant. Luckily, he was not only a great enthusiast but he was also wealthy and could afford to put money into the firm. Morris Grant took Frank Bradbeer to the continent to hear a tracker action organ being played by Piet Kee in the Church of St Bavo in Haarlem. Frank was a good down to earth practical family man who liked to get things done. I remember him telling me that when he heard the music from that instrument he just wept, overcome by emotion and joy. Frank wondered why this sound was so silvery, so clean, so pure, so warm, so enveloping and rich. And then he realised why. It was because the choruses of the pipework were planned together. They were put on one chest and connected from that chest by a mechanical link to the player’s fingers. He was an architect by profession and the concept suddenly started to make sense to him. He realised that there was a simplicity about the design of the cases. The 32-foot principals were in the pedal tower, the 16-foot principals were in the second tower, the 8-foot principals were in the third tower and so on. So of course it was the Werkprinzip all over again. Mind you the St Bavo organ was the original tracker action organ built in 1735 by Josef Gabler. Frank Bradbeer came back and decided that, although it was possible to make a fine organ with electrical action, as Grant Degens had built up to then, the future for them would be to build tracker organs. DN: Did he bring any continental workmen back with him? MC: No, not as far as I know, but I think Morris Grant had an enormous amount of assistance from great German organ builders such as Klais and Giesecke who were pipe makers. Giesecke to this day still make probably the finest reeds in the world. I was lucky enough to have a little training with them when Morris Grant sent me over there for a month. DN: I thought you had been over there. MC: I also spent a wonderful year in Vienna building and tuning the most marvellous organs that you normally only see in books these days. DN: So you came to believe in these organs on a technical and an aesthetic level? This all made the soundest sense you’d heard. Did you ever at any stage manage to go back to Willis and say ‘Don’t you think that tracker action is the future?’ MC: I don’t think Henry Willis IV would have been very interested in an ex-apprentice of his father’s coming back to him and questioning his judgement, especially one who had committed the ultimate sin and set up on his own. It was, however, for me the only way forward. It was the first time that I could see what connection there was between the action of the instrument, the case, the stop list, the way it was voiced and the winding. When I realised how they blended together to form a superb instrument, it was a moment of vision for me.
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Matthew Copley, of Organ Design, has been responsible for the maintenance and tuning of the Frobenius organ since its installation in 1988. David Nield was organist of Kingston Parish Church from 1966 to 1994.