The King of Instruments

Mozart called the organ ‘the King of Instruments.’ This week’s newsletter is a guest post from Robert James Stove, shedding some light on an area I admit I had given little thought to, despite performing many times in Salisbury Cathedral. I hope you enjoy. Mary x

For lots of churchgoers, I think, organ music is like electricity. In other words, it simply doesn't get noticed unless a power cut ensures its absence.

I’m a church organist in Australia who has issued five CDs of my organ-playing, and who after a considerable hiatus has fairly regular employment at the parish level once again. But you can imagine the combined impact which, first, churches’ sex abuse scandals, and secondly COVID lockdowns, had on my ability to gain work for much of the last few years.

Whilst I’m sure that every musician seriously believes himself or herself to be ‘a special case,’ I reckon that we organists really do constitute a special case. For one thing, demographics operate against us. Go to any organ concert and try to count the audience members under 65 years of age: you’ll find it a frustrating experience. (I’m 62.) Numerous potential or erstwhile audience members were simply, in the most literal sense, killed off by the coronavirus.

And the demographic which cares about organ music enough to attend organ concerts is precisely the demographic least amenable to streaming platforms. Pre-pandemic, I could sell per concert six or eight copies of my CDs, thereby earning an extra $160 or so apart from my performing fee. That happy state of affairs long ago ended. Those who were inclined to buy my CDs have already bought them, and their acquaintanceship with channels like Spotify is generally almost non-existent.

I don’t need to tell you about Spotify’s own current policy by which any track streamed fewer than 1,000 times will gain no royalties at all for its creator. But what most people don't realise is the frequent ineptitude of most such platforms in basic matters of musical nomenclature.

Look up my CDs on YouTube and you'll find that I'm credited – insanely – as composer for most of the tracks which I've recorded. I am of course a mere performer of them, but no amount of explanation to the relevant online personnel makes any difference. Nor can I stop such platforms from automatically classifying every work, even if purely instrumental, as a ‘song.’

I have no plans to make further recordings. Engineers with any talent charge very high fees – and rightly so – for their services. Many an engineer well attuned to capturing, for instance, a flute-and-piano duet in a studio, or a singer-songwriter’s guitar in a home, flounders when confronted with the spatial and balancing challenges of an organ in a cavernous church next to an arterial road. There is only so much money which one can afford to spend on making CDs in the hope that they will enrich one's job portfolio.

The real money and prestige, for organists, comes with cathedral employment. Most cathedral organists enjoy permanence of tenure which any Gdansk stevedore circa 1976 would have envied.

Alas, in Australia, too many cathedrals have become the most ruthlessly ageist workplaces which I have ever seen. Although I’m sure there’s an innocent explanation for the repeated episcopal tendency to hire almost totally inexperienced 20-somethings who look like boy sopranos, I must confess to ignorance of what that explanation might be.

Like the former British prime minister Lord Melbourne, ‘I have always thought complaints of ill-usage contemptible.’ Nevertheless such complaints might in specific circumstances be justifiable; and in the hope of shining light on a musical area which for many people remains in darkness, I offer these musings.

Robert James Stove

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Independent Artist of the Week: Paule Van Wijngaarden (aka Sprawler Fu) has just released her very first recorded song, ‘Where the Light Falls’. She works alone, and is completely self-taught, with fifteen more songs on the way. I like this song very much – echoes of Kate Bush. Give it a listen and show it some love!

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