It is difficult to assess what late seventeenth-century English organs sounded like, for what little of them has survived, has generally been incorporated in deeply altered instruments. Tonally speaking, they must have been both bright and soft, if one is to judge from contemporary assessments. The account of the famous ‘Battle of the Organs’ is a good example. Between 1684 and 1688, the two foremost organ builders of the period, ‘Father’ Smith and Renatus Harris, competed for the building of the organ of the Temple Church in London, both erecting their instruments in the church for these to be played by the best organists—such as John Blow and Henry Purcell engaged by Smith—and rated by the most able judges. The controversy went on for months, including accusations of sabotage, until the judges finally voted in favour of Smith’s organ. In their report, they praised it for the ‘sweetnes and fulnes of [its] Sound’, adding that it was ‘more ornamentall and substantiall, and bothe for Depthe of Sound and Strengthe fitter for the use of the said Church’ than Harris’s instrument. These mixed qualities of ‘fulness’ and ‘sweetness’ were to become what English organ builders would henceforth strive after. ‘Father’ Smith went on to build numerous instruments, including that of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1695-7, the front of whose case survive to this day, and he exerted a deep influence on organ building after the Restoration.
One remarkable instrument of the period to have survived in almost unaltered condition is the organ in Adlington Hall, an historic manor-house in Cheshire. Though it is suspected to have been built on the occasion of a wedding around 1693, its precise origin is still unclear: it was long attributed to Father Smith, but there are clear signs that it is not stylistically homogeneous, as some elements are closer to Harris’s style, and it is therefore more likely to have been built by some of Smith’s disciples. It has 14 stops on two keyboards and, quite uncharacteristically for an English organ of the period, it includes a (French-style) pedal-board. This beautiful, poetic instrument—allegedly played by Handel—is the most precious seventeenth-century English organ extant.
[ Adlington Hall:
GREAT ORGAN: Open Diapason 8’, Stopped Diapason 8’ Principall 4’, Twelfth 2’, Bl Flute Bas 2’, Bl Flute Trib 2’, Fifteenth 2’, Ters 1d, Sm Twelfth 1a, 2 & Twenty 1.
CHOIR ORGAN St Diapason 8’ (borrowed from the Great), Stopped Flute 4’, Bassoon 8’, Vox Humana 8’, Trumpet 8’. ]
Prosperity and optimism
The Glorious Revolution in 1688 opened a period of prosperity, political stability, and intellectual optimism in England. The Puritans’ ‘enthusiasm’ was denounced as what had been the cause of the Civil War. Thinkers, writers, artists and clergymen alike advocated a ‘middle course’—decency, toleration, restraint from excess. The Latitudinarian clergy preached that being a good man mattered more than belonging to this or that particular Church denomination, and, following on from the epistemological precepts of John Locke’s Essay upon Human Understanding (1690), they insisted upon the importance of moderation in all aspects of human life. The new churches built in London, as well as in the major provincial towns, expressed the confidence of an age in which decorum became as it were an expression of morality.
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