Early English Organ Project
The Wetheringsett Organ
(Martin Goetze and Dominic Gwynn, 2002)
The new organ is based on the soundboard found in recent years at Wetheringsett
in Suffolk (hence the name). It was discovered during alterations to
a farmhouse, and may have been a dairy door. According to tree-ring
dating the tree of which the original soundboard was made (from Baltic
oak) cannot have been cut down before about 1525. The likeliest local
church for this organ is at Debenham, a large church which bought an
organ in 1525. It is likely that this organ stood on the floor, or
against the wall in a gallery, and was probably the main organ of the
church.
It is known that there were continental organ-builders being paid for new parish church organs in the first half of the 16th century in England, but the indigenous characteristics of this organ suggest that this organ was made by an English builder, probably fairly local, since there were some well-known East Anglian builders. These characteristics can be summarised as: long, fully chromatic key compass, choruses of wooden or metal pipes of the same scale and style, each with its own slider, and a voicing style familiar from 17th-century English organs.
Stoplist
The pitch and scaling of the stops are indicated by the spacing and the toehole sizes on the old soundboard. The order is that of the sliders and stop knobs, from the front.
| I | short resonator reed regal 5ft |
| II | open metal principal 5ft (C, C# and D shared with other Principal) |
| III | open metal principal 5ft (27 pipes D# to f² in the front) |
| IV | open metal octave (C shared with other octave) |
| V | open metal octave |
| VI | open metal fifteenth |
| VII | stopped wood basses 10ft (C to f#º, 19 notes) |
Key compass
The key compass is C to a², 46 notes, which is the number of grooves in the Wetheringsett soundboard. This compass matches the ranges needed for the surviving repertory. The two C organs at All Hallows by the Tower in London (1519), and Holy Trinity, Coventry (1526) would also have had an upper limit of a². This key compass allows for techniques of transposition by the player, which may have been quite subtle (by a fourth, a fifth or a tone).
Pitch
The nominal pitch is 5ft, i.e. a fourth above singing pitch. 5ft Principal ranks were the basis of the two organs mentioned above. For the actual pitch, Martin Goetze and Dominic Gwynn have chosen the pitch of the earliest unaltered English pipes (the dummy pipes of the 1630 Dallam organ now at Stanford on Avon), which are about 1½ semitones above A440 at singing pitch. We have to assume that this pitch pre-dated use alongside choirs, but that it encouraged subtleties of technique in ‘accompanying’ which we have yet to learn.
Tuning
The tuning system is the tuning system recommended by Arnolt Schlick in his Spiegel der Orgelmacher published in Heidelberg in 1511, and intended as a guide for good practice throughout the Holy Roman Empire. He was the first writer to give a recipe which mentions every note of the scale. It is a modified form of mean-tone tuning, with good (not pure) major thirds and the wolf spread to some extent over neighbouring fifths to allow some modulation (though a flat for instance is still much closer to being a g sharp).
Dimensions
The outside dimensions of the organ are:
| height | total: 340cm with pinnacles: 375cm to impost: 122cm |
134ins 148ins 48ins |
| plan | at pipe level: 170cm wide x 78.5cm at ground level: 98cm wide x 78.5cm |
67ins wide x 31ins 39ins wide x 31ins |
| ground plan of the wind system |
134cm x 134cm | 53ins x 53ins |
| staging (= total floor space required) |
300cm x 150cm | 120ins x 60ins |
The picture on the left is a measured drawing of the 16th-century soundboard found at Wetheringsett. The drawing was made by >Martin Goetze and Dominic Gwynn, the organ-builders who made the reconstructions. This soundboard was removed from an organ, probably in about 1570-80, when many remaining pre-Reformation organs were dismantled. It was adapted for use as a door to the service area of a 17th-century house, and subsequently concealed by a partition wall. Rediscovered in the 1970s, it has provided the core of the information about the nature of >the Wetheringsett Organ.