Peking into the far east

[MusingMuso]

A friend of mine used to go, (as a senior toy-buyer for Woolworths), to Japan and China. Fairly fluent in far-eastern languages,he thoroughly enjoyed going there; describing the Chinese as "rather giggly people with a great sense of fun, who love to play games."

Obviously, the "far east" is a rather big area, and although dominated by the sheer scale of China, it would seem that the organ, (in various guises), has quite a following in various countries.

Although we naturally link Japan to Yamaha, (and the electronic and acoustic instruments they produce when they're not making motor-bikes), it would seem that the electronic-organ still has quite a following in various places in the far east; especially the entertainment organ/synthesiser type of instrument.

Browsing around on YouTube, I came across some very interesting videos, which range for the funny to the awesome to the world-class, and crossing several genres in the process.


Without much of an organ and church culture, except in the former colonial centres such as Hong-Kong, China could be forgiven for neglecting the organ, but not a bit of it, as the first video demonstrates. Here we hear a documentary about the newish concert organ in Shanghai, which is the largest in China. Clearly, this is the start of something interesting for the Chinese people, who seem to gravitate towards all that is best in western music.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBFtgzmxunY  Shanghai organ (Rieger)

The Chinese sense of fun seems to bubble up in the following two videos.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa171qbC1TE&feature=relmfu  Super Mario Theme

Why not organ and percussion? Mr.Lemmens wouldn't have minded, surely?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwOQT3ASuNo  Lemmens Fanfare


Of course, Japan is the home of the synthesiser style of organ, and although the British market seems to have nose-dived, there is no doubt that in other parts of the world, these instruments not only have a following, they have some remarkable exponents associated with them.

Take a small Malaysian boy, feed him, wash him, send him to the best teacher in town, buy him a keyboard or two, then sit back and wait a short while.

Irrespective of genre, has anyone ever seen or heard of a more confident, (arrogant?) 8 year-old boy than this, who not only gets to grips with a very complex instrument, but also succeeds in winning a major competition. The stage-presence of this little boy is just astounding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS4LnsFDtQQ&feature=related

As someone who enjoys many genres of music, I recall a very special concert, when I went to hear the legendary Max Takano in London, playing Yamaha Electone. The following is his version of the classic Latin American number, "Tico Tico," but it is the percussion-riff in the middle which is just eye-wateringly brilliant.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsaW82u4U-8&feature=related    Tico Tico   


Still with Max Takano, who now teaches in a Japanese University, he is here joined by Chiho Sunamoto in a truly beautiful performance of "The way we were."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u9hAhE4fxQ&feature=related


Still in Japan, would you expect to hear a magnificent organ and orchestra together, in a performance of Guilmant's 1st Sonata?

Here is Olivier Vernet doing just that.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5ejBEbZE80&feature=channel Olivier Vernet in Japan - Guilmant


And finally, not only the superb Mascioni organ in St Mary's Cathedral, Tokyo, but possibly one of the finest performances of Bach I've ever come across, played by Lorenzo Ghielmi:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVgNMpKQ5O4  Mascioni organ Tokyo

MM

[Barrie Davis]

Hi

There is an organ museum in China at Xiamen, the organ from Graingers Lane Methodist Church in Cradley Heath went there and is up and running, I understand they have a few pipeorgans all playable. From memory St Judes Thornton Heath is stored in China awaiting re erection, I think Carlo Curley has input on this.

Best wishes

Barrie

[AnOrganCornucopia]

NPOR says St Jude's went to Japan, though I'd like to hear more - I remember Barry Williams saying it was rather out of the ordinary in terms of quality. If no progress has been made with its installation, I'd like to see it brought back... as for finding a home for it, it could go in the chancel at Westminster Cathedral, where Arthur Harrison planned to build his crowning masterpiece, but was denied the opportunity...

Cradley sounds STUNNING in its new home - far better than any organ of that size has any right to, particularly as its new home is hardly cavernous. Mind you, it's rather similar to another N&B I've banged on about a lot lately in that respect...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yZHkPyRd1E is the ex Cradley Heath organ, all 3/21 of it...

Meanwhile, the 1906 N&B in Saint Mary Aldermary in the City of London, 3m and about 35 stops, including a handful of older ranks by England & Russell, Gray & Davison and Holdich in that order, lies unused, tuned but suffering many faults as a result of its general neglect. I noted on my visit on Friday last that the tuner's book contained a complaint from the tuner about a large amount of wood having been stored atop the main reservoir...

[KB7DQH]

See also...

http://www.organmatters.com/index.php/topic,1136.0.html

but check out....

http://www.gothic-catalog.com/Ja_kyung_Oh_plays_the_Yokota_GOArt_organ_of_Seoul_p/lrcd-1101.htm


and this will tell you a bit more about one of the world's premier "organ builders"...

Remaking the Sound of the Eighteenth Centure
The Organ-Building of Munetaka Yokota
by DAVID YEARSLEY

The history of the organ in broadest outline has it that the instrument, in a form much smaller than that of so many of the massive models found in churches, was invented in the Mediterranean world of the 3rd century BCE. After the fall of Rome it was cultivated only in the Byzantine Empire, but was re-introduced into the West by means of a gift brought by a diplomatic mission from Constantinople to the Frankish court of Pippin the Great in 757.  In this sense the organ's survival can be attributed to the East, however contested or illusory the divide between Occident and Orient may be.

There is an appealing symmetry in the fact that one of the greatest present-day masters of the revivified art of organ building as it flourished so radiantly in northern Europe in the 17thand 18th centuries—a millennium after the arrival of those Byzantine ambassadors —comes from the Orient, far beyond Istanbul. It doesn't get much more East than Tokyo.

In 1966 the fourteen-year-old Munetaka Yokota took money received for Christmas—which his family observed not religiously but as but as a kind of cultural novelty—to a Tokyo record shop. The year before he had bought his very first LP with his own money in this shop, choosing a recording by Gustav Leonhardt of Bach's harpsichord concertoes. On his return a year later, with the next familial disbursement in hand, he was disappointed to find that the shop didn't have the next record in that series. "I had money in my hand and was intent on using it," says Yokota in his elegant and considered English. But another LP with the black filigree bordering motive of the same historically-oriented Telefunken label which those Bach concertos had been recorded on caught the young enthuasiast's attention.

This other LP had been made in 1938 by Fritz Heitmann on an organ from 1706 in the Charlottenburg Castle chapel in Berlin. The only organ Yokota had heard live was in one of Tokyo's department stores. He also recalls being fascinated by the pop organ sound of the 60s British band, The Tornadoes and their chart-topping record, Telstar. In most things Yokota tends to be, as he put it, "ecumenical."

Records have a strange way of changing your life, and the Charlottenburg LP changed Yokota's.  For almost the last forty years he has dedicated himself to making organs as beautiful as the one he heard as a schoolboy in Japan on that classic recording.

Yokota had become enthralled by a ghost. Like so many monuments of its kind, the Charlottenburg instrument had been destroyed in World War II. Now Yokota is just about to complete his latest organ, an attempt to bring it—or a version of it—back to life in Upstate New York, more than forty years after his serendipitous encounter with that vinyl ambassador of the European art in a Tokyo record shop.

The organ captured on that record had been commissioned by Frederick I, the first Prussian monarch to gain the rank of King in recompense for military favors he did the Holy Roman Emperor.  In the first years of the 18th century Frederick, the grandfather of the king who would share his name but be known as "the Great," set about renovating one of his residences a few miles beyond the western edge of the still-small, 18th-Century city of Berlin. The original palace in Charlottenburg dated from the late 17th-century, but Frederick hugely expanded the building in an attempt to emulate at least a portion of the magnificence of Versailles, the model for all European autocrats of the age.  Fredrick installed in the new West Wing of his Charlottenburg Palace a fabulous mirrored chamber filled with Chinese porcelain vases and figures. Nearby was the famed Amber Room, one of the wonders of the European Baroque blazingly paneled and decorated in that lustrous substance. (The Amber Room was given to the Russian Czar Peter in 1716 by Frederick's art-hating son, disappeared in World War II and has now been reinstalled in the Empress Catherine's Palace at Tsarskoye just outside  St Petersburg.)) Adjacent to these marvelous interiors was the chapel, and Frederick deemed that it should have an organ boasting an opulence commensurate with that of the treasures in the neighboring rooms. 

In accordance with his ambitions in accumulating the symbols of luxury, Frederick I hired the greatest organ builder of the period, the Hamburg master Arp Schnitger, who had exported instruments across the breadth of Europe from St. Petersburg to Lisbon. The instrument for Charlottenburg finished by Schnitger had to be fitted into a cramped balcony with the main part of the organ almost out of sight. But another section of the organ, as exuberantly decorated as the flamboyant décor of the chapel itself, was placed on the rail of that balcony and spoke directly into the high, square space.  As in the typical arrangement favored in larger north German organs, the organist was hidden from the listeners down below. But in Berlin these glinting tin pipes and their lavish gilded case had both an intimate and sublime quality: they were tantalizingly near to the auditors, but their music was devoid of signs of human agency, like a fabulous automaton, a brilliantly executed musical clock.

With Allied bombing campaign against German cities well underway, the Charlottenburg chapel organ was removed to the basement of another former royal residence, the Berlin City Palace in the center of the metropolis.  The City Palace was not destroyed in the war, but a bomb did found its way into that basement and obliterated the organ. It is little consolation that the instrument would have perished even if it had it not be removed from Charlottenburg, since that palace was also hit, and the chapel consumed by flames. Only the recording, photographs, and carefully-made measurements of the pipes remained.

That first organ record purchased by Yokota features music from J. S. Bach's Clavierübung III of 1739, a collection that contains settings of the melodies of the Lutheran German Mass and Martin Luther's  catechism hymns. These are framed by the monumental Prelude and Fugue in E-Flat Major, BWV 552. Yokota played nothing but that record over the next year, acquiring a pocket score so that he could study the music when out and about, in the subway, on a bus, in the car, walking the street.  "It was," he says in his calmly self-reflective manner, "a way of centering myself."

Yokota was still taking piano lessons at the time, and knew of Bach's keyboard music—his inventions and fugues, and, of course, some of the harpsichord concertos on his first LP. But what he heard in the extraordinary music played on the Charlottenburg organ was "an expression of universal principles." For Yokota, organ building, like music, is not just about craftsmanship and the creation of sonic and visual beauty, but about bigger issues still. He is not afraid of grand statements, but never makes them with an air of self-importance. He likes to laugh, especially at himself.

After playing the Charlottenburg disc uncountable times over the next twelve months, he began adding other Telefunken recordings of historic European organs to his collection. Intuitively he came to the realization that these "old organs sounded better than new ones." It wasn't that, as some have asserted, these instrument improve with age, for he thinks this claim has been often made as an apology for shoddy modern work.  Rather, something registered as vitally different about their qualities even to his unschooled ear. For all his subsequent training, research, examination of old organs, the triumphs of his own organ-building projects, it is this intuitive response that still guides his craft, his artistic choices and the minute skill of his ears and hands.

Years later, after being named guest professor at the internationally-recognized center for the study of organ construction, history, and performance at the University of Gothenburg, he put a facsimile of the first-page of Bach's Prelude in E-flat on the door to his house office, as a reminder to all who entered — including most especially himself— of Bach's achievement, and of the highest calling of the organ arts. There is no music more uplifting—Bach's title page promises "refreshment of the spirit"—in its mixture of magisterial pomp and graceful humor, its bracing excursions into virtuosic fugal territory, and the architectural grandeur that unites what would in lesser hands become a series of digressions. There is a palpable sense of a higher musical purpose, indeed of higher purposes altogether, and this is what captured Yokota's imagination and has never let it go. The lofty striving and delight of that music is shared by Charlottenburg organ.

Descending from a family of bankers, Yokota enrolled in 1970 in Tokyo's Gakushuin University where he received a degree in economics four years later. He was also an avid field hockey star with Olympic aspirations. But the love of the organ remained with him and in the last two summers of his college career he become a shop assistant to Hiroshi Tsuji, a pioneering Japanese builder making organs inspired by European masterpieces.  Yokota now saw that it was possible, however uncertain the potential monetary rewards, to make a career as an organ-builder. He also knew that he could pursue a more faithful approach to capturing that old, elusive sound than the one even groundbreaking masters such as Tsuji were seeking.

In the early 70s students engaged in massive protests against Japan's conservative government, against the Vietnam War and imperialism more generally. Each day protesters thronged the entrance to Gakushuin University with its fine wrought-iron gates. Yokota participated in some of the demonstrations and was sympathetic to the critique of the establishment and the unjust structures of society. He became disillusioned by the infighting of radical groups: "When I saw blood on the street beaten out of revolutionaries by other revolutionaries, I knew that I wanted to make my contribution, to the extant that I could, on the small-scale with my own hands."

With the dawning realization that he wasn't quite Olympic material on the field hockey pitch, Yokota resolved to become an organ builder. After graduating from college, he apprenticed full-time with Tsuji, as his college classmates went off to jobs earning three or four times his salary.  He was not interested in making money: "The development of my skills was a deposit not into my bank account but into myself." Another crucial encounter was with the German organist, Harald Vogel, who came to Tokyo in 1973 playing concerts and giving lectures and slide-shows featuring photographs of historic organs like the one that had enchanted Yokota as a teenager. In the midst of his three-year apprenticeship with Tsuji he went to Vogel's North German Organ Academy in the summer of 1976, where he heard for the first time in person one of Schnitger's great early works, the magnificent and newly-restored instrument in the north German city of Stade.

In 1978 Yokota moved to the United States to Eugene, Oregon to work with the important builder John Brombaugh, a crucial figure in the North American engagement with historic organs of Europe. Yokota has not lived in Japan since. After a year in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he toyed with the idea of starting an organ workshop, he moved to California's central Valley to become an "artist in residence" at California State University in Chico, where he lived from 1984 to 1990. This was Yokota's first time leading an organ project, and he approached it an utterly novel way: show up in a small college town alone, without a team of trained craftsmen and without materials and attempt to make an ambitious instrument according to the highly-evolved aesthetic and artisanal principles of Gottfried Silbermann, a colleague of J. S. Bach. (Silbermann's most famous organ, in Dresden's recently reconstructed Frauenkirche, was also destroyed in World War II.)

Yokota, endowed with a calm but pied-piper-like charisma that attracts people to his organ-building projects, recruited volunteers from the student body and community as his assistants and trained them in the handcraft techniques of the early 18th century. Yokota's was a quixotic idea which  reflected not only his exacting patience and highly refined aural and manual skill, but also a fantastical imagination, a true gift for teaching, and an astounding capacity for risk. Show up at an empty Manhattan lot and convince passers-by to join in building a skyscraper from scratch: that is something like what Yokota did in Chico. His commando approach to organ building yielded one of North America's great organs, even if the instrument, tucked to the side of the stage in the campus theatre and music building, still seeks a fitting architectural and acoustic home.

The pipes of Yokota's Silbermann-style organ were cast from lead reclaimed from spent bullets from the LAPD gun range. This was a wonderful, and highly practical, inversion of the dismal story of many historic organs, including important instruments by Schnitger himself, whose precious façade pipes were removed and melted down into bullets by the Germans in World War I, a symbolic action meant to show that even art had to be sacrificed for the victory that never came.

From California he was lured to Sweden as a visiting professor to embark on his largest scheme to date, a colossal Schnitger-style instrument like those built for the large Hanseatic cities. Important research was done at the university in conjunction with engineers and organ historians into old techniques, which could now be further refined by Yokota working for the first team with a large team. These investigations led, among other things, to the casting of the pipe metal on sand for the first time since the 18th-century. All wooden surfaces were hand-planed, all metal parts made by a Swedish blacksmith. The result of this six-year effort was as expensive as it was beautiful. The minutiae of handcraft and what, from a modern perspective could be dismissed as excessive—unnecessary—labor produced a technological and sonic wonder in which the sum of the individual acts of craftsmanship undertaken by students, laid-off steel workers, and many other collaborators yielded a sound and an experience of music-making fundamentally different from that of modern factory-made organs.

These two instruments, the one on the west coast of North America the second on the west coast of Sweden, have secured Yokota's legacy. More recently he and an international team have finished a copy of an instrument from 1776 in Vilnius, Lithuania, on the shores of Lake Ontario for the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. This Eastman organ demonstrates again the unlikely ways Yokota has become of the great musical cosmopolitans of his or any other time. "Still," he says, putting his skilled hands together a few inches in front of his eyes, "the Wall between Occident and Orient is always directly in front of me." I ask in what ways this barrier divides these two worlds. "In every way," he says, then agrees to give one example. "My Japanese aesthetic allows for, indeed demands, the co-existence of irregularities and imperfections in a work of art. That these tensions and differences are necessary and beautiful is one of the important things, I think, that fascinated me about the Charlottenburg organ when I first heard it."

Yokota is now in Ithaca, New York listening to those competing voices on a nearly-completed "fantasy reconstruction" of that very instrument as he comes to the final weeks of his attempt to bring back to life a sound that has traveled from Berlin to Tokyo and now to somewhere in between.

Next Week: The Charlottenburg Organ Reborn

DAVID YEARSLEY teaches at Cornell University. He is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, "All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London", has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu

Upon first reading this in researching this post I found the above most inspirational :o 8) ;D ;)

So... It should  surprise no one here that Casavant-Fre'res, likely the oldest, extant "factory" organ-building firm in the New World, in addition to English and French, the entirety of their website also is published in Chinese...

Eric
KB7DQH

[MusingMuso]

Japan is a country of considerable culture, and there is a liberal attitude to "foreign" religions and human rights generally. It's therefore not suprising to find a great love of the best western culture as well as their own; the two being quite complimentary in many ways. (Japanese melodies work especially well with pentatonic and modal harmonies).

Another country with an increasingly strong organ tradition is South Korea, where there are many very promising young organists making a name for themselves; especially in America.

China is another story, for the communist ideal and the party of the people must predominate. Religion is therefore seen as a threat, as the voice of individuality and dissent. Nevertheless, there is a growing appreciation for all things concerned with western art-music, but is more likely to be found in the concert hall and places of education than in churches. For the forseeable future, I wouldn't expect that to change.

I cannot speak for the Phillipines, Malaysia or the other far-eastern regions such as Burma, Indonesia, Vietnam etc., because I know little about them from a cultural point of view. The Phillipnes may be a very catholic country, but with massive over-crowding and considerable poverty in the major cities, I suspect that day-today survival is more important than cultural matters and organs in churches; not forgetting the famous "bamboo organ" in Manilla.

Still, it is interesting to discover a lot happening in and around this part of the world.

MM

[KB7DQH]

This one really should be listed in the "new pipe organs" board but thought it appropriate to bring it to the attention to those reading this one also :o ;) ;D

http://www.hey-orgelbau.de/expo_korea_pipe_organ.html

Pictured on the Hey Orgelbau website is the Guinness Book of World Records certificate indicating this instrument is officially the loudest in the world :o

Eric
KB7DQH

[AnOrganCornucopia]

That's not an organ, that's more like a calliope! The ACCHO doesn't need to be quaking in its boots just yet... It also sounds pretty mild in the sound clip I found - just an ordinary flute. It's no use trying to measure the volume of an organ by doing as it seems Guinness did, measuring its volume close up in the organbuilder's workshops... imagine what it would have been like if they'd stuck the decibelometer right up next to ACCHO's Grand Ophicleide and had the organist let rip!

[MusingMuso]

I started off with an open mind, but the moment I saw the screw-compressor and the compressed air-tank, I knew I was looking at something rather bizzare. I think we can say with some certainty that this will be the loudest ONE manual organ in the world!

I suppose it's not far removed from a racing-car engine, where the poppet-valves act as diaphonic tone generators feeding into  flared, tuned-length resonators.

It reminds me of the fact that North Korea was formerly ruled by an organist, (Kim il Sung) who had an organ in his bomb-proof bunker. It further reminds me of the Disney cartoon, where two islands go to war, using an organ to fire missiles at "jazz island."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBKmkbRLXGM

Isn't it wonderful how art imitates life?


MM

                 

[MusingMuso]

I have discovered that there is only ONE ORGAN in the whole of Thailand.

Nevertheless, it is by Fr Willis.

MM

[AnOrganCornucopia]

A Willis in Thailand? Blimey! Here are some details: http://xoomer.virgilio.it/RobertoBertero/Organs/Bangkok/Bangkok,%20spec.%20&%20history.htm

That Blockfloete surely isn't original! More likely to have been a Gemshorn or some such. It's a small Willis indeed which has no Swell Cornopean, too...

---

Meanwhile...

Kim, an organist?  :o

You'll probably find that he was a member of a church choir as a child. Maybe Kim il Sung!

[MusingMuso]

The late "Dear Leader" comrade Kim il Sung, was born Kim Song Ju; therefore a song became sung. His early background was as a Presbyterian, and I seem to recall that he did indeed sing in the church choir, prior to his organ studies. He was apparently a very competent organist, and while he may be considered to have been a bit nuts, his hard-line communism probably had its origins in the fight against aggressive, Japanese imperialism, and the fact that he fought in the various battles on the peninsula.

We must never forget that war was taking place in Korea  long after WW2, so memories are quite recent to many.

It would be interesting to know who built the organ in his underground hideaway.

MM     

[AnOrganCornucopia]

How big was the underground hideaway? I'm willing to bet that the organ was not one with pipes but an electrone or some such.

[MusingMuso]

Nothing is impossible in North Korea.....have you seen the size of the dear leader's palace?

I recall seeing somewhere, that it was a pipe-organ, but that's not surprising, considering that (a) the lecky supply was and remains a bit iffy, and (b) Kim had closed all the churches, declared himself an atheist yet taken on the status of a cult deity, (the last proving that he was an organist first and foremost).

With pipe-organs to spare. it wouldn't have been difficult to find one for the palace.

Amusingly....perhaps chillingly.....Kim kept one church open for visitors, but it was staffed by actors, who told people how moderate and kindly the "Dear Leader" was.

Apparently Kim wasn't the only organist in the family, but as everything has to be gathered from the internet, I've probably got better things to do than google the facts, factoids or myths surrounding "The dear leader," who is now on show in an embalmed state for all to see.

I mean; I'm not about to go on a study tour, am I?

MM

[MusingMuso]

Then we have the famous Bamboo organ in the Phillipines:-

http://mypipeorganhobby.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/bamboo-organ-of-las-pinas-phillipines.html

Nice!

MM

[AnOrganCornucopia]

NK has to be the strangest country on Earth! One can only hope that Kim Jong-Un proves more of a reformer than his father and grandfather... I thing it was KIS's father who brought organ-playing into the family. I LOL'd at your remark about organists' egos btw...

Singapore has some interesting organs, too.

[David Wyld]

I have discovered that there is only ONE ORGAN in the whole of Thailand.

Nevertheless, it is by Fr Willis.

MM

Indeed, only one pipe organ in the Kingdom, which nearly didn't make it!  We were asked to visit to inspect it about five years ago and when we pulled out the records prior to my going there, we discovered that in 1905 the whole organ was impounded on arrival and unloaded on the dockside, where it lay exposed to the elements for several weeks until they decided what it was: Apparently the pipes, especially the large zinc ones, we're assumed to be parts of some fiendish weapon!

The organ is by Henry 2, beautifully made, entirely of Mahogany (including the Swell Box) and termite proofed with the Firm's 'Tropicalisation' techniques. The only parts which have suffered are the ivory drawstops knobs, which have split badly and are falling apart, and the Pedal mechanical action, which was most unfortunately removed following the flooding of the church about 20 years ago. This is now a cobbled together direct-electric arrangement powered by a battery charger.

We've put forward a scheme for complete restoration, but it seems unlikely that the church will ever manage to raise what is actually a very modest sum in organbuilding terms. They need a donor.

Mr. Cornucopia is also quite right - the Blockfloete is very 'not original' being added in the 1970s when HW4 went there to help the DuPont man to "restore" the organ. The flute was made and voiced on-site with materials sent out by post!

I have photographs somwhere in the office and will post a few later, if anyone is interested?

DW

[AnOrganCornucopia]

Interested? Intrigued is closer to the mark! So what did the Blockfloete replace? Or was it just a three-stop octopod Swell? I can't imagine Bangkok is short of a wealthy business or two that would be glad to do a bit of PR at minimal cost...

I have received confirmation that the ex Hove Town Hall 4/36 FHW at Haberdasher's Aske's Boys' School in Elstree remains in situ, in reasonable condition and in daily use, though I am told its restoration must be imminent. Thanks to Christopher Muhley (HofM at Habs) for the info. My initial enquiry, at least, was CC'd to you, Mr Wyld, although I dare say you haven't been picking up your emails over Easter!