Some years ago, in the English northern city of Durchester, a problem arose in the Cathedral environs. The cathedral building was surrounded by colleges, residences, and an old castle. The three-hundred years old sewage system simply was unable to cope.
The cathedral authorities brought in an up-and-coming young sanitary engineer by the name of James Hooternoyse. (distantly related to the founders of Hooternoyse and Herdsounds, a local firm of organ builders) and asked that he look into the problem and report. A week or two passed by and the report duly arrived : summed-up, it said what everybody already knew, that there was too much stuff coming through pipes that were too small.
Young James proposed that whilst the system was generally under-spec'd, if the discharge from individual buildings was 'collected' by one very large pipe running under the cathedral parking lot, he was sure that the bottleneck effect would be overcome. He quoted a price for the project which was accepted by the Dean and Chapter. (In English cathedrals, approval for major expenditure is by an intricate formula, which (i)squares the number of chapter members surviving the declaration of the price, (ii)adds in the number of hours since the last morals scandal, and (iii)divides the total by the number of communicants at 8.00am Communion last Thursday. If (ii) & (iii) are the same number, then approval is granted).
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When the engineer got to his drawing board, he saw that the dimensions of the new collector pipe would be 8 feet diameter, with a length of 256 feet. As with any pipe organ enthusiast, a number related to the figure '8', created a warm fuzzy feeling in young James, and then his mind drifted.......would it be possible to place manholes along the length of this pipe, so that it became a sort of giant flute with a full octave of twelve notes from CCCCCCCC.......C(?) ? If this WAS possible, and if it could be controlled from the organ console, then the organist would have at his disposal a truly massive pedal keynote to a final cadence. Nobody would actually hear it of course, but they'd darn well know it was there.
Hooternoyse returned to the Dean and Chapter with his proposal. As this was optional expenditure, each chapter member had power of veto. When the time came to vote, the only voting member still conscious, rose to deliver his veto. James took him aside and reminded him of the incident with the organists wife.... and the veto was never uttered. The Durchester Fundaton 256' was born.
Some problems had to be overcome in the construction of this revolutionary new concept in cathedral music.
(i) It had to be an 'open' pipe. The consequences of closing the end and creating a 612 ft. pitch were too awful to contemplate. This meant that the contents of the pipe would have to be allowed to leave the open end, freefall a few feet, and then be re-gathered into another pipe for onward transmission. Good fortune played its part here, when it was found that by altering the line of the pipe just a few degrees, the open end would reach the adjacent carpark of the City Planning offices. This was felt by everyone to be wholly apposite, merely returning to the planners a measure of what they had been putting out for years.
(ii) The manhole covers....pitching valves, weighed nearly three hundred pounds apiece, quite beyond the capabilities of the organ action. The solution arrived at, was to employ a series of hydraulic rams, powered by the lift mechanism servo-pump from a redundant Cape Kennedy 'crawler'.
Although this lifted the valves well enough, the time delay was about 120 seconds. Provided that the organist remembered to put down his pedal keynote some two minutes before needed all was well... except that during alpha testing, it was realised that after putting the note down, the stop had to remain 'drawn' until it sounded. Consequently, everything played in the pedal lower octave for the for the last two minutes of a piece, was echoed after the piece ended, at 256 foot pitch, with surprising results for heavily pregnant women within a twelve mileradius. The problem was soon solved by the incorporation of an isolater which allowed only one note per 'draw'.
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Three years on and the Fundaton is now an established feature of old Durchester Cathedral. The teething problems have been largely dealt with and the cricket club is now top of the league, all visiting teams refusing to play and thus losing by default.
The medical establishment is still conducting extensive research into the difficulties that local women are having in getting to full term in their pregnancies.
The Civil Aviation Authority is urgently examining the baffling loss of so many airliners as they approach the airspace around Durchester, particularly at 11:30 on Sunday mornings.
All the masonry from the cathedral tower which fell into the Central Space, has now been cleared, and the builders are looking at a number of possible solutions to the problem of ultra-low-frequency sound, and its effect on stone structures.
Some amusement was generated a few months ago, when a young woman arriving at the cathedral by taxi, stepped out onto the FFFFFFFFFF# valve. The organist must have been practising, because the taxi driver reports : ..."Well, she was standing there going through her purse for my fare, when she began to rise up into the air. It was only about ten inches or so, but then there was this amazing noise sensation coming from somewhere beneath her skirts. Last I saw of her, she was running across the green screaming 'IT WASN'T ME!, IT *WASN'T* ME!' ".
A sticking valve on EEEEEEEEEEEb continues to puzzle the ship builders/tuners. They called Hooternoyse in last week to see if he could fathom it out. They lifted the valve, and he peered in with a torch. "See anything?", "Nothing", he said, "just a load of crap."
This has been just a short extract from the book of the project, which itself runs to 1032 pages. If you would like to have your own copy, give a lot of money to your shrink, and wait til the desire passes.
So ends chapter one.
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(The above was posted to OrganChat, an email list for organists, a few years ago by a very witty man, Chris Baker of the UK. We have not heard from Chris for a long while, so I hope he doesn't mind the re-print here.)
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