Organ-Building in Georgian and Victorian England: The Work of Gray & Davison, 1772–1890 by Nicholas Thistlethwaite

Abstract

Reviewed by: Organ-Building in Georgian and Victorian England: The Work of Gray & Davison, 1772–1890 by Nicholas Thistlethwaite Karrin Ford Organ-Building in Georgian and Victorian England: The Work of Gray & Davison, 1772–1890. By Nicholas Thistlethwaite. (Music in Britain, 1600–2000.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2020. [xxii, 552 p. ISBN 9781783274673 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781787446670 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, maps, tables, work lists, bibliography, index. Recent decades have seen a proliferation of research in organ history and organology, befitting a tradition whose history extends back well over a thousand years. To this corpus, Nicholas Thistlethwaite’s Organ-Building in Georgian and Victorian England: The Work of Gray & Davison, 1772–1890 represents a thoughtful and well-nuanced addition, focusing on an era of British organ building marked by radical and pervasive transformation of the instrument’s design and structure. Thistlethwaite’s earlier authorit ative account of the Victorian organ, The Making of the Victorian Organ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), provides a comprehensive survey of organ building in Britain from 1820 to 1870. His present tome expands on that work by examining the venerable and innovative firm of Gray and Davison, large-scale manufacturer of church and concert instruments active for the better part of two centuries. Founded by Robert Gray in 1772 and soon augmented by the addition of his brother William in 1787, the firm was responsible for some of the most significant installations in and around London in the early years of the nineteenth century, including instruments at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, and St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Following the ascension of William’s son John to leadership of the firm in 1837, the company [End Page 247] continued to enjoy solid success, producing a plethora of instruments for churches in the London area and exporting instruments to Boston and Charleston. After the marriage of John Gray’s daughter to Frederick Davison and the subsequent death of Gray in 1849, the firm became known as Gray and Davison, with the latter serving as sole proprietor and manager. One of the most prominent organ building firms in early nineteenth-century Britain, Gray and Davison were responsible for an astonishing number of technical and musical innovations, which Thistlethwaite details with admirable perspective. Evolutionary and reformist in approach, the firm’s tonal schemes were typically characterized by delicate voicing and powerful reeds while retaining the presence of a strong and carefully graduated grand choeur. The contributions of Gray (1790–1849), who sought to create designs responsive to the changing vicissitudes of musical tastes and increased technical demands of the instrument in worship and concert, proved synergistically balanced by those of Davison (ca. 1815–1889), whose efforts were marked by steadfast prescience and pragmatism. British instruments of the age were hardly reflective of synchronous instruments on the Continent—indeed, most organs built in Britain before 1830 lagged far behind their European counterparts in size and scope—but the firm’s perspicacity and commitment to quality, coupled with a strong sense of business acumen, decisively altered the course of domestic building and installations, gradually bringing the British organ into greater alignment with contemporary European models. Nowhere was the firm’s nascent progressivism more apparent than in its bold commitment to standardization and independence of pedal compass and design. Thistlethwaite refers the reader to The Making of the Victorian Organ for a synopsis of pedal layout in earlier instruments, although the prevailing attitude toward an independent pedal could best be described as ambivalent. Fueled by allegiance to Samuel Wesley, the greatest English organist of the age and iconic disciple of Johann Sebastian Bach, Davison sought to design organs with pedalboards capable of performing the full spectrum of German baroque music, featuring an autonomous pedal division, expanded compass, and equal temperament tuning. Further aided by performances of Felix Mendelssohn- Bartholdy, whose historic recitals in London in the late 1830s showcased the organ music of Bach (and that of Mendelssohn himself), the firm soon rebuilt earlier instruments to conform to the new standard C-compass, adding pedal divisions congruous with European models. Gray and Davison’s larger installations were heavily influenced by contemporary French models, reflecting the cultural shift to a more symphonic...