The Early English Organ Builders and their work/Appendix V
V.
The Proposals of Renatus Harris to the Reverend the President and Fellows of Magdalen College in Oxford, for repairing and making several alterations in their Organ, 17 July, 1685.
(From Harleian MS., British Museum, No. 4240 fol. 116b.)
1. To make the three bellows new, to repair and perfect the inner trunks and wind chests, to new hang both sets of keys, to rectify all defects in the roller-boards, to repair the sound-boards and conveyances, and to make them as good as at the first.
2. To mend all the pipes and conduits in both organs, and perfectly to voice and tune them, which, voicing shall be done after the modern, best and sweetest manner that either the work or proposer is capable of.
3. Whereas the great organ consists of eight stops, namely, two diapasons, two principals, two fifteenths and two two-and-twentieths, one of which stops, and several pipes in the other, have been spoiled by Preston; finding by experience that when two unisons are together in an organ as two principals, two fifteenths, etc., that they never agree well together in time, and one stop of each sort is in a manner as loud as two of the same name; for which reason neither in my organ at the Temple, nor in those which I make for the King, after the open and stopped diapasons, none of the rest are of the same denomination; so that I propose to make your eight stops to consist of these following, one open diapason, one stopped diapason, one principal, one great twelfth, one fifteenth, one tiers, one furniture of two or three ranks, according as there is room for it, in place of the two two-and-twentieths. In the choir organ there are one stopped diapason, two principals, one recorder and one fifteenth, so that in these five stops there are no less than three unisons; which five stops ought to be reduced to these four, namely, one stopped diapason, one principal, one stopped twelfth and one fifteenth; the recorder being left out will give more air to the rest of the work. With these amendments, alterations, additions and varieties of stops, it will be an extraordinary good instrument, and the best old organ in England, and exceed the best organ in your university, with only the cost of one hundred and fifty pounds.