Organ Man

Organ music may not be ranking too high on the Billboard Top 100 these days, but that doesn’t mean it’s difficult to find a way to get your fix. The easiest way is through OrganLive.com, “a listener-supported internet audio station with a focus on music of the classical organ.” The station features over 10,000 tracks which you can stream just like a regular internet radio station, through any MP3, WMA, Real Media, or Quicktime player on your computer. OrganLive has a fully-searchable organ library with information about organists, composers, albums, and even organs themselves. The service is completely free, and is also interactiveyou can create a user account in order to rate tracks and albums. Also, if you’ve got any organ music of your own floating around, feel free to send it in.There are also several collections of public domain organ recordings which can be downloaded to your computer. The International Historical Organ Recording Collection, supported by the Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus/Denmark, offers recordings by several renowned players from the years between 1920 and 1959. Some names from the archives include Kurt Grosse, Marcel Dupre, Niels Otto Raasted, Edouard Mignan, Alfred Sittard, Anton Nowakowski, Fernando Germani, and Fritz Heitmann.Of course, you can also always purchase recordings of your favorite players and composers. JAV Recordings, an American label founded in 1997, releases mainly pipe organ recordings, along with some choral recordings. The label features organists such as Thomas Murray, Stephen Tharp, Daniel Roth, Oliver Latry, Paul Jacobs, and Ken Cowan, and can be found online at www.pipeorgancds.com. Regent Records, a British label founded by Gary Cole in 1988, has produced over 500 recordings for both major companies and for their own label. Check out their “English Cathedral Series,” “Single Composer Collections,” and “Organ Recital Collections” for some of their most impressive organ recordings.The most important way that you can support organ music is by sharing it with your friends and loved ones. Let them know about the many ways they can listen, and you may find that there are more organ fans in the world than the popular music charts would have you believe.