DESCRIPTION:
Organ of Little Waldingfield parish church, Suffolk -- I have also recorded Bennett's Voluntary No. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM7aR0SGG68
"[John] Bennet [sic], an eleve of Dr Pepusch, played the Tenor [viol], & occasionally, was a Chorus singer & figurante in processions. He knew the laws of Counterpoint very well, but had not a spark of…" The quotation comes from notes by Charles Burney (1726-1814) preserved in the British Museum. Burney is discussing the orchestra of the Drury Lane Theatre in London, of which Bennett was a member. Unfortunately the rest of the sentence was written on a different sheet of paper, now lost.

Having been offered the post of organist of St Margaret's at King's Lynn, along with the highest salary (£100 p.a.) of any organist in the British Isles, Burney resigned as organist of St Dionis Backchurch in the City of London in 1752. St Dionis now needed a new organist. Seven candidates applied, four withdrew on learning that the vestry would not tolerate deputies (in 18th-c. England an organist would often hold more than one post, sub-contracting some of his duties to deputies evidently paid still less than even an official organist often was). Bennett got the post. It had paid Burney £30 p.a., quite a lot by the standards of the time; I do not know what Bennett earned. He obviously supplemented his income by playing his viol, singing and apparently even dancing on stage, and as a music teacher (Mortimer's "Universal Director...to the Masters and Professors of the Liberal and Polite Arts and Sciences" of 1763 lists one "Bennet [sic], John, Tenor to the Queen's Band, Organist and Teacher on the Harpsichord, Queens-square, Bloomsbury"). In 1760 the vestry allowed Bennett to apply for a second post as organist (of St John's Chapel, Bedford Row) "for the better Support of himself and Family". He was unsuccessful and apparently did not try again. He held the post at St Dionis until is death in 1784. We do not know when Bennett was born.

Bennett published a single item, the "Ten Voluntaries" from which the work recorded here is taken. 227 subscribers, among them Boyce, Handel, Stanley and the actor David Garrick (co-proprietor of the Drury Lane Theatre), ordered a total of 271 copies. Also on the list are James Nares and John Travers. The former is described as "Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal", which he became in October 1757, while the latter, organist of the Chapel Royal, died in June 1758. As with all music printed in 18th-c. England the "Ten Voluntaries" have no publication date, but it can be inferred from this. (Much of this information comes from the preface, by Gwylim Beechey, to the collection of voluntaries by Bennett, Hine and Walond that he edited in 1969.)

Bennett was certainly gifted with more than a mastery of counterpoint. Of all the voluntaries written in 18th-c. England his are the longest: clearly these are concert pieces. His slow movements are sublime. As to the fast movements writing pieces of such length without losing momentum is a challenge. This is all the more true if, as Bennett does in the Allegro of No. 5, you limit your thematic material to just two or three short motives, all introduced early on.

This music will always sound best on an English organ of the pre-Victorian period. Sadly, not only are there few such instruments left, but none is as yet available in digitised form -- with the exception of the organ heard here, made in 1809 by Joseph Hart, a Suffolk builder of some skill. When William Denman rebuilt it in 1876 he retained most of the original pipework. A tonal comparison of this organ with other Georgian instruments suggests that not much revoicing has taken place here. In Victorian England it was believed that the sound of metal pipes improved with age, so old pipes, when they were reused, were perhaps treated with a certain respect. There was some relabelling: the unfashionable cornet on the great was renamed a "mixture", the swell "Gedact" was no doubt originally a "stop diapason", the spelling used for the eponymous rank on the great. All the stops heard in this recording date from 1809 (except that the bottom octave-and-a-half on the swell is by Denman) -- still close, tonally, to the kind of organ Bennett knew. (The organ in fact has only 18 stops, not 20 as stated in the video.)

Some information about the now-lost Harris organ at St Dionis, including a photograph, will be found at the end of the video.

a_osiander(at)gmx.net / www.andreas-osiander.net