What is in Kelvin's Head?

The Organ & The Consultation

02/12/2013

This picture appeared on my facebook feed yesterday. It was posted by Peter Wakeford who was playing the organ yesterday morning. It shows what was going on during the service.

Now, if you had been there yesterday you would have heard some sumptuous music and would have had no idea that anything was going wrong. However, the last thing an organist wants is for the pistons to fly out when you give them a nudge.

This picture shows something fairly small going wrong with the organ but it is indicative of the state that parts of it are in. Much of the pipework – the bits that make the noise is fine. Indeed, much of the pipework is of significant historical interest. However, the bits that make the pipes play, not so much. There are huge problems with the console and with the transmission – that’s the gubbins that tells which pipe to open after the organist has pulled out a stop and attempted to play a note.

Thinking about the organ is just one bit of what the Vestry are currently consulting the congregation about. A new consultation paper called Releasing the Mission was launched last week at the Annual General Meeting. It is partly about the organ but is also about how we build capacity into St Mary’s so that we can do what we do well and even do more. We are so busy at the moment that the building is creaking at the seams. If we did a bit of development work, we would be able to help to secure the musical life of the place (which is a core part of our mission work), provide more space for the groups and networks that are buzzing, get better use of the building for the local community and also provide a more welcoming space when the diocese is holding big events at St Mary’s.

The consultation paper is available online on the website and the Vestry are hoping that lots of people will respond – whether people who are directly members of the congregation or indeed those who have a more tangential relationship with St Mary’s. The hope is that lots of different voices and constituencies can be heard. Responses can be made using the on-line form or in writing via the Cathedral office.

18 responses to “General Assembly on sex and singleness”

Kennedy

27/05/2009

DCampbell writes:
Wow, Kennedy – I hadn’t realised there was so much or so many people to it, but surely it is not beyond us to have some kind of webcast of the more important sections of the proceedings

Webcasting from Palmerston Place presents a number of challenges:

resourcing the camera crew, vision mixer and director (kit and people) and integration with the projection system to carry any slides and visuals
looking at the lighting to allow good pictures but without interfering with the projection system (which suffers from light spill from the windows already)
Network and machine infrastructure in the building to capture and code the video.
Dedicated bandwidth (with Quality of Service) to transfer the video and audio stream out to a distribution server. (We currently piggyback on Palmerston Place’s own internet connection).

An alternative would be an audio stream with a general shot webcam updating every 30 – 60 secs but again would probably need a dedicated connection to the net to ensure that there was no breakup.

This is not a litany of reasons for not doing things – it’s just a realistic assessment of the resource requirements.

Kennedy

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Kennedy

27/05/2009

Or another thought-

We start having Synod on the Th/Fr/Sa after the Assembly on the Mound and share the costs of the setup.

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Kennedy

27/05/2009

No, I suppose a general ‘piskie tag would work just as well, but I’m with Kimberly and would prefer #piskie

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kelvin

27/05/2009

My only problem with piskie is that in some parts of the UK a “piskie” is one of the little people, and not necessarily a nice one.

See for example:
http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/cornwall/folklore/the-piskies-of-cornwall.html

“Some people saw them as the souls of pagans who could not transcend to heaven, and they were also seen as the remnants of pagan gods, banished with the coming of Christianity. In tradition they are doomed to shrink in size until they disappear. “

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Elizabeth

27/05/2009

Maybe it’s just me, but I have always found the potential confusion between pisky and piskie immensely pleasing (by ‘always’ I mean, since I discovered the term – not too many years ago!). It’s one of the (many) reasons I’m pleased to be on the pisky/ie side of the pond.

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David Campbell

28/05/2009

Thanks Kelvin – all this stuff is quite amazing really – especially Kennedy’s informative and knowledgeable material about what is actually needed. I agree about the Primus’s charge being essential, but if live streaming (if that is what it is called) is too intensive an operation in all kinds of ways for an admittedly small audience, why not do a twice daily edited digest of each day’s business like the one the Revd Dougkas Aitken does for the CofS?

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Kelvin

28/05/2009

Rob Warren already does do digests in audio format – video may well be the next step, though it is quite a big step to take.

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Kennedy

28/05/2009

The video update that Douglas Aitken does is a copy of his audio update with appropriate video material behind it ie you don’t get any actuality from the chamber.

We would still need editing and coding time before the video could be uploaded to an external server.

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