Wedd's pedal thunder and Norman's Goss-Custard transcriptions were more than just late romantic curiousities; they were entertaining, they were fun.

Both recitals rose at times to levels of great beauty, and although much of the material might not be considered profound by normal concert standards I suspect that it demanded more musicianship and interpretive skill than is often required of recitalists. The standards for registering and interpreting Bach on the organ are by now pretty well established (some would say to a rather inhibiting degree) but the standards for playing, say, a transcribed Wagner piece, though once well known, have fallen by the wayside in the last few decades.

Organists are fortunate in the incredible volume of material that exists for their instrument. There is a common notion that they should somehow be ashamed of this, presumably because so much of the material is mediocre.

Well, so what. That organists and their listeners have bathed in a great deal of bathwater over the last few centuries, much of it quite dingy, can't be denied. But there is still a need, I believe to develop a greater respect for, and knowledge of, the literature and of the role of the printed score in preserving it.

The history of the pipe organ tends to parallel that of the printing press. (It may interest organ afficionados to know that the tracker revival has its counterpart among some younger,less commercial printers who in recent years have attempted to preserve the standards of craftsmanship essential to the traditional -- and now "obsolete" -- technologies of their trade, including papermaking methods, metal typesetting, and letterpress printing.) The miracle of the long tradition of music publishing, and of the archival publishing of the last century or so, is that there is now available, at relatively low cost, an incredible variety of organ compositions spanning at least five hundred years.

To draw another parallel: a lover of fine art, unless he's quite wealthy, has to be satisfied with traveling to distant galleries and museums at great expense to experience the great works of the past, or he can settle for looking at reproductions. But I can walk into a music store, and by spending relatively few dollars, actually own the organistic equivalent of those museums and the works of art they contain. An edition of Bach or Balbastre isn't merely a reproduction of a work, it has the potential to be the work and in one sense is the work. All it requires is for the music to be realized sensorially from the image on the page -- the same requirement that's made by a painting.

If you're a good reader, with an educated understanding of how the music should sound, you may even be able to realize or experience that music better without an organ, simply by reading the score, than you could on many organs -- an unsociable pastime, but a rewarding one. Ink and paper have the potential to liberate us from the limitations of time and place (or, in this case, the lack of a Schnitger or a Cavaille-Coll) -- a platitude when applied to most literature, but too often forgotten in its application to the literature of music.

If all this seems too philosophical or farfetched, here's another point, on which there ought to be general agreement -- namely, that if scores are so important, then publishers have a corresponding responsibility to present them accurately and clearly. In this regard, American publishers have been more deficient than the European ones.

One U.S. publisher has recently employed well-known editors to produce a series of worthwhile and very inexpensive collections of eighteenth and nineteenth century organ compositions. It's disturbing to see so many errors in them -- wrong notes, wrong clefs, etc. Doesn't this publisher allow the editors to see proofs before these books are printed?

Another publisher issues what are obviously facsimiles of out-of-print earlier editions, but often without the original title page or any indication of who the editor was or whether (for example) the registration suggestions are the editor's or the composer's. This is a disservice to the purchaser and unworthy of the content.

There is, of course, the alternative of buying expensive European urtext editions or (particularly for Victorian material) shopping in junk stores and thrift shops. Unfortunately these approaches have their limitations for most of us. We should be demanding more of the publishers who have been mining these treasures for their benefit as well as ours.

Music is not, of course, the exclusive preserve of the musically literate. Folk and jazz artists and others who can't read a note make their own masterpieces, and in this century the phonograph recording has made that material into a literature in its own right. All the more reason for those of us who can* read to hold our end up -- by preserving and playing the best, and even some of the not-so-good-but-fun, of what's been handed down to us.