Thank you to Lillian’s students in NJ for a link that led me to US internet radio station Organlive.com, devoted to the classical organ.
It’s great for background listening – they’re streaming Bach right now in honour of his birthday. You’re not quite sure who or what is coming up, but that’s part of the fun.
For each broadcast performance there are lots of links to play with – organist pic and biog, public domain sheet music, and links to Amazon to buy the CD or mp3. You can visit the OHS Pipe Organ Database to see the organ specs. And (I love this!) you can click through to the Google Earth location of the organ you happen to be listening to.
You sometimes have to refresh the listening now page manually to make sure the info correlates with what you’re hearing (they’re working on it) and it took a while to get it to play on my computer here in the UK, but that was probably the fault of my browser setup (there is a choice of 5 player formats and 3 bit rates for Europe – just keep clicking until one works).
Organlive plays organ music from all periods – the sister station Positively Baroque plays only organ music of the baroque (the playing now/coming up function is much slicker here).
Both stations are brought to us by the Organ Media Foundation, a non-profit organization, set up a couple of years ago to make sure the organ and its music are heard over new media as well as the old. Thanks guys. We need something like this over here.
I’m grateful to the OHS Pipe Organ Database for permission to reproduce their photos.
pic courtesy OHS Pipe Organ Database/Eric J Gastier
