FROM HEAVEN WINGING

KEITH BRAMICH remembers
this magazine's founding editor,
Basil Ramsey, who passed away this week

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Basil Ramsey, the founding editor of this online magazine, aged eighty-nine. His daughter wrote to me yesterday with the news that he had died peacefully, at home in North Yorkshire, following a long illness, on the morning of Wednesday 13 June 2018.

Basil was an organist, music journalist, publisher and editor with many many years' experience of writing about music, both in general terms, and about church and organ music in particular.

He was born in Chelmsford, Essex on 26 April 1929, grew up in London, was evacuated to a farm in Hertfordshire during the war, met his future wife at Christchurch, Highbury, and after the birth of the first of three children, moved to Rayleigh, near Southend. He was organist of two churches in London — St Luke's Old Street, and then St Giles, Cripplegate. Basil began his publishing career at Novello & Co, now part of the Music Sales organisation, literally working his way up the promotional ladder from tea boy to Director of Publications, with responsibility for taking on new Novello house composers, giving him an enviable collection of composer friends, including Charles Camilleri, Peter Dickinson, Bernard Herrmann, John Joubert and John McCabe. Eventually he branched out on his own, initially with his friend Benny Herrmann, as Basil Ramsey Publisher of Music, but got into difficulties when Herrmann died suddenly.

Basil had a parallel career in music journalism, editing a series of high profile publications including the Musical Times, Music and Musicians, and Choir and Organ. One thing I discovered whilst writing this tribute is that Basil was also a composer/arranger: he was credited for a Christmas carol, From Heaven Winging, which appears on several CDs.

In 1996 two tragic events changed Basil's life completely. His wife died, and he had a serious stroke, which left him unable to walk, wheelchair-bound and living alone. For a while he remained editor of Choir and Organ, communicating with his team by fax, phone and post. Once a month, the editorial team, based in Harrow in North London, visited Basil near Southend, on the north bank of the Thames Estuary, for editorial planning meetings. But Basil felt that it was unfair to ask the team to work remotely, and to make this long journey every month, and he resigned at around the time that he turned seventy.

Any other man would have retired at this point, but Basil, confined to home, looked to the internet for a new way to reach out to those interested in classical music, and this striving for connections was phenomenonally successful and wide-ranging, with information coming back from Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Malta, New Zealand and the USA. A mutual friend, the English composer Adrian Williams, introduced Basil and I, and we began to work on various internet music projects together. It was a good match because I was working with the internet and wanting to move towards classical music. After working on a couple of smaller projects — I have been there — A stroke patient offers help to others, and the Basil Ramsey Programme Note Library, we both came to the conclusion that we wanted to run an online magazine, and, following three months' of planning, Music & Vision Magazine was born on 1 January 1999, nearly twenty years ago. '... we have faith in this unique venture', Basil wrote, in his introduction to M&V in December 1998, 'as people everywhere, and from every strata of society, come within the power and influence of good music.'

Whilst I used my programming skills to make an online magazine which updated itself every day at midnight GMT, Basil wrote to his enviable list of writers and other contacts, asking for new writing, so that we had something every day, from high profile authors including, in these early days, Robert Anderson, Peter Dale, Peter Dickinson, Roderic Dunnett, Trevor Hold, Robert Hugill, Wilfrid Mellers, Malcolm Miller, Bill Newman, Ates Orga, Jennifer Paull, Shirley Ratcliffe, Gordon Rumson, Howard Smith, Patric Standford, Gillian Weir and of course Basil himself.

In 1999 the internet was something new: most of our material for publication arrived by fax and post. Optical character recognition wasn't advanced enough to convert these paper documents into text, and so Basil typed out almost all of them into his desktop computer, slowly and laboriously, using just one finger, and then emailed them to me for publication. Basil's former magazine colleagues in Harrow were amazed to see Basil's own writing appearing on their screens, with coloured backgrounds and images, several days a week.

Basil was very proud of Music & Vision, and kept up the daily work on the magazine until 2006, when his health began to decline. Basil has been a generous colleague, a good friend, and a successful teacher: he trained his editorial apprentice well, and I've been able to keep things going here since then.

I'll leave the last words to Basil himself ... one of his Editorial Musings, on the subject of organ playing, first published here in 1999 ... followed by a selection of tributes from some of his colleagues.

YOU NEVER KNOW
BASIL RAMSEY muses on organ playing

There remains a gulf between organs, those who play them, and the general musical public. Having experienced a lifetime of a personal love-hate relationship with this most mysterious of instruments, I find myself stuck rigid on the halfway spot of indecisiveness.

Whatever criticism may be hurled at church organists, their devotion to the task of accompanying Sunday services and taking a weeknight choir rehearsal is a matter for praise, often a thankless task in difficult circumstances. Not unknown in some churches is the extreme nightmare of an unregulated organ heading for the knacker's yard, a choir of two boys and a girl, a hooty alto, bleating tenor, and two tremulous basses. A laugh? Try it.

Yet there are churches with a dedicated musician performing quiet miracles, keeping standards at a respectable level by his own mix of enthusiasm and knowledge, and using every harrowing experience as a challenge to convert weaknesses into strength.

To me, the trouble with taking the musical standards of the concert hall to meet the organ — except in the hands of some fine players worldwide — comes to pieces in the fact that organ playing is a challenging art requiring exceptional command of the instrument before any thought of musical interpretation can be considered. Its limitations in certain respects demand more of the player than any other instrument, with the possible exception of the bagpipes. (But there you sense that challenge is the name of the game.)

I heard an organ recital a fortnight ago by a fine and experienced player in touch with his packed-out cathedral equipped with a good amplification system for his commentary on the music, and a large video screen showing his handling of the programme at the console.

The whole evening slipped into the pleasure of a musical experience for these reasons: masterful technique, interpretative ability, exceptional control of the means to an end, and music of quality with a few lightweight titbits slipped in to provide relaxation.

I remember a notable French organist playing in the same cathedral several years back. He thundered into his programme with Bach's 'Wedge' Prelude and Fugue in E minor — a mighty piece of musical architecture — with no regard for the audience's generally untutored ear or the futility of serving the main course before an appetiser. The playing was generally apoplectic, so the organ's easy descent into musical banality became evident. I returned home saddened that the instrument's weaknesses had been so shamelessly exploited.

On the other hand, I have permanently stored in my mind's slim treasure trove a performance of Bach's majestic Prelude and Fugue in E flat by a continental recitalist whose playing was of superlative quality, thereby gently lifting the audience into another dimension of musical existence. Nothing can describe this when it happens, and it is best left inside us to mature and remain as a yardstick for the occasion when something else miraculously happens.

The organ is as capable of transmutation as any other instrument in the hands of an inspired performer. If your experiences of the organ have previously left you cold, persist and you may be astonished at what is possible.

Copyright © 5 June 1999 Basil Ramsey, Essex, UK

BASIL RAMSEY

MUSIC & VISION