When asked about their health hypochondriacs give you an impromptu organ recital. "Organum' is the Latin word for an instrument. The organs of the body are the instruments through which it functions. Francis Bacon's 1620 Novum Organum proposed a new way of (instrument for) understanding nature. The monarch of musical instruments is the organ.

The term "organic" in food production is not clearly defined, nor can it be uniformly regulated. Its use in the above heading is whimsical.

An important organ recital is planned for next Tuesday evening, September 18 at 8 p.m. in St. John's Church, Highway 9 at the 2nd Line of Mono. Internationally famous musicians Ian Sadler and Angus Sinclair will be the visiting artists. The event will be a major one in Dufferin County's new musical season. Tickets ($30) are still available at BookLore, Orangeville, or at 519-941-1950.

Sadler was a boy chorister at St. Paul's Cathedral in London (U.K.) and, later, organ scholar there. His concerts this summer have been in the cathedrals of Norwich, England, and Bruges, Belgium, in several parish churches here and abroad and in various non-liturgical venues. He now lives in Canada where he is an acclaimed organist and teacher. Sinclair, based in London ON, is well-known in music circles as pianist, organist and choir director.

The Second Vatican Council (1962 - 65) recognised the organ as the normative musical instrument for the liturgy provided that it served, rather than dominated, the text and the human voice. It is, of course, a wind instrument. The image of someone blowing a flute is as old as art. A drum may have been its earliest tribal antecedent. The (bag)pipes came with the dawn of Celtic culture but there were other ancient experiments at playing more than one 'flute' at a time.

Historians of music have decided that the closest to what we now know as the organ was the Greek 'hydrolis' of the Third Century B.C. Pipes of different length were put under pressure from pumps controlled by valves (later, keys) that, in turn, were under varying degrees of water pressure. It all sounds terribly ingenious but the same race of men built the Parthenon. Tradition ascribes the invention of the primitive hydrolis to the Greek Klesibios who lived in Alexandria. In due course a bellows replaced water pressure.

After the collapse of classical civilisation in the Dark Age the organ was not known in Western Europe until it was reintroduced from Constantinople to the court of Charlemagne. It was then, probably, a handheld, portable device, something like a large accordion with a range of protruding pipes. It played only a single melodic line. At first, liturgical musicians looked askance at it. When the vast mediaeval cathedrals and abbey churches began to be built only an enlarged pipe organ could provide the variety and volume of sound they required. Parish churches still relied for centuries to come on viols and flutes. No organ from the Middle Ages has survived but we know from manuscripts that multiple pipes and bellows were used.

By the 16th Century there were dual and triple keyboards and controls for shutting off different ranks of pipes. And there were pedal controls. Pictures painted at the time confirm those developments. But it was the 19th Century that revolutionised organ building. They began to be constructed in German, French and English factories. Canada's Casavant Fréres have been building pipe organs - 3800 to date - since 1840. That's only about 20 a year. Some include more than 10,000 pipes.

Organs became popular not only in large churches but also in civic concert halls. I remember the great Wurlitzer organ at Shea's Hippodrome in Toronto. It compared proudly, if brashly, with the pipe organs in St. James Cathedral, Knox Church and in Convocation Hall, the latter two instruments played by Sir Ernest Macmillan.

The reed organ came before the pipeless electronic instrument. Many still remember it, pumped either by foot pedals or by a handoperated lever in homes and rural churches. To operate those onemanual organs was an aerobic exercise. The sound came through metal reeds. The grandparents and great-grandparents of many now living sang, as children, Sunday evening hymns around the family harmonium.

Electric organs arrived, with similarly powered refrigerators, in the 1930s. They gradually came to produce sounds similar to those of pipe organs. The first successful one was the Hammond organ that used rotating 'tonewheels' to project sound through speakers. It became popular for jazz, 'soul' and the either sweet or raucous 'Gospel' genre.

In due course electronic devices could be made to sound like pipe organs, pianos, bells and percussion instruments. The jury is still out on the matter of where music, instrumental or vocal, and contemporary religious or secular thumping and caterwauling have a frontier.

As far as Dufferin County is concerned, that frontier may begin to be defined with the visit of Ian Sadler and Angus Sinclair. We are all now so accustomed to the best of recorded music that it is a penance to take part in parish worship that has neither sonorous organ music, Gregorian or Anglican chant, nor anything but musical mediocrity. Repetitive and happy-clappy choruses do not edify most Canadian churchgoers. 'Pop' entertainment is not worship. What Anglicans call a 'plain' (without music) Eucharist is preferable to having to endure bad or sentimental music.

When I was living in Canterbury a favourite story had been current there for many years. About 1919 a day-tripper from France asked a verger on duty if he could play the Cathedral organ. He was told that the special permission required would take several hours to obtain. The visitor explained that he was on a short trans-Channel tour but that he would appreciate the opportunity should he ever return. He left his card for presentation to the Dean or organist. It bore the name of Camille Saint- Sans, the famous organist at the Madeleine Church in Paris and composer of the opera "Samson and Delilah". There are times when one entertains either angels or genius unawares.

One day many years from now some of us may remember that we heard both Ian Sadler and Angus Sinclair in recital at St. John's, Mono.