Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 2.djvu/611

ORGAN. and the improvement consists in the facility with which these blocks can be added to, or any of them removed, and so the 'composition' be altered in a few minutes, if a change be desired.

These were first applied by Bishop, in 1825, to the organ which he built in that year for the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. [See vol. i. 216.]

The most complete GG Pedal Organ that was ever made, both as to compass and stops, was the one erected by the late J. C. Bishop in St. James's Church, Bermondsey, in 1829. It had three stops of a range of two octaves each. The following was the general specification of it:—

There was a keyboard on the left-hand side of the manuals, acting on the pedal organ; and the writer remembers seeing in print a copy of Handel's chorus, 'But the waters overwhelmed their enemies,' arranged for three performers,—a duet for the manuals, with the rolling bass part for a third player at the side keyboard,—prepared expressly for and played at the opening of this organ.

In a large organ with several pallets to a key, and perhaps some stops on a heavy pressure of wind, the touch becomes heavier than the most muscular finger (or foot) can control without experiencing great exhaustion. The number of springs in the several soundboards to some extent bring back the resistance existing in the old 16th-century spring-boxes, which resistance however can now no longer be overcome by brute force, but must be controlled by the elastic action from the knuckles or ankle. This power is supplied by the pneumatic lever. The late Mr. Joseph Booth, of Wakefield, was the first organ-builder to whom the idea seems to have occurred of establishing pneumatic agency, and of thus ingeniously turning the wind-power, one of the organist's antagonists, into his assistant. It was to some of the bass pipes of the organ he built for the church of Attercliffe, near Sheffield, in the year 1827, that Mr. Booth first applied his little invention. The lower notes of the wood open diapason of the GG manual were placed on a small separate soundboard, and to the pulldown of each pallet he attached a small circular bellows below. From the great organ soundboard-groove a conveyance conducts wind into this bellows, which, opening downwards, draws the pallet with it. These small bellows Mr. Booth used to call puff-valves.

It was in 1832 that the late Mr. Barker first thought of his invention that has since been called the pneumatic lever. On the completion of the organ in York Minster, the touch of which, in consequence of the great size of the instrument, was of course very heavy, he wrote to Dr. Camidge, then the organist of the Cathedral, begging to be allowed to attach one of his levers in a temporary way to one of the heaviest notes of his organ. Dr. Camidge admitted that the touch of his instrument was 'sufficient to paralyse the efforts of most men'; but financial difficulties stood in the way of the remedy being applied; and in 1837 he [App. p.735 "Mr. Barker"] went to France to superintend its introduction into the organ then being built by the eminent builder Cavaillé-Coll for the royal Church of St. Denis, near Paris. M. Cavaillé had, among his other experiments, made Flue and Reed pipes to produce harmonic tones by means of wind of heavy pressure, but these discoveries he had looked upon as practically useless on account of their leading to the production of a touch which no human muscles could overcome. Mr. Barker's apparatus, which simply overpowered the resistance that could not be removed, was therefore an opportune presentation; and M. Cavaillé immediately introduced it, together with several Harmonic stops, into the large organ he was then (1841) building for the Abbey Church of St. Denis, near Paris.

In 1835 Mr. David Hamilton, of Edinburgh, made a pneumatic movement, which he applied to the organ in St. John's Episcopal Church in that city; and in 1839 a paper was read at a meeting of the British Association at Birmingham explanatory of a pneumatic lever which he then exhibited.

The pneumatic lever consists of a bellows shaped very like a small concussion bellows, two or three inches in width, and about ten inches in length. The key of the clavier opens a small circular valve beneath this, and compressed air being thus admitted, the bellows rises, drawing with it a tracker that communicates the motion to the whole of the pallets and to such of the coupling movements, etc., as may be 'drawn'; all of which immediately answer to the putting down of the key. When the key is released the valve that admitted the air is closed and another