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 OBQAN

298

ORGAN

the air pumps were replaced by bellows. Whether in these organs the water api)aratus was dispensed with, is not quite certain. It woul<l be strange, however, if this important means of roguhiting the wind jircs.-iure had been discontinued whiU' the liydrauhis wa.s still in vogue. About the sixth century organ-building .•^cenis to have gone down in Western Europe, \\\n\r it was continued in the Kastern Empire. It was a great event when, in 757, the Emperor Constantino \' C'oprony- mus made a present of an organ to King Pepin. In 826 a \'cnctian priest named Georgius erected an organ at Aachen, possibly following the directions left by Vitruvius. Shortly afterwards organ-building seems to have flourished in Germany, for we are told (Baluze, "Misc.", V, 480) that Pope John VIII (S7'J- 80) asked Anno, Bishop of Freising, to send him a good organ and an organist. By this time the hydraulic apparatus for equalizing the wind-pressure had cer- tainly been abandoned, presumably because in north- ern climates the water might freeze in winter time. The wind, therefore, was supplied to the pipes directly from the bellows. To get anything like a regular flow of wind, it was necessary to have a number of bellows worked by several men. Thus, an organ in Winches- ter cathedral, built in 951, and containing 400 pipes, had twenty-six bellows, which it took seventy men to blow. These seventy men e\'idently worked in relays. In all probability one man would work one bellows, but the work was so e.xhausting that each man could con- tinue only for a short time. The bellows were pressed down either by means of a handle or by the blower standing on them. It seems that the device of weighting the bellows — so that the blower had merely to raise the upper board and leave the weights to press it dow^l again — was discovered only in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Another point in which the medieval organ was inferior to the hydraulus, was the absence of stops. There were, indeed, several rows of pipes, but they could not be stopped. All the pipes belonging to one key sounded always together, when that key was de- pressed. Thus the ^^'inchester organ had ten pipes to each key. What the difference between these various pipes was, we do not know; but it appears that at an early date pipes were introduced to re-enforce the over- tones of the principal tone, giving the octave, twelfth, and their duplicates in still higher octaves. Then, to counterbalance these high-pitched pipes, others were added giving the lower octave, and even the second lower octave. In the absence of a stop action, variety of tone quality was of course unattainable, except by haying different organs to play alternately. Even the Winchester organ had two key-boards, representing practically two organs (some authorities think there were three). From a contemporary description we learn that there were two organists (or three according to some), each managing his own "alphabet". The term alphabet is explained by the fact that the alpha- betical name of the note was attached to each slide. The modern name key refers to the same fact, though, according to Zarlino ("Istitutioni armoniche", 1.55S), in a roundabout manner: he says that the letters of the alphabet placed at the beginning of the Guidonian staff (see Neum, p. 772, col. 2) were called keys (daves, clefs) because they unlocked the secrets of the staff, and that, hence, the same name was ap- plied to the levers of instruments like the organ inscribed with the same alphabetical letters.

WTiile, in the Winchester organ, the two key-boards belonged to one organ, we know that there used to be also entirely separate organs in the same building. The smallest of these were called "portatives", because they could be carried about. These were known in France in the tenth century (Vioflet-le-Duc, "In- struments de musique", p. 298). A larger kind was called "positive", because it was stationary, but it, again, seems to have been distinguished from a still

larger instrument known simply as the organ. Later on, when in reality se\'eral organs were conibined in the same instrument, one of the .softer divisions was called "positive". This name is still retained on the Conti- nent, while in English-speaking countries it hsis been changed to "choir organ . There was still another in- strument of the organ kind called a "regal". Its lieeuliarity was that, instead of pipes, it had reeds, fastened at one end and free to vibrate at the other. It was therefore the precursor of our modern harmo- nium. In the fourteenth century organs were con- structed with different key-boards placed one above the other, each controlling its own division of the or- gan. Soon afterwards couplers were designed, that is, mechanical appliances by which a key depressed in one key-board (or manual) would simultaneously pull down a corresponding key in another. The invention of a special key-board to be played by the feet, and hence called "pedals", is also placed in the fourteenth century. Sometimes the pedal keys merely pulled down manual keys by means of a chord; sometimes they were provided with their own rows of pipes, as in some fourteenth-century Swedish organs described by C. F. Hcnnerberg in a paper read at the International Musical Congress at Vienna, in 1909 ("Bericht", 91 sqq., Vienna and Leipzig, 1909).

It seems that stops were not reinvented until the fifteenth century. The form then used for a stop ac- tion was that of a "spring-box". About the four- teenth century, it appears, the slider for the key action had been discontinued, and channels (grooves) had been used, as in the ancient hydraulus, but running transversely, each under a row of pipes belonging to the same key. Into these grooves wind was admitted through a slit covered by a valve (pallet), the valve being pulled down and opened by the key action, and closed again by a spring. Such an arrangement is found in some remnants of the fourteenth century Swedish organs (see Henncrberg, 1 c). In these grooves, then, about the fifteenth century, secondary spring valves were inserted, one under each hole leading to a pipe. From each of these secondary valves a string led to one of a number of rods running longi- tudinally under the sound-board, one for each set of pipes corresponding to a stop. By depressing this rod, all the secondary valves belonging to the corre- sponding stop would be opened, and wind could enter the pipes as soon as it was admitted into the grooves by the key action. Later on it was found more con- venient to push these valves down than to pull them. Little rods were made to pass through the top of the sound-board and to rest on the front end of the valves. These rods could be depressed, so as to open the valves, by the stop-roil running over the sound-board. From these secoiulary valves the whole arrangement received the name spring-box.

The spring-box solved the problem in principle, but had the drawback of necessitating frequent repairs. Hence, from the sixteenth century onwards, organ- builders began to use sliders for the stop action. Thus the double control of the pipes by means of channel and slide was again used as in the hydraulus, but with exchanged functions, the channel now serving for the key action and the slider for the stop action. In modern times some builders have returned to the an- cient method of using the channel longitudinally, for the stops (Kcgelladc and similar contrivances; pneu- matic sound-boards). Mention should also be made of attempts to do away with the channels altog(^ther, to have all the pipes supplied directly from a universal wind-chest, and to bring about the double control of key and stop action by the mechanism alone. Each pipe hole is then provided with a special valve, and key and stop mechanism are so arranged that only their combined action will open the valve. Shortly after the stop-action had been reinvented, builders began to design varieties of stops. The earlier pipes