Organ Instruments
Organ Instruments Fast Facts
For hundreds of years organs were used almost exclusively in churches, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries they began to appear in music halls, cinemas, places of entertainment. The reason for both is that the organ is an incredibly versatile beast, at the same time capable of thunderous noises to put the fear of God into you, and of soothing, gentle magical sounds to calm your fractured nerves. Until the synthesizer arrived, the organ was by far the most versatile of keyboard instruments.
A Brief History of the Organ Instrument
The organ is the earliest known of all mechanically operated musical instruments and not, as is sometimes stated, one of the earliest musical instruments. The first known organ dates from the 3rd century BC. This was a hydraulos, with a clever system of maintaining wind pressure by incorporating a water cistern in the wind reservoir; when the wind pressure sank, the water level rose to maintain it.
The story of two thousand years of development, from the small hydraulos to mammoth instruments with thousands of pipes, a multitude of timbres and inbuilt gale force winds, cannot be encompassed in anything less than a major work in several volumes. In almost every century and every country the construction and timbres of the organ were enriched by a process of evolution which was exploited by both composers and performers. As early as the 14th century the organ was called the King of instruments, and I the late 19th century was described as ‘the most perfect musical instrument that the ingenuity of man has hitherto devised.’
Until the 18th century the organ had been a major instrument for the expression of polyphonic music, which required a transparent texture so that separate parts could be clearly heard. Many churches in Britain and Europe still possess small 18th century organs with voices of silvery sweetness which are perfect for music of many strands, and a considerable number of larger organs of that period also still survive and are treasured for the information they provide about construction in their time, as well as the authentic timbre of contemporaneous music. Automatic or barrel organs were also popular in the 18th century and these were skillfully constructed by some of the greatest organ builders. Barrel organs consist of a barrel turned by hand which bristles with pins; when the barrel is turned each pin makes a pipe speak. The pinning of barrels was done in such a manner that the tunes, their harmonies and the ornamentation were accurately consistent with the style of the period when, in many cases, churches preferred a barrel organ to some fumbling part-time human organist.
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