ORGAN. A wind instrument of la•g dimensions, whose earliest history cannot be exactly traced, though it is safe to assume that its predecessors were the bagpipes and Pan's pipes. The orgasms 1Q/dont/learn of Ctesibius, native of Alexandria (e.250 me.), has been described by his pupil, lleron, also of Alexandria, from whom it would appear that organs were made in Greece and Italy with wind generated by bellows (air pumps), and also by means of water pressure. There is also extant a descrip tion (Greek) of an organ belonging to Julian the Apostate (fourth century A.D.). and there are other examples from Cassiodorns and Saint .Augustine. Further data are obtained from an cient reliefs. representations, and accounts which would seem to indicate that the instrument wa known in the West. even before the Emperor Constantine (Copronymos) sent a gift of one to King Pepin in 757. These early instruments were naturally imperfect, rarely possessing more than from eight to fifteen pipes; while the key board consisted of small upright plates made of wood which the performer pressed upon. The sound of the pipe continued until the key plate was restored to its former position. The organ is said to have been first employed in the church during the time of Pope Vitalian I. (0.666 A.D.)., Pepin placed the Constantine organ in the Church of Saint Corneille at Compiegne, and Charle magne had one made at Aix-la-Chapelle, a model of the one at Compiegne. Caliph Ila•un al Inshid presented Charlemagne with an organ built by Ciafor. an Arab. In Europe at this period the organ-builders of Venice were con sidered the best, but in the following century both the French and the aermans made rapid strides. The great organ in Winchester Cathedral, described by the monk \Vulstan, was the first instrument of importance erected in England. it is described as having been operated by "two brethren of concordant spirit," and its tone is said to have "reverberated and echoed in every direction so that no one was able to draw near and hear the sound, but had to stop with his hands his gaping ears." Among the Anglo-Saxons of the tenth century the title 'Bum bulum' was applied to the organ. 1:p to this time the instrument was worked by means of slides, which, according as they were opened or closed, admitted wind to the pipes.
The modern keyboard (q.v.) grew out of the levers of this period, which have been well described as resembling those used by a railway signal switchman. The organ already mentioned at Winchester is said to have had four hundred pipes and two claviers, each of which had twenty keys (the compass of the Guido monoehord), and also had ten pipes for each key, which were further reinforced in the octave and double octave. The special development of the twelfth century seems to have been the division into registers of the pipe-work, which, with its com plicated mechanism, caused a great increase in the size of the instrument and made necessary such large keys that they had to be struck with the fists or elbows. The introduction of reed pipes occurred in the fifteenth century, subse quent to the invention of pedals in Germany about 1350. improvements were also made in the keyboard so that fingers could be used in stead of fists. Organ-building now became a regular trade. The father of the modern organ building craft, so far as any authoritative ac count is concerned, was Albert van 0s, who flourished in the first half of the twelfth century, and who is supposed to have been the inventor of pedals, although the idea is also attributed to Ludwig van Valbeke, of Brabant. and also to a German named Bernhard. Van Os built the celebrated organ of Saint Nicholas Church at Utrecht. From this time also dates the influ ence of the organist on the builder, for improved instruments made possible the skillful organist, and his reflex influence discovered and developed further improvements and possibilities in the instrument. Coming to the time of Bach, we
find the organ the most thoroughly developed and possibly the most important musical instru ment of the period. Saxony, which may be described as the birthplace of the magnificent instrument of to-day, boasts of over two hundred organ-builders between 1359 and 17S0. including such world-famous workmen as the Silbermanns, Hildebrand. Gabler. Sommer, and Herbst. The difference between the French and the German systems had an important bearing on the develop ment of the various pipes. The French gave the reeds to the instrument, while the Germans invented the gaml)a family and brought the small wooden pipe tone to great perfection. The next great. and comparatively recent discovery was a method for equalizing the wind pressure, by the introduction of inverted ribs in the upper reservoirs of the bellows, an improvement which made possible a constant wind pressure and con sequently an evenness of tone which had hitherto been unattainable. The 'hatiptwerk' and 'ober werk' of Germany correspond to the 'great' of the modern English and American organ: and similarly the 'brustwerk' is the equivalent of the English 'swell.' The `ruckpositiv' corre sponded to the English 'choir' or 'chair' organ. A distinctive feature of the German organs was their 'echo' organ, which contained stops redu plicating either the whole or the upper portion of smile of the stops on the main organ. As they were built in an inclosed box, they produced the effect of distance. An English maker, Abra ham Jordan. invented the simple contrivance of shutters about 1720, an invention which in creased the tone of the echo stops and was prac tically the first real 'swell.' Other countries were somewhat. slow to avail themselves of the English invention, for, according to Burney, no trace of it could be found anywhere on the Continent except in the Michelkirche at Hamburg, and .even there it was so small as to be almost ineffective. In France the disposition of the stops in classes seems to have been the same as in Germany, Holland, and England. The organ of Saint Loeb (1750) had four manuals, of which the great and choir communicated by means of a spring. The third manual was for the reed stops, and the fourth or upper for the echoes. The spring of communication was the predecessor of the modern coupler. Coming down to the nineteenth century, we find the etTorts of the builders directed to still further improve ments in the wind apparatus and the keyboard. An Englishman, C. S. Barker (1S013-79). noticed that in the great organ at York Minster several pounds' pressure was necessary to force down any single key. In the search for a remedy the principle of the hydraulic press occurred to him, with the result that lie devised a movement or mechanism by which the action was set in motion by the expansive power of compressed air, so that the key, instead of being a lever which had to move a complicated mechanism of back falls, rollers, springs, etc., became a valve lever whose only function was to admit or cut off a small quantity of air in order to obtain a result greater than had been possible before. Barker offered his discovery to the celebrated builders, Messrs. Hill, of London, when they were at work OD the organ in the Birmingham Town Hall. but they rejected it. The equally celebrated Parisian builder, Cavaille-Coll, was next approached, and promptly applied it to the organ of Saint Denis. Thus the three great inventions of the swell, the bellows. and the pneumatic lever belong to the English school of organ-building.