The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by driving pressurised air (called wind) through the organ pipes selected from a keyboard. Because each pipe produces a single tone and pitch, the pipes are provided in sets called ranks, each of which has a common timbre, loudness (volume), and construction throughout the keyboard compass. In other words, a rank is a set of pipes all having the same tonal quality, but having a range of different pitches. Most organs have many ranks of pipes of differing pitch, timbre, and volume that the player can employ singly or in combination through the use of controls called stops.
A pipe organ has one or more keyboards (called manuals) played by the hands, and most have a pedalboard played by the feet; each keyboard controls its own division (group of stops). The keyboard(s), pedalboard, and stops are housed in the organ's console. The organ's continuous supply of wind allows it to sustain notes for as long as the corresponding keys are pressed, unlike the piano and harpsichord whose sound begins to dissipate immediately after a key is depressed. The smallest portable pipe organs may have only one or two dozen pipes and one manual; the largest pipe organs can have over 33,000 pipes and seven manuals.Willey, David (2001). "The World's Largest Organs". Retrieved on 3 March 2008. A list of some of the most notable and largest pipe organs in the world can be viewed at List of pipe organs. A ranking of the largest organs in the world—based on the criterion constructed by Michał Szostak, i.e. 'the number of ranks and additional equipment managed from a single console'—can be found in the quarterly magazine The Organ and in the online journal Vox Humana.
The origins of the pipe organ can be traced back to the hydraulis in Ancient Greece, in the 3rd century BC,Randel "Organ", 583. in which the wind supply was created by the weight of displaced water in an airtight container. By the 6th or 7th century AD, bellows were used to supply Byzantine organs with wind.Dalby, Andrew Taste of Byzantium. IB Tauris, 2010, , p. 118. "the narrative of the Syrian hostage Harun Ibn Yahya...'This is what happens at Christmas...they bring what is called an organon. It is a remarkable wooden object like an oil-press, and covered with solid leather. Sixty copper pipes are placed in it, so that they project above the leather, and where they are visible above the leather they are gilded. You can only see a small part of some of them, as they are of different lengths. On one side of this structure there is a hole in which they place a bellows like a blacksmith's. three crosses are placed at the two extremities and in the middle of the organon. Two men come in to work the bellows, and the master stands and bidding to press on the pipes, and each pipe, according to its tuning and the master's playing, sounds the parsed of the Emperor. The guests are meanwhile seated at their tables, and twenty men enter with cymbals in their hands. The miscue continues while the guests continue their meal. A pipe organ with "great leaden pipes" was sent to the West by the Byzantine emperor Constantine V as a gift to Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, in 757.Willis, Henry. "The Organ, Its History and Development." Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association. Vol. 73. No. 1. Taylor & Francis Group, 1946. p. 60 Pepin's son Charlemagne requested a similar organ for his chapel in Aachen in 812, beginning the pipe organ's establishment in Western European church music.Douglas Bush and Richard Kassel eds., "The Organ, an Encyclopedia." Routledge. 2006. p. 327. In England, "The first organ of which any detailed record exists was built in Winchester Cathedral in the 10th century. It was a huge machine with 400 pipes, which needed two men to play it and 70 men to blow it, and its sound could be heard throughout the city."Winchester Cathedral http://www.winchester-cathedral.org.uk/worship-and-music/music-choir/the-cathedral-organ/ . Beginning in the 12th century, the organ began to evolve into a complex instrument capable of producing different timbres. By the 17th century, most of the sounds available on the modern classical organ had been developed.Randel "Organ", 584–585. At that time, the pipe organ was the most complex human-made deviceMichael Woods, "Strange ills afflict pipe organs of Europe". Post-Gazette, 26 April 2005. —a distinction it retained until it was displaced by the telephone exchange in the late 19th century.N. Pippenger, "Complexity Theory", Scientific American, 239:90–100 (1978).
Pipe organs are installed in churches, synagogues, concert halls, schools, mansions, other public buildings and in private properties. They are used in the performance of classical music, sacred music, secular music, and popular music. In the early 20th century, pipe organs were installed in theaters to accompany the screening of films during the silent movie era; in municipal auditoria, where orchestral transcriptions were popular; and in the homes of the wealthy. The beginning of the 21st century has seen a resurgence in installations in concert halls. A substantial organ repertoire spans over 500 years.Thomas, Steve, 2003. Pipe organs 101: an introduction to pipe organ basics . Retrieved on 6 May 2007.
History and development
Antiquity
The organ is one of the oldest instruments still used in European classical music that has commonly been credited as having been derived from Greece. Its earliest predecessors were built in ancient Greece in the 3rd century BC. The word organ is derived from the Ancient Greek (),Harper, Douglas (2001). Organ . Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved on 10 February 2008. a generic term for an instrument or a tool,Liddell, Henry George & Scott, Robert (1940). Organon . A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. . Perseus. Retrieved on 9 February 2008. via the Latin , an instrument similar to a portative organ used in ancient Roman circus games.
The Greek engineer Ctesibius of Alexandria is credited with inventing the organ in the 3rd century BC. He devised an instrument called the hydraulis, which delivered a wind supply maintained through water pressure to a set of pipes.Randel "Hydraulis", 385. The hydraulis was played in the arenas of the Roman Empire. The pumps and water regulators of the hydraulis were replaced by an inflated leather bag in the 2nd century AD, and true bellows began to appear in the Eastern Roman Empire in the 6th or 7th century AD. Some 400 pieces of a hydraulis from the year 228 AD were revealed during the 1931 archaeological excavations in the former Roman town Aquincum, province of Pannonia (modern Budapest), which was used as a music instrument by the Aquincum fire dormitory; a modern replica produces an enjoyable sound.
The 9th-century Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih (d. 913), in his lexicographical discussion of instruments, cited the (organ) as one of the typical instruments of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. It was often used in the Hippodrome in the imperial capital of Constantinople. A Syrian visitor describes a pipe organ powered by two servants pumping "bellows like a blacksmith's" played while guests ate at the emperor's Christmas dinner in Constantinople in 911. The first Western European pipe organ with "great leaden pipes" was sent from Constantinople to the West by the Byzantine emperor Constantine V as a gift to Pepin the Short King of the Franks in 757. Pepin's son Charlemagne requested a similar organ for his chapel in Aachen in 812, beginning its establishment in Western European church music.Douglas Bush and Richard Kassel eds., "The Organ, an Encyclopedia." Routledge. 2006. p. 327. Extract of page 327
Medieval
From 800 to the 1400s, the use and construction of organs developed in significant ways, from the invention of the portative and positive organs to the installation of larger organs in major churches such as the cathedrals of Winchester and Notre Dame of Paris. In this period, organs began to be used in secular and religious settings. The introduction of organ into religious settings is ambiguous, most likely because the original position of the Church was that instrumental music was not to be allowed. By the 12th century there is evidence for permanently installed organs existing in religious settings such as the Abbey of Fécamp and other locations throughout Europe.
Several innovations occurred to organs in the Middle Ages, such as the creation of the portative and the positive organ. The portative organs were small and created for secular use and made of lightweight, delicate materials that would have been easy for one individual to transport and play on their own. The portative organ was a "flue-piped keyboard instrument, played with one hand while the other operated the bellows." Its portability made the portative useful for the accompaniment of both sacred and secular music in a variety of settings. The positive organ was larger than the portative organ but was still small enough to be portable and used in a variety of settings like the portative organ. Toward the middle of the 13th century, the portatives represented in the miniatures of illuminated manuscripts appear to have real keyboards with balanced keys, as in the Cantigas de Santa Maria.Riaño, J. F. (1887). Critical and Bibliographical Notes on Early Spanish Music (PDF). London: Quaritch, 119–127. .
It is difficult to directly determine when larger organs were first installed in Europe. An early detailed eyewitness account from Wulfstan of Winchester gives an idea of what organs were like prior to the 13th century, after which more records of large church organs exist. In his account, he describes the sound of the organ: "among them bells outstanding in tone and size, and an organ [sounding] through bronze pipes prepared according to the musical proportions." This is one of the earliest accounts of organs in Europe and also indicates that the organ was large and more permanent than other evidence would suggest.
The first organ documented to have been permanently installed was one installed in 1361 in Halberstadt, Germany.Kennedy, Michael (Ed.) (2002). "Organ". In The Oxford Dictionary of Music, p. 644. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The first documented permanent organ installation likely prompted Guillaume de Machaut to describe the organ as "the king of instruments", a characterization still frequently applied.Sumner "The Organ", 39. The Halberstadt organ was the first instrument to use a chromatic key layout across its three manuals and pedalboard, although the keys were wider than on modern instruments.Keyboard instrument (2008). In Encyclopædia Britannica Online (subscription required, though relevant reference is viewable in concise article). Retrieved on 26 January 2008. The width of the keys was slightly over , wide enough to be struck down by the fist, as the early keys are reported to have invariably been manipulated. It had twenty bellows operated by ten men, and the wind pressure was so high that the player had to use the full strength of their arm to hold down a key.