Organ

ORGAN. - A wind musical instrument with sounding pipes (from about ten in the primitive ones to several thousand in modern ones) of varying size, shape and material (metal, wood, etc.), grouped, according to their timbre, into stops. The sound is produced either by the air that vibrates in the body of the pipes and is the deeper the higher the vibrating column of air (the other characteristics of the pipe: diameter, cylindrical or conical shape, etc., have repercussions only on the timbre) or by a vibrating reed, fixed in the foot of the pipe, which serves only to balance the sonorities emitted by the reed. The necessary current of air, generated by mechanical means

(pumps, bellows, fans) is driven into the wind-chests, the vital joints of the organ, built with various systems (slider, wind, piston, membrane, electric, etc.); on these rest, arranged in rows, the pipes of the same kind and shape, and of progressive size. The wind-chests are joined by means of the transmission (mechanical or tracker action, tubular-pneumatic, electric) to the console at the organist's disposal, which carries the keyboards (from one to five, in exceptional cases up to seven, with a varying number of keys), the pedalboard (with a maximum of 32 pedals), the mechanisms for operating the stops and all the other devices that facilitate the handling of the instrument or amplify its tonal resources (pedals, couplers, unions, reversible pistons, thumb pistons, collective controls, cancelers, free and adjustable combinations, swell pedals, etc.).

The o. arises from the addition of an air reservoir, as in the bagpipe, to the panpipes. In its two-thousand-year evolution it underwent the most surprising technical and tonal transformations.

The ûghâbh of the Bible, organum in the Vulgate, a term preserved in the new translation of the Psalter, indicates generically a wind instrument. A primitive o. with bellows seems to have been the maghrêphâh mentioned in the Talmud. According to A. Kircher (Musurgia universalis, Rome 1650) the maîrôgîthâ' (Dan., III, 5, 7, 10, 15) belonged to the same genus, but the description he gives of it is fanciful. But the history of the o. begins with the hidraulus, so named from the use of water to balance the pressure of the air produced by pumps. Invented by Ctesibius, who lived under the reign of Ptolemy I (246-21 B.C.), it is described by Hero of Alexandria in Spiritalia seu pneumatica, I, 42. Ancient Arabic sources preserve under the name of Muristus Greek treatises, among them a description of the hydraulic o., perhaps by Ctesibius himself. In any case the Oriental sources give no information about instruments of this kind earlier than the hydraulus. In the one described by Vitruvius (De architectura, X, 13, 1-6), groups of pipes can be selected at will. This characteristic is confirmed by the discovery at Aquincum (1931) of the remains of an authentic Roman o. Each group of pipes was controlled by a perforated slider, made to slide by means of a handle between the boards of the wind-chest along its length. The analogy with the mechanism of the stops in the slider wind-chest is evident. However, in the hydraulus the individual groups of pipes do not select, as in the stops, different timbres, but different keys or modes. Other perforated sliders, placed above the previous ones but sliding along the depth of the wind-chest, were connected with the keys; when the holes of the sliders coincided with those of the boards of the wind-chest, the pipes sounded. The latter, very different from present-day ones, were nevertheless flue pipes of small proportions, for the most part stopped and of narrow scale, made with an alloy of rolled brass. They must have sounded at high pressure because they were fitted with reinforcing rings. The hydraulus had great dif-

(phot. Museums of Rome)
ORGANO. - Hydraulus with an organist, of which only the legs remain. Terracotta from the late 1st century - early 2nd century - Carthage, Lavigerie Museum.

diffusion, especially as a secular instrument, and it is reproduced in numerous archaeological monuments, such as the famous terracotta found at Carthage in 1885, and the graffiti discovered in 1928 beneath the basilica of St. Sebastian in Rome, etc. (cf. C. Mercurelli, Hydraulus graffito su epigrafe sepolcrale del cemeterio di Commodilla, in Riv. Arch. Crist., 15 [1938], pp. 43-106). The obelisk of Theodosius (d. 393) in Constantinople depicts an organ with bellows.

It appears that the Roman organ disappeared with the barbarian invasions. It survived in the East, whence it returned to Europe; in the year 757, all the annals record, venit organum in Franciam, an admired gift from the emperor Constantine Copronymus to Pepin. In 826 Baldric, marquis of Friuli, brought to Louis the Pious the Venetian priest George, a builder of organs according to the Greek manner, who was charged with building one at Aachen. But only the discovery of the ventilabrum (also called a screen), the valve, which would replace, in all its functions, the holes of the sliding sliders used in the hydraulus, allowed the medieval organ a development. It became an object of study, and the monks wrote the first theoretical treatises on its construction (De mensura fistularum, 9th century, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, ms. lat. 12049, fol. 43; Incipit ordo fistularum by the anonymous of Bobbio, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana). With due reservations one must receive certain reports on the use of the organ drawn from unreliable documents.

In the 13th century, under the impulse of the Ars nova, the organ made notable progress and there spread above all the very nimble portative (portable organ) played with the right hand while the left presses the small bellows. There exists an abundant iconography on the subject in the paintings of the time, from Giotto onward. From these reproductions it also appears that the portatives were equipped with handles, certainly to select the stops or to open the access of air to certain low pipes called bordoni (in the allegory of Music by Andrea da Firenze ca. 1355, in the Cappellone degli Spagnoli at S. Maria Novella in Florence, on the side of the instrument 4 handles can be made out, and in the Incoronazione della Vergine by Caterino Veneziano, at the Accademia in Venice, 3 are traced).

From the development of the portative was born the positive, of larger proportions, with a more extended keyboard to be played with both hands. It rested on a table, whence its name, and later on a base that contained the bellows. With the positive the slider chest (with drawstops) took its definitive form. At the same time the great church organ, born of environmental necessity, assumed a physiognomy of its own.

Gradually instruments begin to establish themselves with national characteristics. Especially in Flanders, the great organ assumes the appearance of a compact sound mass, not susceptible to variations in intensity; therefore the need soon arose to add another detached body, with less powerful sonority, but one that could be modified by registration, as in the positive. The new body would be placed behind the organist's back and would be called the rear positive. From this first innovation there then derives the introduction of all the other bodies placed above or below the main wind-chest. In the French school various bodies are likewise employed, but with markedly coloristic functions. Italy, on the other hand, perhaps because its organ builders knew how to select, in the individual stops, the compact mass of the great organ earlier than those of other countries, did not feel the need to add other bodies to the fundamental nucleus, and therefore its classical instruments were always with a single keyboard. Even though classical Italian organ music did not give particular importance to the pedal, Italian organs had a pedalboard from as early as the 14th century, which therefore was not brought to Italy by Bernardo d'Allemagne, as Praetorius would have it; the organ of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence, built in 1379, had a pedalboard of 12 pedals called calculos pro tastando cum pedibus. It is the century in which Italian cathedrals were definitively provided with organs in maiori forma qua fieri posset (Orvieto 1373). In the 15th century Italian organ-building consolidated its artistic directions. The best-known artist of the first half of the century is Matteo da Prato (1395-1465), but unfortunately technical details about his numerous instruments are lacking. The ripieno, a sound amalgam of numerous pipes tuned in ascending octaves and fifths, assumes those unmistakable and perfect sonorities that still today form the finest quality of the Italian organ. The slider wind-chest of the positives, perhaps because of technical difficulties, had not yet been used in the great organ; in Italy the wind-chest was soon introduced, in which the perforated slider to be moved was replaced by an equal number of small pallets, and a rod connected all the pallets of a single stop. Even though the name "stop" already appears in a document

Trevisan document of 1436, in which the expense is recorded for iron wire ad infingenda registros et tastos in the organ of the Cathedral, many decades would pass before the use of a regular registration in large organs could be proven. The well-known Bernardo d'Alemagna, as perhaps Matteo da Prato, still belonged to the old school, which did not know the division of stops in the wind-chests. Zarlino (1588) recalls an ancient organ, of suitable size, in the basilica of the Santo in Padua, whose wind-chest "had many rows of sounds, which contained many pipes, nor for all that had any stop." But Bernardo's son, known by the name of Antonio Dilmano, would in 1487 reduce de antico ad modernum the organ of Milan Cathedral made by his father, and more explicitly in 1495 would transform al modo novo cum registri an instrument of Feltre. In this age and in the sixteenth century, among the builders of Italian organs stand out Lorenzo di Giacomo (S. Petronio in Bologna, 1471, one of the few ancient instruments still extant), Domenico di Lorenzo (St. Peter's in the Vatican, 1496), G. Battista Fachetti (S. Lorenzo in Genoa, 1552), Vincenzo Colombo (St. Mark's in Venice, 1558), Luca Biasi (St. John Lateran, 1597) and above all the Antegnati family of Brescia. In the Arte organica published in 1608, Costanzo Antegnati illustrates the artistic merits of his own family: and Antonio Barcotto in a short treatise of 1652 completes the technical notions on the classic Italian organ. It has no innovating tendencies: to the family of the principals forming the ripieno in the last decades of the fifteenth century only the flute in 15th and 12th is added, and in the second half of the sixteenth century the fiffaro or vox humana, a stop based on acoustic tremolo. Instruments with two keyboards or with numerous stops of various timbre, common abroad, are exceptions in Italy. Technically perfected, the organ reached a tonal equilibrium that favored the development of organ composition and reached its culmination in Johann Sebastian Bach. It is the period of the greatest flowering of German organ building, and famous organ builders create important and grandiose instruments. In Italy there was no parallel evolution in that epoch, even though foreign organ builders sought to enlarge the perfect but restricted scheme of the Italian organ. Eugenio Gasparini (1624-1706), a Silesian, first teacher of Andreas Silbermann, for almost half a century propagated a new technique in the Venetian territories. Guglielmo Hermans (1601-83), a Flemish lay Jesuit, spread throughout Italy the evolved forms of the Nordic organ; the Provençal school insinuated itself with Antonio Julian in Piedmont, and perhaps with an anonymous treatise (ms. of the Biblioteca Martini, Bologna), in which the Italian and French organ-building schools of the second half of the 17th century are compared. But Italian organ builders did not depart from the national tradition; only in the eighteenth century did Azzolino della Ciaia (1671-1753) in Pisa and Donato del Piano (1698-1785) in Catania create instruments of exceptional size for Italy, and the Venetian school of Pietro Nacchini (1694-1770?) and of Gaetano Callido (1727-1813) adopted proportions skillfully studied on classical models and on foreign technical treatises. Only with the Serassi of Bergamo did the Italian organ become enriched with new timbres, especially of the reed family; in its forms, however, it did not assimilate the technical characteristics necessary to perform the organ compositions of German and French authors.

German Romanticism replaced the characteristic sonorities of the Baroque organ with orchestral timbres. The nineteenth-century organ benefited from many innovations, such as the Barker pneumatic lever, tubular transmission, piston wind-chests, etc.; these innovations are in part to the detriment of true organ sonorities. The French organ too underwent the Romantic influence, but had in Cavaillé-Coll (1811-99) an artist of genius, who knew how to avoid every excess. In Italy, toward the last decades of the nineteenth century, with the spread of the Cecilian movement, the reform of the organ was not limited to the necessary technical updates in the number and form of the keyboards and pedals, but modified the traditional sonorities in order to follow Romantic ideals. The Englishman William Trice (1847-1918) was the first to introduce into Italy the new systems of manufacture. An artist endowed with fine sensibility is shown by Carlo Vegezzi-Bossi (1858-1927), who grafted the traditional Italian tonal scheme onto the reformed organ.

Toward the first quarter of the present century a reaction movement arose in Germany, in favor of Baroque sonorities, while the American organ of the last decades, through ingenious technical innovations of skilled artists such as Robert Hope-Jones (1859-1914), spread the new sonorities of high-pressure stops and perfect electric transmissions. But even the best European factories, not least the Italian ones, vie in technical perfection with the products from beyond the Ocean. Modern technique has succeeded in replacing the pipes of the organ with electric circuits; various types of instruments have spread as a surrogate for the traditional organ, among which the best known is the Hammond electrophone.

With the introduction of figured bass, the organ became the most appropriate instrument for the realization of the continuo in sacred compositions. It then performed a similar function in sacred music concerted with instruments, even when the orchestra had notable importance, as in the so-called Viennese classics (Haydn, Mozart, etc.). In figured music, an obbligato part with preeminent tasks is today often entrusted to the organ. A particular development was had by the organ accompaniment of Gregorian chant, which in modern times is often a practical necessity and increasingly increases the importance of the organ as a support of popular singing.

The resources of modern technique, which facilitate the connection in a single console of several organs located apart, can be usefully exploited, provided one does not commit the error of considering the individual bodies, placed at a considerable distance from one another, a single instrument.

For the use of the organ in churches v. MUSICA.

Renato Lunelli

ART

No monumental organs are known in churches earlier than the mid-fifteenth century. In the oldest ones the case is devoid of ornament, and the pipes may be hidden from view by doors, mostly painted with a single scene on the outside, with figures of saints or distinct scenes on the outside. This decoration of the organ, often entrusted to very great artists, was frequent in northern Italy (a famous example being the doors by Cosmè Tura, now in the Museum of the cathedral of Ferrara), especially in the Veneto and in regions artistically connected with Venice; organ doors were painted by Giambellino, by Carpaccio, by Sebastiano del Piombo, by Tintoretto, by Veronese, and at Brescia by Romanino and by Moretto, down to the late sixteenth century. In central Italy, already at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the organ with pipes in view within an architectural façade had come into use: one of the first known examples is that of S. Maria della Scala in Siena, after a design by Peruzzi; slightly later is that of the cathedral of Arezzo, of 1535, Vasari's first architectural work, conceived as an altar frame and connected to the choir gallery below.

But above all in the seventeenth century, with the development of sacred music, the importance of the organ increases, and Baroque sumptuousness increasingly enriches its façades with ornaments, and expands them by linking them to the choir gallery (v.). After Bernini, who in the famous organ of the right transept of S. Maria del Popolo achieved a new pictorial effect in the contrast between the rigid verticality of the pipes and the motion of the twisted fronds, seventeenth-century fancy runs riot, animating the organs with festoons, volutes, statues (Chiesa Nuova); transferred to the counter-façade, the organ becomes the central motif of the architectural composition of the entire wall (S. Maria della Vittoria, Gesù e Maria, etc.).

In the eighteenth century that of the Maddalena is a lively example of the most whimsical Rococo. More rare are nineteenth-century façades of an architectural character, among which are remembered those of the Gesù in Rome, which coldly repeat sixteenth-century motifs; and that of the church of the Servi in Rimini, which forms a monumental complex with the choir gallery supported by caryatids. - See plates XVIII-XIX.

Mario Zocca