We left off near the end of my discussion of pipe work. Flue and reed pipes, stops and sliders, pallets and windchests. See Part 1 as needed, also the Havinga video.
One last tidbit, pipes can be encased in a box with shutters at the front, and sometimes also on the top. These shutters can be gradually opened or closed by a foot pedal centered above the pedalboard, one per swell box. You can see a set of swell shutters above the central V in the lower set of pipes in the above image. Swell boxes provide some amount of crescendo/decrescendo capability, along with some corresponding increase/decrease in the upper harmonics. A gentle sort of muffling if you will. Most organs have at least one division (keyboard) under swell expression. Here, a 4 manual and pedal console with 3 swell pedals, many stop knobs, and multiple thumb and foot pistons for combinations (not covered herein).
So how on earth is all this controlled, behind the stop knobs, keyboards and pedalboard? The typical 61 note keyboard is roughly 33″ wide. The typical, insofar as there is such a thing, windchest is more than 8 feet wide.
There is a direct mechanical connection (the only option prior to electricity, or fancy but initially difficult games with pneumatics), between key and pallet, the ‘valve’ that lets air flow from the windchest to the pipes whose stops have been drawn. It’s complex, but needs to be sturdy and reliable. Fortunately, far fewer stop mechanisms are needed than keyboard mechanisms.
Tracker action is so called because the straight line links from the key are called trackers. If the key is hinged at the rear, behind the sharps/flats, the key is suspended, through all the linkages, by the spring holding the pallet closed. This is called, naturally enough, ‘suspended action’ and for some of us aficionados, it is the gold standard in actions. Note that pedals are hinged at the rear, despite ‘rear’ being reversed from the keyboards, that is, as far from the sharps/flats as the length of the pedal.
An aside on pedalboards. The American (AGO, American Guild of Organists) standard has the pedals radiating and concave, to more naturally follow the motion of the feet. The British (RCO, Royal College of Organists) are non-radiating/straight but are concave. The original European tradition is both non-radiating and flat. Again, see the Havinga video for an older European pedalboard. Clearly, the performance enhancements of radiating or radiating/concave may be real, but are relatively minor. Experienced organists claim switching between them is fairly easy.
Organists wear shoes with moderate heels to facilitate heel and toe playing.
When the key or pedal is depressed, the tracker is pulled down and the motion is transferred to the pallet. If the key is hinged in the middle, the tracker is at the rear of the key and is pushed up. It needs to be converted to a downward pull, which is accomplished by a backfall. Imagine a triangle with a pivot at its low apex, long edge on top and horizontal, the tracker pushing up on one corner, causing the opposite corner to move down:
But how to handle the disparity of width between keyboard/pedalboard and windchest? This is done with rollers, narrow but stiff cylinders with links at each end and able to roll around their horizontal center. A downward pull at one end becomes a downward pull at the opposite end, pulling down whatever is above.
The final piece of the action (heh) is the square. A single square changes the direction of motion of the tracker, typically from a downward pull to a horizontal pull. A second square can then change the direction from a horizontal pull to a downward pull. With rollers and squares, actions can be routed around corners.
Fuller details can be found at my source for the gifs linked above.
Trackers, rollers and squares make up ‘suspended action’, wherein the key is hung in place, suspended from, the pallet spring. The first portion of a pedalboard tracker action:
From Wikipedia, Tracker Action
Now you have this set of parts for each of the (up to) 61 keys and (up to) 32 pedals. The mechanism needs to be responsive, light in touch at the keys, adjustable in fine increments, and must all fit within the console and the space between it and the windchests. No wonder consoles were/are so often embedded within the body of the organ:
Oops. What about the pipes that make up the facade? And the Trumpets en Chamade? Conveyances are used, tubes that sit in the windchest where the pipe would ordinarily go and are routed to the foot of the pipe in the facade. If the Trumpets en Chamade are on higher wind pressure than the rest of the pipes in their division, they may be on their own windchests, thus requiring yet more routing within the action. The same for other ‘high pressure’ ranks.
Prior to electric blowers, wind was provided by reservoirs fed by bellows pumped manually. Wind pressure ranges from under 1″ to 10″ or more, although 3/4″ to 5″ seems to cover the common cases. Wind pressure is measured by a water gauge, placed in a toe board where a pipe will go, with the water in a U-shaped tube.
I have not covered manual to manual or manual to pedal coupling, combination pistons (buttons seen below the keyboards and the toe studs seen above the pedal board in modern organs), nor electric, electro-pneumatic, nor pneumatic actions, or other details., but those quickly get into ‘eyes glaze over’ territory.
I hope you’ve gained some appreciation for the complexity of the organ and the skill and ingenuity of builders in the 17th through mid-19th century. That’s roughly when other action schemes began to come into play, some more robust and successful than others, but none with the sensitivity of the direct physical connection from performer to pipe of the tracker action. Tracker action began to make a serious comeback in the early mid 20th century, along with other traditional organ building techniques. Tracker action instruments are widely available today from the top builders in the world.
Thank you for reading!
And we’re back — this time with the action.
I’m amazed at the mechanical complexity of these things. Thank you for some excellent work.
I want to thank Zwak, of the many subordinate clauses, for linking this in last week’s episode.
One chapter in the book discusses Taylor and Boody Organ Builders, who make tracker action organs. There’s a nice section on building pipes and another on voicing.
T&B’s web site is worth a visit; look at their brochure (linked on the ‘about us’ page) for stoplists and pictures of beautiful instruments. They are very highly regarded.
Taylor and Boody
Looks like T & B have a current project less than 2 hours South of me in Plymouth, Indiana. I noticed some younger people in their website photo too, so hopefully the craft will carry on.
Excellent! The craft has survived for more than 500 years, and remains vigorous. It’s a tricky business to navigate. Maintenance work carries many builders.
I regret that I’ve not heard a Taylor and Boody organ. I like the specifications I see.
Oh, good. I wasn’t sure if you caught that, and was going to put a link up this week also. Crawford is one of my favorites, he writes about the nexus of humanity and technology, where art meets the machine, so to speak. A couple other books of his are Shop Class as Soul Craft and Why We Drive.
Yes, indeed. I quibble with some of his stances, but all in all, good stuff.
Where is the last picture from?
I’ll double check, but I believe it’s the Muller organ in the Haarlem Cathedral, The Netherlands.
Yes, St. Bavo Kirk. Here as well as many other web sites. “The most photographed organ in the world.”
Thanks!
I had, once upon an olden time, a recording of E. Power Biggs playing that organ. Magnificent sound!
Great writeup! Thank you!
/blush/ Thank you for reading, and for your kind appreciation!
This has been a great (short) series. Pipe organs are fascinating technically, and they seem to be pretty tolerant of various spatial arrangements which lets the visually artistic possibilities shine through.
Thanks for sharing!
Thank you! And you’re quite welcome. It was fun to pull together and then condense. There’s just So. Much!
The spatial possibilities are indeed vast, which proves to be a mixed blessing. The St. Bavo Muller instrument works well within the constraints of width vs height.
, and the acoustics favor the design. But look at the Taylor and Boody brochure for a survey of a range of solutions. Then look at the Rufatti Organ in St. Mary’s Cathedral, San Francisco. And on and on…
Organ designers struggle with aesthetics, functionality, space constraints, and acoustics. And, I suspect, either madness or the serenity of the Buddha 😉
Longwood Gardens (former DuPont estate in PA near Delaware) has a fabulous organ; we’ve gone a couple of times for the Christmas music program.
That used to be my nickname. “Fabulous Organ”
I don’t your organ ever made these sounds.
-> believe after don’t
Nice video!
Long Wood was my nickname in high school.
Just don’t use the Grindr.
Tell me about it. Rolls eyes. Not having a good time there.
Thank you so much for writing these 🙂
I’m very glad they have been appreciated! I’m a bit mad for pipe organs 🙂
Years ago, I had occasion to listen to some Bach sponsored by a Minneapolis pipe organ enthusiasts group called Pipe Dreams.
https://www.pipedreams.org/page/events
(Lots of beautiful pictures on that site).
It was around Christmas and was at an (apparently) well-known organ at the unassumingly named Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, MN.
https://pipeorgandatabase.org/organ/7782
I recall not just hearing it but feeling it. Really great experience.
Thanks for the reminder, Shirley!
I went to a wedding there once. Amazingly beautiful church!
Pipe Dreams is, or was (but I believe it’s still going) a weekly radio broadcast. It might be on Sirius? Or your local public station.
Oooh, Visser-Rowland built some exquisite organs before splitting apart at the hyphen. I really should have made the effort to hear the Eden Prairie instrument when I lived in Plymouth/Maple Grove. Regrets, I have a few.
We were neighbors? When did you live there?
Beginning of 99 to end of 2001.
Thanks again, Shirley. The complexity is so impressive and I love that the skills still exist.
Great series!
OK, OT – this was a really interesting read for me. Maybe some of you know all of this or all of you know some of it, I knew some names but not the details.
A friend is the substitute organist at church. He says he would be rich if he had a dollar for every time someone asked “so how do you like playing with your organ?”
Snicker
Thank you for the lovely article! I love a good organ. I sent you the info on the Arlington Tx organ last week. If I get any recordings I will post them. Would love to find some pre-2000 recordings.
Were I younger and more energetic, I’d think very seriously about a database of organ recordings organized by builder, rather than performer. Of course, I’d want performer and repertoire, but those are easily found. Finding recordings of a particular builder’s instruments is arbitrarily difficult aside from a very few stand-outs (Skinner, Flentrop, the above pictured and mentioned Muller, Schnitger, Silberman, um …)
This is the kind of piece I love about this place. Great series, Shirley.
Thank you!
It was my job to wake up early on Sundee mornings and turn the thermostat up at church. I would sometimes fire up the organ when no one was around and play the opening to The Final Count Down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jK-NcRmVcw&ab_channel=EuropeVEVO or The Walk of Life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd9TlGDZGkI&ab_channel=DireStraitsVEVO
What’s better than roses on your piano?
…
Tulips on your organ.
A joke no one has heard?
WAAAAY Off topic: When you have lost Mayor Lightfoot, you have truly lost. I feel like the dam is breaking here.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/learning-loss-is-real-lori-lightfoot-slams-randi-weingartens-teachers-union-for-delaying-school-reopening/
Sure, now that she’s out the door.
I studied the organ as a callow yute, getting good enough to make some pocket money doing weddings when I was in high school and college. One of the wedding pieces I loved best was Charles-Marie Widor’s toccata from his Symphony #5, a now-traditional wedding recessional in the UK but, sadly, hardly ever heard on this side of the pond.
My freshman year at Big State U, on a lark I took a class in the carillon, where the “keys” are nearly the size of organ pedals and are played by thumping them with your fists (needless to say, you’re not playing chords, just single notes). I had a far-fetched dream of maybe one day being good enough to play at the “singing tower” of Bok Gardens in Lake Wales, Florida. Our “final” for the semester was to play a twelve-minute recital at the carillon on campus between classes that the students and professors could hear while walking around the campus. One of the pieces I played was the theme from the TV show M*A*S*H, which was familiar to everyone at that time. Imagine my surprise when I the student newspaper printed a sternly-written letter to the editor claiming that I was a horrible human being (true enough, I guess) for playing a tune called “Suicide is Painless” during a stressful time like Finals Week, thus encouraging my fellow undergrads to jump off the top of the football stadium or whatever.
Rather than shrugging the whole thing off, I wound up getting a stern talking-to by my professor and the chair of the department, and decided right then and there that my carillon career was over. Turns out, snowflake culture was alive and well back in the 1980s.
That was indeed lovely! And majestic.
Which brings me to another topic/ question: This is coronation week for Chuckie III, for whom there is only a pale shadow of a sliver of affection that his dear mother engendered in her people.
Chuckie foolishly thinks that modernization of the (already powerless officially, but powerfully persuasively when done right) is the way to go, yet tradition is the British monarchy’s greatest strength!
So I wonder, will Chuckles have organ music played at the coronation?
I wasn’t alive at the time so I don’t know, but 71 years ago, did the good Queen Liz II’s coronation feature organ music at Westminster Abbey?
Not entirely certain as I think some audio was added post production, but appears so https://youtu.be/52NTjasbmgw
State Secretary of State got caught accepting bribes, er, consulting contract from a shady operator making bank off the phony ass mj legalization*. Wah wah, why me? I’m really sorry (I got caught). It’s all kabuki theater. The news media is falling over themselves to reveal public documents showing she make poor choices in her personal and professional life, something that escaped their notice when she was running for office in multiple elections.
I don’t believe this is out of the blue either. The hateful dyke governor has been quite silent while letting Fagan twist. Kotex has been quietly and not so quietly using one pretext after another to clean out the bureaucracy of the state and fill it with loyalists. I think this is yet another case of that.
*fuck the dopeheads who conflated a semi decriminalized state structured marijuana industry as some sort of legalization and a moral good
OT: RIP Gordon Lightfoot.
Thanks to my mom, most of the music I remember from my childhood is either Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Diamond, or the Kingston Trio. And all that 70’s country crap like Convoy.
https://youtu.be/9vST6hVRj2A
Well that sucks.
My dad taught me Gordon, the Kingston Trio, Credence and Glenn Campbell.
https://youtu.be/s0TK8eyydCU
My favorite and I like more than a few of his.
I’m in Norway right now and one of the amazing things about Nidaros cathedral in Trondheim is it has THREE organs. One from the 18th c, an absolutely giant Steinmeyer, and a modern one.
Beautiful place besides the ridiculous numver of organs!
You know who else was often surrounded by a ridiculous number of organs ?
Three is nothing 😉 The cathedral in Toledo, Spain, has about a dozen. See this article.
Three is actually not uncommon, although 1 is usually found in a chapel within the cathedral rather than in the main space.
Ok morning crew, it’s all ready for you.
On the bright side, the Rangers got their asses kicked.
I figured one or two players needed to show up – turns out none of them did.
Get a haircut, Panarin, you hippie.
Good morning peeps.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fregObNcHC8
🎶🎶
Good morning, Sean, homey, Shirley, Stinky, rhy, and Ted’S!
Shirley, once again I’m overwhelmed by the complexity of this instrument and suitably impressed by the talent and, perhaps most of all, physical coordination needed to master its playing.
Maybe it’s time to pick up my ukulele again.
Morning.
Good morning, U! How are you today?
Numerically, I’m supposedly better than I’ve been in a while.
I’m not all that awake though. I saw your email and ask – do you want me to spoil what I’m thinking about the character motives? Is is supposed to be a mystery story
Let’s say no spoilers, at least for the time being.
Curious about your numerical…advantage? Was also wondering how your knees held up for bowling after a day in the not-at-all-comfy chair.
I resumed charting my fitness numbers in a spreadsheet (reason for the AverageIf() inquiry), and today’s numbers are the best they’ve been since I resumed.
My knees did okay. The office replaced my chair, but I don’t yet know if it’s any better.
That’s great! And likewise good news that you got a new chair without having to kick up too much of a fuss. If it will stay put at the correct height, that’s bound to help.
Mornin’ GT! How’s the weather down south? We’re “enjoying” snow, and later mixed rain and snow. Fortunately, temps are (barely) above freezing. It’ll be upper 70# to mid 80s by late next week, assuming the weather forecasters are reading the entrails correctly. Sigh
Mostly chilly and dreary, with some rain and wind. Predicted highs in the upper 40s. After one brief cloudburst yesterday, my boss said he’d seen some icy pellets mixed in with the rain. Should FINALLY get warmer and clearer by the weekend, so I hope some of that gets to you, too. I really need a dose of Tranquility Base! 🙁
Glib ukulele orchestra, tune up!
Good morning.
Good…noon, limey! Hope all is well with you!
Mornin ‘. Ukulele is a little tough for me. I’m going with a kazoo.
Good idea. And if caught kazoo-less, my mother used to swear by a comb wrapped in tissue paper.
https://www.pennlive.com/life/2023/05/almost-4000-bottles-of-rare-whiskey-for-sale-through-pa-liquor-control-board-lottery.html
Hmmm.
That’s where my EH Taylor has been? It used to be a stocked item.
suh’ fam
whats goody
I think I got caught up- I slept like 16 hours straight
After reading the article, Im reminded of hearing that Elton John, while a great piano player, really sucked on the organ.
HEY-OHHHH
Virgil Fox was rumored to be skilled on the skin flute…
He’s here till Thursday folks, be sure to try the veal.
Another cool technical article. Nice work.
Good morning, people.
Thanks! And good afternoon (?) to you!
The forthcoming Harris presidency may well include a ‘when Chuckie met Chuckles’ moment.
That may lead to the lowest point in US/UK relations since 1814. 😣
Thanks for the article, Ms. Knott. It’s amazing that people figured out how to make something like this hundreds of years ago. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Good morning to the rest of you reprobates. After one day of partial sunshine we are back to damp, chilly, and just generally shitty. If I wanted this I’d move to Seattle.
Good morning, ‘patzie! You have me wondering if there’s any decent weather at all in the eastern half of North America, though yesterday afternoon, BEAM was claiming 88 degrees in whatever Canuckistani province he’s in. (Quebec? Je ne sais pas.) I’m skeptical that he was doing the math right on the conversion from Commie degrees.
If you listen to WHIO, Fried-Eggs must have issued a directive on pronunciation. Any more, everyone clearly enunciates the G in Vry-DAGS when reading her name.
I, for one, am irrationally disappointed that there is absolutely nothing on the ballot in Harrison Twp for today’s primary. I know it doesn’t mean squat, but somehow I feel kinda left out. 😞
Last time I looked, isnt anything I hate enough to bother voting against.
I could always just go and write “fuck you, cut spending” down.
Imma jus gon point out dat wes usually stand onna necks of giants.
We do, though, occasionally manage to reach their shoulders, without even pulling them down. Music at large, and its technology, does tend to be one of the bright lights.
Stack enough dwarfs and you’ll reach the same heights.
It depends on the structural integrity/mass of the dwarfs.
I’m sure, nay, positive, that violates a whole host of laws and regulations and workplace policies. IOW, FORBIDDEN!
Truly, in our technological era it is easy to forget the engineering feats of our forebears. Great articles, Shirley.
Ah. The town finally sent the woodchipper to dispose of the pile of branches in front of my driveway. I wonder if they do side gigs…