Pipe Organ
Piano
Harpsichord |
PIPE ORGAN
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The organ is the oldest keyboard wind instrument and the most complicated of all wind instruments. It is not a standardized instrument like the other keyboard instruments or the rest of the orchestral instruments. Each is built to individual specifications.
Organs may range in size from small single-keyboard instruments with one or two ranks of pipes, to large instruments with five or more keyboards or two hundred ranks of pipe. Thus, no two pipe organs are identical in physical and tonal designs. What is unique about the organ is the presence of a pedalboard, which is played in the same manner as the manuals, but with both feet (heel and toe) instead of the hands.
HISTORY
Organ building has its historical sources in various places such as Germany, France, Netherlands, England, Spain and Italy. And within each tradition, there have been changes in tonal design and construction from one historical period to the next.
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SOUND PRODUCTION
The organ has two main types of pipes - flutes and reeds. Sound is produced when a musician strikes the notes on the keyboard, causing the wind to blow through pipes. The flute pipes can produce from very low to very high pitches, while the reeds produce more nasal-sounding tones. The player can determine which pipes will sound by pushing or pulling knobs or levers called stops.
Sound is produced when the valve under each pipe is opened and air is blown through it from the body of wind in the windchest.
In the olden days, sound was produced when air was blown through pipes by hand pumps or bellows. In the modern pipe organ, an electric blower does the same job. However, nowadays electric or digital organs have begun to replace some traditional pipe organs. The sounds from these instruments are digitally sampled from actual pipe organs.
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THE RANKS OF PIPES
The number of ranks on a windchest may range from one to more than fifteen. Each rank supplies a complete range of notes. Each rank of pipes has a tone quality slightly different from the others. |
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TONE PRODUCTION IN PIPES
The pipes vary in length and diameter. The longest pipe produces the lowest pitch and the shortest one produces the highest pitch.
The tone of a flute pipe is created by the air column swaying back and forth while the tone of the reed pipe is created by a brass reed which vibrates as air is forced through the opening in the shallow. The vibrations in the brass reed are strengthened into an audible tone by a tube called a resonator.
There is a great number and variety of reed pipes. Even pipes of the same name differ due to different construction by different builders.
With a great variety of tone colour, some of the organ stops are imitative of other orchestral instruments. For example, many reed stops can imitate the tone quality of the oboe, clarinet and trumpet. The resonators even have construction features similar to the instruments they resemble.
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HOW DO STOPS WORK?
Tone is varied by the selection and combination of different stops on different keyboards. The Great Manual has stronger stops than the Swell Manual. By using different organ stops, the same note can sound an octave or two higher or lower. For example, a 16 ft. stop will sound the note an octave below, and a 32 ft. stop will sound two octaves below. And by using several stops at the same time, a player can sound a melody in various octaves. |
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