Wouldn’t you be surprised today if you should see an announcement of a concert to be given by the President’s chauffeurs? But in the time of Couperin and Lully wind instruments were used in all the court festivals, balls and ballets, and were played by men attached to the great hunting stables of the king. The band was called la musique de la grande écurie du Roi (music of the King’s stables). There were twelve trumpets, eight fifes and drums, the cromornes (krumhorn—a curved reed instrument), four to six Poitou oboes and bagpipes, and twelve large oboes under which title were included violins, oboes, sackbuts and cornets. These players of wind instruments accompanied the royal hunting parties and made the beautiful forests of France ring with their merry music. Each family had its own hunting call, by which it was recognized from afar. We heard a phonograph record in Paris of these ancient calls, and with each one, the name of the family to whom it belonged was announced.
By the way, do you know the difference between a band and an orchestra? (This is not a conundrum!) A band was originally a group of musicians who played while standing or marching, while the orchestra was always seated. This word comes from the Greek word meaning dance, and was first given to a group of players who accompanied the dancers in the dramas, and were seated in that section of the theatre which is still called the orchestra.
CHAPTER XVII
Germany Enters—Organs, Organists and Organ Works
It is rather hard to believe that the largest of all instruments, the pipe organ, is a descendant of Pan’s Pipes, played by the shepherds on the hillsides of ancient Greece, is it not? The pipes of the church organ of today are of different lengths and are built on the same principle as were the pipes of Pan, our goat-footed friend, who broke off the reeds by the bank of a stream way back when the world was young, to pour out his grief in music for his lost love, Syrinx.
The next step was to supply the organ pipes with wind so they could be made to produce tones without blowing on each one separately. A wooden box was invented, and each pipe inserted into a hole in the top of the box, which is still called the wind-chest. At first this was supplied with air by two attendants who blew into tubes attached to the wind-chest. Soon the tubes were replaced by bellows, and were worked with the arms, and as the instrument grew larger, with the feet like in a treadmill. An organ is spoken of in the Talmud as having stood in the Temple of Jerusalem, and the hydraulic (water) organ in which air was supplied to the pipes by means of water power was built in Alexandria, Egypt, about the year 250 B.C. The small organ with keys that could be carried from place to place was called a portative (from the Latin porto—to carry); the larger organ sometimes stationary and sometimes moved on wheels was called a positive. The levers needed to produce the sound were soon exchanged for keyboards which at first had only a few keys, and you may remember our telling how the keys were pounded with the fists and elbows, in the Winchester organ.
A Greek writer of the 4th century A.D. gives us a vivid description of an organ: “I see a strange sort of reeds—they must methinks have sprung from no earthly, but a brazen soil. Wild are they, nor does the breath of man stir them, but a blast, leaping forth from a cavern of oxhide, passes within, beneath the roots of the polished reeds.”
It is not known just when the organ was first used in the churches, but there are records of its having been known in Spanish churches as early as the 5th century A.D. Pope Vitalian introduced it in Rome in 666, and in the 8th century in England, organ-building became a very popular profession. Cecil Forsyth says: “In those days a monk or bishop who wished to stand well with society could not take up essay-writing or social-welfare: what he could do was to lay hands on all the available timber, metal, and leather, and start organ-building.”
Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, imported an organ into Compiègne, France, from Byzantium in the 8th century. Charlemagne had it copied at Aix-la-Chapelle. The Arabians must have been organ-builders, too, for one of their most famous rulers, Haroun-al-Raschid, sent Charlemagne a pneumatic organ noted for its soft tone. The instruments made in Germany and France up to the 10th century were small and unpretending, but were objects of astonishment and curiosity.
In Magdeburg, in the 11th century, we find the first keyboard with keys 3 inches broad. In 1120, we hear of an organ in the Netherlands that had 2 manuals (keyboards) and pedals. Organ-building was growing up! In the 14th century the manuals of many organs had 31 keys.
The organ was not always accepted in the church, for in the 13th century its use was regarded as scandalous just as the English Puritans in the 17th century called it a “squeaking abomination,” and it is not even now admitted in the Greek Catholic Church!