Harmoniums and American organs are the result of many experiments in the application of free reeds to keyboard instruments. The principle of the free reed became widely known in Europe through the introduction of the Chinese cheng[1] during the second half of the 18th century, and culminated in the invention of the harmonium and kindred instruments. The first step in the invention of the harmonium is due to Professor Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein of Copenhagen, who had had the opportunity of examining a cheng sent to his native city and of testing its merits.[2] In 1779 the Academy of Science of St Petersburg had offered a prize for an essay on the formation of the vowel sounds on an instrument similar to the “vox humana” in the organ, which should be capable of reproducing these sounds faithfully. Kratzenstein made as a demonstration of his invention a small pneumatic organ fitted with free reeds, and presented it to the Academy of St Petersburg.[3] His essay was crowned and was republished with diagrams in Paris[4] in 1782. Meanwhile, in 1780, a countryman of Kratzenstein’s, an organ-builder named Kirsnick, established in St Petersburg, adapted these reed pipes to some of his organs and to an instrument of his invention called organochordium, an organ combined with piano. When Abt Vogler visited St Petersburg in 1788, he was so delighted with these reeds that in 1790 he induced Rackwitz, an assistant of Kirsnick’s, to come to him and adapt some to an organ he was having built in Rotterdam. Three years later Abt Vogler’s orchestrion, a chamber organ containing some 900 pipes, was completed, and, according to Rackwitz,[5] was fitted with free-reed pipes. Vogler himself, however, does not mention the free reed when describing this wonderful instrument and his system of “simplification” for church organs.[6] To Abt Vogler, who travelled all over Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, exhibiting his skill on his orchestrion and reconstructing many organs, is due the credit of making Kratzenstein’s invention known and inducing the musical world to appreciate the capabilities of the free reed. The introduction of free-reed stops into the organ, however, took a secondary place in his scheme for reform.[7] Friedrich Kaufmann[8] of Dresden states that Vogler told him he had imparted to J. N. Mälzel of Vienna particulars as to the construction of free-reed pipes, and that the latter used them in his panharmonicon,[9] which he exhibited during his stay in Paris from 1805 to 1807. Kaufmann suggests that it was through him that G. J. Grenié obtained the knowledge which led to his experiments with free reeds in organs. It is more likely that Grenié had read Kratzenstein’s essay and had experimented independently with free reeds. In 1812 his first orgue expressif was finished. It was a small organ with one register of free reeds—the expression stop, in fact, added to the pipe organ and having a separate wind-chest and bellows. It would seem from his description of the orchestrion in Data zur Akustik that Vogler knew of no such device. He used the swell shutter borrowed from England and a threefold screen of canvas covered with a blanket arranged outside the instrument, neither of which is capable of increasing the volume of sound from the organ, or at least only after having first damped the sound to a pianissimo. Vogler explains minutely the apparatus used to conceal the working of the screen from the eyes of the public.[10] The credit of discovering in the free reed the capability of dynamic expression was undoubtedly due to Grenié, although Abt Vogler claims to have used compression in 1796,[11] and Kaufmann in his choraulodion in 1816. A larger orgue expressif was begun by Grenié for the Conservatoire of Paris in 1812, the construction of which was interrupted and then continued in 1816. Descriptions of Grenié’s instrument have been published in French and German.[12] The organ of the Conservatoire had a pedal free-reed stop of 16 ft., with vibrators 0.240 m. long, 0.035 m. wide, and 0.003 m. thick.[13] Two compressors, one for the treble and the other for the bass, worked by treadles, enabled the performer to regulate the pressure of wind on the reeds and therefore to obtain the gradations of forte and piano which gained for his instrument the name of orgue expressif. Grenié’s instrument was a pipe organ, the pipes terminating in a cone with a hemispherical cap in the top of which was a small hole. There were eight registers including the pedal, and the positive on the first keyboard had reed stops furnished with beating reeds. Biot insists on the Importance of the regulating wires (Fr. rasettes; Ger. Krücken) for determining the vibrating length of the reed tongue and maintaining it invariable. These are clearly shown in his diagram (see article [Free Reed Vibrator], fig. 1); they do not essentially differ from those used with the beating-reed stops in his organ (fig. 76, pl. II.), or indeed from those figured by Praetorius.
Isolated specimens of the cheng must have found their way to Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, for Mersenne[14] depicts part of one showing the free reed. It would seem that still earlier in the 17th century there was an organ in a monastery in Hesse with free reeds for the Posaune stop, for Praetorius gives a description of the “extraordinary” reed (p. 169); there is no record of the inventor in this case.
During the first half of the 19th century various tentative efforts in France and Germany, and subsequently in England, were made to produce new keyboard instruments with free reeds, the most notable of these being the physharmonica[15] of Anton Häckel, invented in Vienna in 1818, which, improved and enlarged, has retained its hold on the German people. The modern physharmonica is a harmonium without stops or percussion action; it does not therefore speak readily or clearly. It has a range of five to six octaves. Other instruments of similar type are the French melophone and the English seraphine, a keyboard harmonica with bellows but no channels for the tongues, for which a patent was granted to Myers and Storer in 1839; the aeoline or aelodicon[16] of Eschenbach; the melodicon[17] of Dietz; the melodica[18] of Rieffelson; the apollonicon;[19] the new cheng[20] of Reichstein; the terpodion[21] of Buschmann, &c. None of these has survived to the present day.
The inventor of the harmonium was indubitably Alexandre Debain, who took out a patent for it in Paris in 1840. He produced varied timbre registers by modifying reed channels, and brought these registers on to one keyboard. Unfortunately he patented too much, for he secured even the name harmonium, obliging contemporary and future experimenters to shelter their improvements under other names, and the venerable name of organ becoming impressed into connexion with an inferior instrument, we have now to distinguish between reed and pipe organs. The compromise of reed organ for the harmonium class of instruments must therefore be accepted. Debain’s harmonium was at first quite mechanical; it gained expression by the expression-stop already described. The Alexandres, well-known French makers, by the ingenuity of one of their workmen, P. A. Martin, added the percussion and the prolongement. The melody attachment was the invention of an English engineer; the introduction of the double touch, now used in the harmoniums of Mustel, Bauer and others—also in American organs—was due to Tamplin, an English professor.
The principle of the American organ originated with the Alexandres, whose earliest experiments are said to have been made with the view of constructing an instrument to exhaust air. The realization of the idea proving to be more in consonance with the genius of the American people, to whom what we may call the devotional tone of the instrument appealed, the introduction of it by Messrs Mason and Hamlin in 1861 was followed by remarkable success. They made it generally known in Europe by exhibiting it at Paris in 1867, and from that time instruments have been exported in large numbers by different makers.
(A. J. H.; K. S.)
[1] See Allg. musik. Ztg. (Leipzig, 1821), Bd. xxiii. pp. 369-374. The cheng was made known in France by Père Amiot, who published a careful description of the instrument in Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois, p. 80 seq., with excellent diagrams.
[2] Ib., Bd. xxv. p. 152.
[3] The essay was published in Acta Acad. Petrop. (1780).