See flûteà pavillon
bELLoWS
The apparatus that collects air and feeds it into a windtrunk, eventually reaching the windchest, where it is distributed to the organ pipes, making it possible for them to sound. A well-known early ref-erence (ca. 1400) to the “organum” defines it as an instrument blown “with bellows.” Direct human op-eration of bellows continued into the nineteenth cen-tury, when flowing water pressure (driven by streams or mains) was used where feasible, a system recall-ing the ancient hydraulis. Soon, steam engines and electric motors were driving the bellows; eventually all such methods were superseded by electrically driven blowers, successors to the nineteenth-century hand-cranked rotary fan. The original bellows concept held until fully electronic instruments developed in the lat-ter twentieth century. Oddly, many post–World War II
“authentic” instruments used electricity to serve the winding function.
BELGIUM
direct beginnings
The earliest systems used water pressure motivated by human power to force air into the hydraulis and similar instruments, but toward the latter part of the first mil-lennium ce, water pressure was replaced by cuneiform or similarly shaped pumps (feeder bellows) operated by hand (for smaller organs such as the portative and positive). For bigger instruments, larger bellows were placed on the ground and expelled air when motivated by body weight. In either case, animal leather and a wooden frame and top were the primary elements.
In the latter part of the first millennium ce, the desire to put organs in churches, where the negative associations of the hydraulis with “pagan” Roman cel-ebrations were too great, required the development of another way to wind the organ. The air would now be “pumped” into the windchest by direct manpower.
The earliest winding devices were probably “blast bags,” animal bladders that gathered and released air into the chest or intervening windtrunk. However, the short lifespan of the bags and very irregular pressure led builders to borrow the principle behind the bellows used to stoke fires and apply it to the organ, creating a type later known as the feeder or forge bellows, made of wood and leather.
In smaller instruments such as the positive, such bellows could be hand-operated by an assistant, as with a house organ; but as organs grew in size and more complicated in construction, the organ’s need for more air required a more powerful bellows. The eleventh-century writer Theophilus (De diversis ar-tibus, book 3) describes how organs were built in the past, including the mostly wooden, cuneiform (forge) feeder bellows, operated by the player’s (or others’) feet. These feeder bellows, with valves to keep air from leaking, fed a duct that led to the windchest. The writer includes copious instructions on how to “hide” the ap-parently noisy bellows from the listening audience. (A similar system was still being used in tracker organs as late as the seventeenth century.)
the birth of Indirection
Direct systems of blowing air into an organ gave way to indirect systems. Larger feeder bellows (“wedge,”
“board,” or “frog’s mouth”; made of wood, leather, and metal bindings) were separate from the console. A hand lever was raised to fill the bellows with air, which was then expelled into the windtrunk by the weight of the operator (calcant) standing on a particular bel-lows, holding onto a horizontal bar for balance. By the sixteenth century human beings were being replaced by weights or ballast (stone or metal) to force the air by gravity into the windtrunk. As before, the larger the
instrument, the greater number bellows were needed to maintain steady air flow.
During the sixteenth century, a more refined type of wedge or diagonal bellows (Spanbalg) was devel-oped. Its frame rested on the ground, and the “wedge”
rose from the front to its peak at the back. While the basic concept was unchanged (air fed in by lever, ex-pelled by weight-assisted gravity), the addition of a hinged fold or folds to the leather collector, secured by wooden ribs, stabilized the flow of air as it entered the windtrunk.
There were at least two other indirect systems that pumped air into the windtrunk without additional stor-age space. Both used a pulley rope to fill the bellows with air; once raised, weighted gravity expelled the air much like wedge bellows. The lantern bellows (seventeenth century) were named for their square shape. The box-bellows (seventeenth-nineteenth cen-tury) raised a box that fell within a second, slightly larger box; the two boxes produced an air chamber sufficiently airtight to function properly, thus avoiding the need for leather folds or hinges.
Parallel rise, reservoir Fall
The shape of the box-bellows may have led to the idea of a two-part bellows to improve wind stability even more. In the latter eighteenth century, the parallel reservoir and feeder bellows and magazine (Ger.
Magazin, storage) emerged. The simple lever-operated bellows served as the base wind feeder to a reservoir, a rectangular chamber with one or more folds that stored the wind generated by the bellows, descending as air was expelled. An exhaust valve permitted the disper-sal of excess air when necessary. The later “horizontal bellows” reduced the feeder to a lever-operated fold under the reservoir, scaffolded to permit the feeder to expand.
Essentially, the parallel reservoir and feeder bellows of the turn of the nineteenth century was the fulfill-ment of the purely mechanical bellows system. The feeder bellows, with its foot-operated pedals or trea-dles, continued to serve house organs and became the mechanism of choice for the new free reed organ or harmonium. Subsequent developments focused on the source of the wind itself, with water mains, steam en-gines, and electric motors moving the bellows instead of physical labor. The rotary fan was a throwback in its use of human energy, but it provided steadier air than bellows and was more effective for wind supply challenges such as the sudden drawing on of multiple stops. The electrification of the rotary fan led to a de-vice that, with improvements, provides wind to most organs today.
BELLOWS
romantic refinements
A single-fold horizontal bellows could be combined with a reservoir to feed a particular group of pipes—for example, the free-reed Physharmonika, a harmonium-like stop, whose pipes were mounted on a separate windchest. The dedicated reservoir is filled by a bel-lows that lies above and whose air is pressed down-ward by spring. In some cases, a separate foot pedal controls the reservoir pressure, permitting expression within the stop.
The Barker lever was the first widely accepted pneumatic unit. Here, the pressured air from the main bellows moves into the lower half of a divided wind-chest, dedicated to a single key. When that key for that chest is activated, a palletlike valve is pulled down, causing the air to escape through to the upper half and from there to a duct that leads to a second, single-fold wedge bellows. The filling of the bellows pulls down a tracker that engages the pipechest pallet.
Small regulating devices called concussion bel-lows (winkers) were sometimes placed near the wind-chests as a last opportunity in the windtrunk to prevent the wind from “shaking,” causing unsteadiness of tone production. The cone-chest (Kegellade) involves a bellows that supplied wind to an entire rank when se-lected; this kind of chest is said to be “barless,” lacking a note channel. Although the open rank is continuously winded, notes sound only when their key were acti-vated, raising a group of cone-like valves that produce sound only in the winded ranks. In some cone-chests, the valves are more like small discs and are operated by bellows-like pneumatic motors.
Tubular action relies on two pneumatic motors in step, both motivated by the presence or lack of air pressure at different points in the wind flow. The first (primary) motor is connected to the initial touch box or key pallet; the second(ary) motor, motivated by a valve from the first, in turn activates an old-fashioned sprung pallet within the windchest. When electric-ity was made part of the pneumatic process, electro-magnets (solenoids) were used to move the valve that
“feeds” the primary motor; again, the secondary motor functioned in a purely pneumatic way. There are two types of pneumatic actions: pressure-pneumatic and exhaust-pneumatic.
The ventil chest, a late nineteenth-century stop channel chest (Registerkanzellelade), involves a simple frame supporting an airtight membrane (i.e., without folds or ribs); it, too, is operated by tubular-pneumatic actions. Each pipe’s conduit has such a chest. As wind travels through an open rank, air pres-sure keeps the conduit closed via the membrane below to prevent its sounding. Pressing the key releases that air pressure; the membrane is now pushed down by the
wind destined for the pipe, and that wind rises through the conduit to the pipe’s foot.
Perhaps the most significant development was the implementation of hand-cranked rotary fans, or “ro-tary centrifugal air turbine blowers,” later powered by steam, gas, or water power, and which in their electri-fied form would become the primary means of winding pipe organs.
Electric Experiments
The American brothers Frank and Hilborne L. Roo-sevelt introduced a number of new approaches to pneu-matic and electro-pneupneu-matic organs, and were pioneers in the development of purely electric instruments. While they are probably best known for their work with piston-set adjustable combination actions, the Roosevelts were skillful adapters of available technology. In one instru-ment (Great Barrington, MA, Congregational, 1883), the builders placed its complex “blowing apparatus” in a cellar room below the vestibule (shades of Theophilus!):
three water motors (for winding and combination action pneumatics), horizontal feeders, large windtrunks and airshafts, bellows large and small, pneumatic actions, and regulators, all leading to the organ’s various de-partments.
The term pallet is often treated as a synonym for valve; their functions are identical—opening the con-duit to the pipe foot so that air can enter under pres-sure and sound the associated note. The distinction is more in the design; while the pallet was generally a small rectangular slat of wood (motivated by stickers, springs, trackers, bars and, later, pneumatic motors), the nineteenth-century valve was usually a disclike object that opened and shut the conduit, often by a complicated series of pneumatic steps. Robert Hope-Jones applied thin, low-voltage valve electromagnets to improve often clumsy and electricity-sapping pneu-matic actions. In his unification system, all pipes had their own valve and magnet, allowing each pipe to be sounded by multiple key and stop actions. Perhaps most innovative (but expensive and difficult to main-tain) was the variety of bellows (and therefore wind pressures) and windtrunks applied to distinct timbral departments (or “units,” each in its own chamber), even ranks, in Hope-Jones’s quest for a truly “orches-tral” instrument, later known as the unit organ.
The “electrified rotary centrifugal air turbine blower” became the most popular means of supplying wind in the twentieth century, thanks to its efficiency, relatively simple technology, and absence of physical labor. Electric blowers cannot expel excess air, how-ever, and must be regulated even before the wind en-ters a reservoir; the relentless pressure would otherwise overblow the instrument into submission. The typical BELLOWS
regulator is a box containing a set of vertical shades.
As with the pulley-rope bellows of the eighteenth cen-tury, the level of the reservoir determines whether the shades are closed (by a full reservoir, with the pul-ley rope at its least taut) or, as the reservoir empties, the shades are gradually pulled up, allowing the right amount of air from the blower. The electric blower remains the standard means to wind pipe organs, ex-cepting the most exacting, “authentically reproduced”
neoclassical organ; even many of these offer both manual and electrically blown winding.
With the early twentieth-century application of relay and switch systems to create electrically powered key and stop actions, and with the more re-cent emergence of solid-state electronics, the “need”
for any winding mechanism disappeared in the latter twentieth century. But, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht,
“some things are missing”: the sound of air being blown through pipes; the loss of subtleties of attack possible in tracker and other preelectric systems; and, ironically enough, the “unsteadiness of wind” that typ-ified all instruments in the centuries before electricity and (especially) electronics. For many, not only is the absolutely steadiness of electrically controlled sound tiresome to the ear, but such sound lacks the human element of breathing that has always made acoustic (or merely amplified) instruments easier for listeners to identify with and enjoy.
See also Action; care and maintenance of Pipe organs; Water motor
Richard Kassel
bibliography
Cook, James H. “Organ History: The Pipe Organ from Its Origin through the Twentieth Century.” <http://panther.
bsc.edu/~jhcook/OrgHist/>.
Fisk, Charles B. “The Organ’s Breath of Life.” Diapason (1969): 18–19. Available at <http://www.cbfisk.com/wel-come.html>.
Williams, Peter, and Barbara Owen. The Organ. New Grove Musical Instruments Series. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.
bELLS
(1) A Glockenspiel with reiterating (repeating) action in the theater organ tradition.
(2) A family of organ stops. As a theater organ stop, Bells can be found in the Wurlitzer instruments at the Emery Theatre, Cincinnati; at Paramount Theatre, Oakland, California, and at the RKO Palace, Rochester, New York. Bell stops fall into several categories:
The Bell Clarinet is an imitative 8' manual solo reed that produces a brighter-than-average orchestral Clarinet tone. The widely flaring bells at the tops of
the half-length (stopped) or unison-length cylindrical metal pipes permit an added cluster of very high but soft overtones to escape the pipes.
The Bell Diapason (also Flûte à Pavillon or Courcellina, honoring the voicer John Courcelle) was invented in France in the 1840s. The French builder Ducroquet introduced it into England at the 1851 London Exhibition. Its distinguishing feature is the flaring bell on the top of the pipe. These bells required extra work in pipe-making and additional space on the windchest, factors which led to its eventual decline in popularity. Bishop and other English builders inappro-priately renamed the stop Bell Diapason, as it is re-ally an 8' Principal-Flute, or at least a Flute-Diapason hybrid. The pipes are cylindrical, similar to that of a Principal; the mouth is similar to a Diapason in width, but cut higher. The top is an inverted conical section.
Its tone is full and rich, and the top bells impart some brightness. A variant of the Bell Diapason is the Bell Pipe, with a conical body and a reedier tone.
The Bell Flute (or Glockenflöte) is an open metal Flute of 4' or 8' manual pitch with a cylindrical metal body and a bell-shaped top. It has a sweet and clear, slightly horn-like timbre. The Bell Gamba (also Glockengamba) is a variant of the Gamba, found at 8' on the manuals or, occasionally, at 16' in the Pedal;
it also has the characteristic bell-shaped top. There is dispute as to its body shape (conical or cylindrical) and its scale. The tone of the Bell Gamba has been de-scribed as delicate and reedlike, and similar to that of the orchestral Viola da Gamba. Like the Bell Diapason, the stop is largely obsolete, owing to difficulties in its construction, voicing, and regulation.
The Orchestral Bells is a tuned percussion stop con-sisting of metal bars struck by hammers, actuated by an electric or pneumatic mechanism. The Austin organ at St. John’s Cathedral in Jacksonville, Florida, contains two kinds: Tower Bells (ten cast bells in a chime) and Bird Bells (twenty-five tubes with brass resonators).
Tina Früehauf
bibliography
Audsley, George Ashdown. Organ-Stops and Their Artistic Registration. New York: H. W. Gray, 1921.
Irwin, Stevens. Dictionary of Pipe Organ Stops. 2d ed.. New York: Schirmer, 1983: 43–44.
Skinner, Ernest M., and Richmond H. Skinner. The Composition of the Organ. Ann Arbor, MI: Melvin J.
Light, 1981: 75.
Wedgwood, James Ingalls. A Comprehensive Dictionary of Organ Stops. London: Winthrop Rogers, 1907.
BENDELER, JOHANN PHILIPP