In light of this being the anniversary of J. S. Bach’s demise, I thought I’d post a pipe organ question.
Just how in the hell did they manage to manually create the air flow needed to produce something like the Tocata and Fugue in D minor? I understand that the air was moved by a bellows, but the guys operating the bellows must have been working like dogs. I can hear it now: as it gets further and further into the piece the air starts moving slower and slower (bellows boys are getting tired) and eventually the last couple of notes are but a gasp.
There is a little something called an aerobic threshold that determines how much effort you can put out on a sustained basis. It varies with every person’s condition but any activity you can sustain for more than a few minutes is likely below the threshold. If you ate your wheaties you’ll make it through the Fugue in decent shape. If the exertion takes all your effort you probably won’t make it more than a minute.
I’ve never studied them too closely, but what I gather from glancing at the wind setups for organs I’ve played is that ait is pumped into a chest that has a weighted, heavy cloth (or similar) top. As long as there is a sufficient amount of air in the chest, it is forced back out at a constant pressure.
Beyond that, I have no idea what the pumping/bellows setup was like, but I imagine they had a lot of mechanical advantage working for them.
I’m envisioning tag teams of altar boys ready for when Bach is having a really good time improvising…
You’ve got me thinking now. My church is in process of installing a mongo big pipe organ. I’ve already volunteered to help refinish the console. Now I wonder if I’m going to see my name on the back of the bulliten as “bellows boy.” We’re Lutheran so heavy on the Bach.
Forget Don McLean. This is the day the music died!
A quick look here gives us an idea of how modern organs work:
The page also gives a quick nod to how wind supply was generated for organs of the eighteenth century:
So my guess is that the windchest is probably not a twentieth- or nineteenth-century invention, but since they probably couldn’t have made them as airtight as they do today they kept a couple of choirboys by the bellows to keep the supply refreshed. Given that the Sunday services of Bach’s time were all-morning, if not all-day, affairs, a couple of Church-sanctioned blowhards must have been a good idea.