Practical Organ Building

This little work is undertaken because it is believed that no treatise on the construction of organs, at once short, practical, and accessible by all classes of readers, is extant.

The bulky volume of Hopkins and Rimbault, worthy as it is of all commendation, and abounding with matter interesting to the musician, does not profess to enter into details essential to the workman. The same remark may be applied to sundry treatises in the form of articles contributed to Encyclopædias, or to periodicals of a popular kind. The writers of these articles, probably fully masters of the subject, cannot, from the very nature of the case, command the time, space, and amplitude of illustration absolutely necessary for the full elucidation of the mechanical processes involved in the construction of the most elaborate and ingenious of all musical instruments.

Readers of the French language, indeed, may find all that they require in a most admirable and exhaustive work, the "Facteur d'Orgues," by M. Hamel, forming one of the series of the


 "Manuels-Roret," published in 1849 by Roret of Paris, in three volumes, with an atlas of plates. The author of this complete exposition of the organ-builder's art has taken for the foundation of his book the great work of Dom Bedos, a Benedictine monk, who printed in 1766-78, at Paris, two sumptuous folio volumes, with plates, which leave unnoticed nothing which was known or practised by the workmen of his period. The modern editor, however, who displays a most intimate knowledge of his subject, together with an enviable power of explaining it in all its minutest details, aided, as he is, by the most accurate of all European languages, has produced in his third volume a manual of the art of organ-building in recent times, which covers the whole field of investigation, and of which it is not too much to say that it can never be surpassed.

A somewhat indifferent translation of a German treatise on the "Organ and its Construction," by Herr Seidel, of Breslau, appeared some years ago. But this work, like the English publication first noticed, is not for the dwellers in workshops, but for organists, choir-masters, clergymen, and others entrusted with the care of existing organs, or likely to be concerned in the erection of new ones.

The writer has lately perused, with much pleasure and advantage, a tract of about forty pages on "Organ Voicing and Tuning," published for the author (evidently a practical operator). He can warmly recommend this unpretending introduction


 to the highest branch of the art, so seldom mastered save by those who have had the advantage of early and assiduous practice under skilled guidance. But it deals, of course, with that highest branch only, and assumes previous knowledge of mechanical construction.

He himself, several years ago, contributed a short series of articles on the construction of small organs to a periodical publication now extinct. The letters which he received from working men, urging him to treat the subject in greater detail, furnished a striking proof of the extent to which the leisure hours of many artisans are devoted to the production of an organ in some one of its innumerable forms, from the toy with two or three stops to the complete instrument with as many rows of keys. Such inquirers will not be satisfied, he fears, by the narratives of "How we made our First Organ," and the like, in well-meant and otherwise well-written books for boys. The real difficulties of organ-building (and they are numerous) are simply evaded in some recent books of this kind, which convey the irresistible impression that their authors are not themselves handlers of the plane and chisel. The true workman knows full well that the very simplest of organs cannot be put together in a few weeks, out of school-hours, and side by side with other undertakings.

If the present work, in which the writer describes the results of his own experience, and lays


 down no rules which he has not reduced to practice in his own workshop, should have the effect of deterring ingenious boys from attempting their "First Organ" until the possession of a large stock of patience, as well as the command of leisure, and of means moderately adequate for the purchase of good materials, are abundantly and unmistakably assured to them, the author, once a plodding and untiring boy-workman himself, will have reason to be satisfied that his efforts to explain a complicated and intricate structure have not been entirely fruitless.