Dear List
Following on from the design thread I would encourage everyone to
develop a sense of how big things really are.
How much space do you need for an 8' stop? Most people reply 'well ...
eight feet I guess'.
If you are building an organ on the floor then the pipe has to start
above head height if the organ is going to address the room, not the
*ahem* hind quarters of those sitting in the back row, say at 6' 7"
(2m) off the floor to avoid all but the occasional lawsuit from people
with cracked skulls. The pipe- let's say it is an offset - needs a 2"
(50mm) object to sit on and if the casework is going to be classical in
style then there will be a whole bunch of mouldings as well. But lets
assume a minimal modern frame just for now. The foot of the lowest pipe
will be at least 1' 4" long if the thing is to speak. So, the mouth of
the pipe is at 8' 1" (2.46m) off the floor at the very minimum. The
pipe itself is about 8 feet long, yes - maybe a tad longer with a
tuning slot - but it needs room to speak. One and one-half diameters is
usually just enough, two diameters better. So say 8' 11" (2.72m).
Yep, I'm saying that the minimum height for a conventional 8' organ
standing on the floor is not less than 17 feet (5.2m). Studio organs
will go in less space, but regular church organs usually need at least
this and in fact 20 feet is far more comfortable and 25 feet gives you
a chance of providing real casework with mouldings.
Now look at the room you are sitting in right now. I'll guess that most
of you are sitting in domestic interiors with a ceiling height of -
well mine is 8'1" but the house is 1858. Many of you will have 7' 6"
(2.29m). So a full size 8' organ needs three times that. Yes, the
height of a two-storey house. Really, I'm not kidding.
I can't count number of times I went, as an organ builder, to a church
where the organists gave me their list of stops for the 32' organ they
wanted then waved airily at an arch that would barely contain a 4' . I
can't count the number of times colleagues, who should have used a
rule, came back from a site visit and told me 'there is more than
enough height' when all they had seen was 15 or 16 feet. Most people
are stunned by a room 16' high - the height of a London bus - and have
very little idea of what a 25' room might look like.
I wonder if any of you have a picture near to hand of the St. Ignatius
organ in NYC. We were so fortunate there to have a room of ideal and
natural size for the instrument proposed. I can't quite remember how
high the gallery is off the floor of the church, but I'm guessing about
16 feet (4.88m). The organ then rises 43' 8" (13.3m) above the gallery.
That entablature on the crown of the centre tower, a set of mouldings
consisting of architrave, frieze and cornice, looks kind of pretty from
down below. It ain't so delicate up close. It is 2' 8" tall and the
cornice sticks out 1' 2" on each side. The pipes in the centre tower,
which start at 16' E (GO Montre 16') weigh half a ton (500Kg).
The mind boggles, doesn't it?
Now think about the amount of floor space each department takes up. If
you are building slider chests then a 61-note 8' department can be got
onto a soundboard 8' long (2.44m) but it will complain a bit and there
is nothing left for a central walkway. If you are making Pitman chests
then you need more room as the trebles wont plant so tightly. If you
are building Austin Universal you need more room still, and not just
because there has to be a man to crawl in, they are just 1957
tail-fin-sized big.
There are many different variables controlling depth but lets say for
the sake of argument that most slider chest organs can be built in a
depth of 6" (150mm) per slider including casework and flat front pipes
- round towers extra.
I am sure you can begin to see the cubic volume required for ordinary
organs, even before you consider the space required for blowing plant
and, if your builder still makes them rather than supplying electric
wiring, key and stop action.
Back to St. Ignatius again. Of the four manual departments only the
Positif and 'Solo' (Man IV) were of 'ordinary' 8' size. The Grand-Orgue
and Récit were not. Fully-fledged 16' departments do not fit cosily on
an 8' chest and, to cut a long story down to size, these departments
occupy 16' each in length; the double tuning walkways are essential in
a scheme with multiple 8' ranks and the trebles are planted in rows of
three to get them in. It isn't 'and space to spare'; it fits quite
nicely, but if there had been a foot or two more in the width we might
have made use of it.
So this 100 stop organ people talk about. Whose shed is it going in?
And where are the people going to sit?
I was fascinated to visit the 1839 Buchholz at Kronstadt (now Brasov)
in Transylvania (now Romania) to compare the scale of construction, for
this too is a four-manual tracker organ of 60-something stops with
suspended action and two enclosed departments, just like the Mander in
New York. The Buchholz is 56 notes not 61 but is about 10% bigger all
round.
However, both instruments pale into insignificance compared to the
great structures erected by Cavaillé-Coll at St. Sulpice and elsewhere.
I know Sacré-Coeur is very late and in some ways more Mutin than
Cavaillé-Coll, but it is made to the same drawings as the 1870s organ
at Sheffield Town Hall burnt in a fire in the 1930s. It has two wooden
spiral staircases inside, each of them more comfortable to walk up and
down than those in the big palm house at Kew Gardens. One goes to the
top of 32' C of the pedal Flute; the other goes to the top of C#.
When I mentioned in passing the 2' 8" tall mouldings at St. Ignatius
you probably thought I was trying to impress? Well, to tell the truth
we scaled them right down to suit the budget and the space available.
They are Ionic when they really ought to be Corinthian or Composite,
and my architectural textbooks suggest that the entablature on a 43'
high case with the plinth 9' off the ground should be SEVEN AND A HALF
FEET.
Well, at least we tried!!!
Stephen Bicknell
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