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The Bridgewater Hall Organ
Modern recital organs are remarkable instruments.
They have a long and fascinating history and are capable of the most thrilling or subtle musical effects. Many of them are craft-works of great beauty and complexity and the vast organ repertory includes some of the most glorious western music.
This section of the site is an introduction to the development and technology of the European organ in general, and to the splendid Marcussen organ that is one of the glories of Manchester's Bridgewater Hall in particular.
The Bridgewater Hall's magnificent pipe organ is a focal point of this internationally renowned concert venue, which opened to the public on 11 September 1996. The 5,500 pipe instrument dominates the 2,400 seat auditorium, completely covering the rear wall with a beautiful blend of wood and burnished metal.
It is the largest instrument of its kind to be installed in Britain for almost a century and is the 'jewel in the crown' of one of Europe's finest concert halls.
An Organ for Manchester
The celebrated organ builders, Marcussen & Son, began the design work on The Bridgewater Hall's recital organ in 1992, and construction began in Denmark in January, 1995 - ten months before it was due to be assembled in Manchester and long before its first scheduled concert appearance.
The specification, drawn up in consultation with City of Birmingham organist Thomas Trotter, was devised to suit the widest possible range of organ repertory, and advice was sought from a number of respected organists and consultants on the character and efficient interior layout of the instrument. The final design of the façade - entirely of working pipes, there are no 'dummies' - was only decided after many days of discussions over dozens of sketches, plans and models. Indeed, architects RHWL were so determined that this superb organ should be a perfectly integrated feature of the auditorium, that even the conformation of the woodwork on the façade is essential to the acoustic character of the space. The Bridgewater Hall organ is a major work of art and technology. It weighs 22 tons, has over 5,500 pipes ranging in length from 32 feet to a fraction of an inch, and stands more than 42 feet high and 45 feet wide. Divided into five divisions - great, swell, positiv, solo and pedal - each of which is a characterful and substantial instrument in its own right, and with a frequency range covering almost the whole audible spectrum, it has already established itself as one of the most splendid recital instruments of northern Europe.
Two centuries of skill
Designed and built by Marcussen & Son, this £1.2 million instrument was hand-made by craftsmen whose skills and working methods have changed surprisingly little since 1806, when Jürgen Marcussen founded the celebrated organ-building company which still bears his name, at Sotrup in Denmark. Born in 1781, he had trained as a carpenter, but his fascination with the organ he heard in church every Sunday made him determined to become an instrument maker. Virtually self-taught, his eighteen months of apprenticeship ended when his master, Oppenhagen, fearing that Marcussen would develop into a competitor, refused to teach him the secrets of voicing and tuning. Despite the hardships of the Napoleonic Wars, he was granted an organ-builder's licence by King Frederik VI in 1811.
By 1836 he was in partnership with Andreas Reuter and had been awarded the title 'Organ Builders to the Royal Court of Denmark'. The success of their new organ in the Chapel Royal in Christianborg Castle in 1829, and their restorations at Roskilde Cathedral and Our Lady's church, Copenhagen, led to a flood of commissions. Reuter died in 1847, and a year later Marcussen's son, Jürgen Andreas, succeeded to the partnership.
His father died in 1860, but the firm and its reputation continued to prosper, building new instruments for the cathedrals at Odense and Göteborg, and reconstructing those at Lund and St. Jakobi, Hamburg. Following the war of 1864, Schleswig-Holstein - including Åbenrå, the small town to which the company had moved in 1830 - became Prussian territory, and Marcussen & Son found it expedient to enlarge their activities to take in the North German states as well as the rest of Scandinavia. Johannes Zachariassen, great-grandson of the founder, became a partner in 1897. The company remains in the ownership and stewardship of Zachariassen's descendants.
Innovation within tradition
Since the 1920s, when Åbenrå returned to Danish sovereignty, Marcussen & Son have been leading exponents of the Organ Reform Movement. In 1929 they built their first organ with a rückpositiv division and in 1930, the first organ of modern times with purely mechanical slide chests. Among their many twentieth century achievements are the outstanding organs at the Oskarkyrken in Stockholm, at St. Petri in Malmø, the concert house in Göteborg, the extraordinary Grundtvigskirken in Copenhagen and the cathedrals of Linz and Lübeck. In 1981 they completed one of the greatest of all organ restoration projects: the magnificent seventeenth century instrument in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam.
Building a work of art
In Marcussens' Åbenrå workshop, everything is carefully made in the traditional way. Each new instrument is constructed in its entirety before being carefully dismantled and shipped off to its permanent location for installation, voicing and tuning.
Like any instrument on this huge scale, The Bridgewater Hall organ required well over one hundred hand-drawn plans and many detail drawings before construction could begin. Metalworkers smelted lead and tin to run the sheets of alloy from which most of the metal pipes were crafted - though copper and other metals were also used. Carpenters worked with hammers and chisels to cut every joint in the massive wooden carcase supporting the windchests and swellboxes, each with their precious cargo of pipes - the largest weighing over three hundred pounds. The windchests, swellboxes and windtrunks themselves - like the façade and consoles - have been made as carefully as fine, hand-built furniture.
A wide variety of timbers is used in organ-building, each for its own special characteristics. The windchests are made of pine, because its combination of lightness, density and straight grain enables the air-flow to be controlled easily and effectively. The oak and cherry on the organ façade have been chosen to complement the colours and materials used elsewhere in the auditorium, and because of their strength and resistance to humidity. Rosewood and mahogany, walnut and ebony are variously used for parts of the instrument and action suited to their particular workability, durability and character. Coming home
In November 1995, the organ arrived in Manchester in many thousands of pieces, and a team of Danish organ-builders took up residence in the City to install it - a process potentially fraught with difficulty, but hearteningly straightforward in this case.
By March 1996, it had been painstakingly reassembled, and Marcussen's experts began the lengthy and delicate process of balancing the wind pressures and voicing each rank of pipes. This is a task ideally performed by only one pair of ears, which in this case took eighteen weeks to complete, often at night, on what was still at the time an enormous building site.
The final stages of voicing were completed by Friday 22 November 1996 when the Hallé Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Harding, joined The Bridgewater Hall's organist-in-residence, Wayne Marshall, for the organ's inaugural performance.
The programme consisted of works by Messiaen, Dupré, JS Bach, Saint-Saëns, Widor and Joseph Jongen, and received a standing ovation from the sold out house.
A Chest of Whistles
Early history
The word organ comes from classical Greek and originally meant any useful tool or instrument - not necessarily musical. Only in the early Middle Ages did it come to mean a mechanical wind instrument with many pipes.
Properly speaking, an organ in the modern sense must have some method of pushing air into a box, or windchest, where it is stored under pressure until the mechanism of a keyboard or manual allows it into rows, or ranks, of musical pipes. In the earliest instruments, called hydraulic organs and dating from about 300BC, the pressure was ingeniously supplied by a system of water cisterns.
Although organs and organ playing in the western world are now firmly associated with churches, they were not common in even the grandest churches and cathedrals until the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. Larger Benedictine monasteries seem to have been among the first to adopt them.
From illustrations in contemporary manuscripts, and occasional references in musical textbooks and poetry, it seems likely that the majority of mediaeval instruments were small. Many of them were portative - portable, or at least moveable - as opposed to positive organs which were fixed in one place, as large instruments are today. Usually they had one short manual and no more than three ranks of pipework, made of copper, Cornish tin or wood, standing on wooden windchests lined with animal skins and glue to keep them airtight.
Very small organs were played with only one hand, while the other hand operated a leather bellows to supply the air, or wind. Larger ones, whether portative or positive, required one or more assistants to work the bellows. Really big instruments, with a thousand or more pipes and dozens of bellows, remained very rare until the fifteenth century.
By the sixteenth century, it seems likely that most northern European organs were equipped with several ranks of pipes of contrasting sizes, materials and construction, a mechanism to enable each rank to be played separately or in combination with others (equivalent to a modern stop mechanism, which 'stops' wind from entering a pipe when not required), and many had more than one manual, each operating separate divisions of the instrument. Some even had a very modest pedal division, though it was sometimes played with the knees rather than the feet, and the notes may simply have been 'borrowed' from one of the manuals.
The Baroque organ
It is widely agreed that organs built using traditional methods reached their peak in the Baroque period - roughly the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries - and not until the mid-nineteenth century were any radical new ideas introduced. Although the sound and construction of Baroque instruments differed from region to region, they had many features in common, usually consisting of between two and four self-contained divisions played from separate manuals; each more or less a separate organ with its own special character and each containing a carefully balanced variety of flue and reed stops at a range of different pitches.
In northern European organs by great makers like Schnitger or Silbermann, the divisions were usually arranged one above another in a tall, shallow case. A further bright, penetrating division faced into the building from behind the player's seat, and was called the chair organ in England. This is the kind of instrument which would have been familiar to Buxtehude, Bach and Handel.
French instruments were celebrated for their rich and beautifully made reeds and their mixtures (stops composed of several related ranks of pipes at different pitches, enlarging the sound into a brilliant and powerful chorus), which contribute so much to the typical sound of a fine organ. In Spain and Portugal there were often powerful reeds projecting horizontally from the case like fanfare trumpets, and entire large divisions were enclosed in swellboxes - wooden chambers fitted with shutters which could be opened and closed at will by the player to increase or reduce the volume.
Large-scale organ-building in Britain was slow to develop, and a huge number of organs - mostly very small by continental standards - were destroyed in the early years of the Commonwealth. After the Restoration there was an enormous demand for new instruments, and many were supplied by three great makers, all with some European training or background; Bernard Smith, Renatus Harris and John Snetzler. Pedalboards were still almost unknown in Britain, but the swell was so popular that it quickly ousted the chair to become a standard division of almost every British organ, eventually fitted with Venetian blind-like louvres called shutters, to allow subtle variations in volume.
The nineteenth century
With notable exceptions, standards of organ-building generally declined in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rising again in the mid-century to a peak of relentless technical - though not always musical - experiment.
A fashion for public organ recitals, sometimes to audiences of many thousands, helped to fuel the construction of grand public halls equipped with enormous instruments (and frequently with a resident virtuoso) as a demonstration of civic pride. In the days before broadcast or recorded music, a large part of an organist's recital repertory consisted of showy arrangements or transcriptions of popular orchestral works and operatic excerpts, and the organ came to be regarded as the one-man equivalent of an orchestra, rather than as a subtle instrument in its own right.
By the 1840s the pedalboard, with its associated ranks of deep-sounding pipes, was becoming usual in Britain, and the old chair organ was beginning to evolve into the solo, a division of especially characterful or unusual solo sounds. Advances in construction and voicing (careful and delicate adjustment of every pipe, ensuring the whole rank speaks with the same timbre or family accent, is properly balanced with its equivalents in the other divisions, and makes its proper contribution to the overall sound), combined with greatly increased wind-pressures supplied by steam or hydraulic engines, encouraged the creation of opulent, powerful Romantic instruments capable of a wide range of melodramatic and colourful effects.
The best of these organs, by inspired builders like Cavaillé-Coll, Schulze and Willis, have the warm, delicate flutes, shimmering strings and reeds of exceptional fiery brilliance, essential for the music of Liszt, Franck or Parry. However, the worst were effectively factory products, mass-produced from poor materials and squeezed behind a façade of fake pipes, unrelated to the layout of the instrument.
As the century proceeded, the huge number of technical innovations included the replacement of mechanical action by many varieties of electric and pneumatic action, intended to overcome the disadvantages of heavy wind pressures and to increase flexibility for the player. They also enabled the console - at which the player sits - to be a considerable distance from the windchests and pipework.
The modern era
Since the 1920s there has developed among scholars, organists and (most importantly) craftsmen, a gradual understanding and appreciation of the principles and practices of pre-Romantic organ building. This trend - often called the Orgelbewegung or 'Organ Reform Movement' - has been stimulated by the fact that modern builders are as likely to be engaged in the restoration of old instruments as the creation of new ones.
The reform movement, in which Marcussens, the builders of The Bridgewater Hall organ, have played a very significant part, has led to a revival of the werkprinzip (the principle of independent divisions) and other features which have radically affected the sound and appearance of modern instruments, and even the way they are played. These include relatively low wind pressures, sensitive and delicate voicing of the pipes toward the brilliance and clarity of the finest Baroque instruments, the avoidance of orchestrally-imitative sounds, and (perhaps most significantly) the re-introduction of mechanical action, which is not only durable, but puts the performer in direct physical contact with the wind supply - literally the 'breath of life' to great organ music.
Pipeworks
In most organs, the majority of pipes are flue pipes, which work on the same principle as the recorder. Although they can be made of pine or oak, flue pipes are mainly made of metal, and consist of a long tube (the body) and a shorter conical section (the foot) which has a hole in the bottom, and sits on a matching hole in the top of the windchest. Where the body joins the foot, there is an opening at the front of the pipe (the mouth) and a horizontal partition (the languid) blocking the pipe except for a narrow slit (the flue) just behind the mouth. Air enters the foot, passes through the flue and is blown against the top lip of the mouth, producing a sound which is amplified by the body.
The pitch and character of the sound can be varied by adjusting the mouth of the pipe, by changing its relative length and width (the scale), or by altering the shape of the body. If the top of the pipe is closed off, or stopped, the sound will be an octave lower, though the tone will also be affected. Three of the four standard 'families of sounds' on an organ are varieties of flue pipes: the principals, the flutes and the strings. The fourth family is the reeds.
Reed pipes are fewer in number than flue pipes. They tend to be louder, are more complex to make and more difficult to keep in tune. Inside the foot (which in reed pipes is called the boot), a thin brass tongue is vibrated rapidly by the stream of air against the open side of a brass tube (the shallot). The top of the tongue is held in place by a little wooden wedge, pushed into a lead casting (the block) which is joined to the bottom of the organ pipe. The upper part of the pipe is called the resonator, and can take many peculiar shapes.
Action
The action of an organ is the mechanism by which the movement of the keys under the player's fingers allows wind to be admitted to the appropriate pipes.
Traditionally, this action was entirely mechanical, but during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries many ingenious varieties of pneumatic (wind-assisted), electro-pneumatic and electrical systems were developed, some of which are still in use. In recent decades, however, the majority of organists and fine organ-builders have come to appreciate the musical and practical advantages of mechanical action.
In the simplest form of mechanical action, both key and pallet-valve (which allows pressurised air to reach the pipes) are linked together. When the key is depressed, a wooden rod or tracker pulls or pushes the valve open, only for it to be closed by a spring when the key is released. The directness of this system makes it practicable only when keys and pipes are equally closely spaced.
In larger instruments, most ranks of pipes are wider than the manuals they are played from and it may not even be possible for the biggest pipes to stand in sequence. Rollerboards are used to transmit the action sideways and to free the arrangement of pipes from the rigid pattern of the manuals. Simple mechanical devices like backfalls and squares enable the action to change direction and spread over considerable distances. Manuals can also be mechanically coupled together, enabling the stops of one division to be played from the manual of another.
When the organist draws out a stop-knob to select a particular rank of pipes, a long strip of timber called a slider, moves horizontally within the top of the windchest. The slider is pierced with a series of holes which now correspond with the wind-holes in the bottom of the pipes, allowing them to speak. When the stop-knob is pushed back, the slider returns to its original position, and the connection between pipe and wind-supply is severed.
Casework and Layout
Mediaeval instruments permanently fixed in churches or other buildings were usually set high up against a wall, above a small gallery on which the player sat. The organ case, rising above the player's head, was relatively wide and shallow and often overhung at either side. The longer pipes tended to be grouped together into pipe towers, crowned with carved wooden pipe-shades and battlements, suggesting the outline of a toy building or a little town, while small pipes were arranged in one or more tiers of pipe-flats between the towers. This pattern has influenced the design of organ cases down to the present day. It was common for the front of mediaeval cases to have painted wooden shutters or wings which could be closed like doors, hiding the pipework. Baroque instruments were frequently sited at one end of a church or cathedral, often as part of a spectacular architectural effect, though some were free-standing on a screen across the middle of the building, as can still be seen at York Minster and King's College, Cambridge. Old northern European organs with more than one division, and many modern instruments, are constructed according to the werkprinzip, in which each division is placed above or beside the others in an arrangement which is musically and visually clear, balanced and logical. The usual divisions were the hauptwerk (the main division, in Britain called the great), the oberwerk (the top-most division), the brustwerk (a division of small pipes immediately above the player's head, at the heart or 'breast' of the organ, sometimes enclosed in a swell-box), the pedal (often very large pipes, usually arranged in towers at either side) and the rückpositiv or chair organ, which stood at the player's back.
The names and positions of these divisions varied according to country or local custom. In some places, the brustwerk gradually changed its character to become the positiv or solo, and the name of the choir division so often found in British organs is actually a corruption of 'chair'. The Bridgewater Hall organ conforms broadly to these principles. An organ specification is a list of the stops and effects available on each division of the instrument, giving some indication of their character, their pitch and the materials of which they are made. This four-manual organ has 76 stops in five divisions, and two consoles: one integral to the instrument, the other mobile for use anywhere on the concert platform. The main console is mechanical, but the remote console is entirely electronic, connected to the instrument itself by a fibre optic cable. After the stop names in the specification, there are numbers which refer to the relative pitch of each rank of pipes; 16' being an octave lower than 8', and 32' an octave lower still. Similarly, 4' and 2' are respectively one and two octaves higher. Three of the divisions have tremulants, which introduce a rapid flutter or wobble into the wind supply for expressive effect.
Further Technical Information
Behind panelled doors and a bench made from lacquered American red cherry wood, the console is made of oak and mahogany. The manuals have ivory-covered naturals and ebony sharps, whilst the pedalboard - radiating and concave according to BDO norm - is partly of oak, partly of cherry, and has sharps of ebony. American red cherry, partly solid and partly veneered plywood, has also been used for the case and front screen. The internal structure, including two swellboxes with electrically driven shutters, is built of pine and a lesser amount of blockboard.
Oak, mahogany and Oregon pine are used for the windchests, each with elastic slider sealings and fitted with push-button tuning keyboards. The pallets are made of redwood, doubled in the lower octaves, and fitted with balancier bellows as pulldown aids; three octaves in the great, swell and solo divisions, two octaves in the positiv, and all pallets in the four pedal chests. Each windchest is supplied by pine windtrunks - partly lined for absorption - and is fitted with built-in bellows and regulator valves.
The mechanical action has pine trackers, roller boards of oak and Oregon pine, and squares of walnut. All trackers are supplemented by ventil magnets with reference to the electrically activated couplers - both drawstop and piston operated - and to the mobile electric console.
The stop action is electrical, with magnetically drawn sliders. Stop knobs are carved from rosewood, and fitted with solenoids for use with the electronic capture system operated by push buttons and pistons, and equipped with a digital display. The power supply is 24 volts DC from a rectifier.
Pipe-wall thicknesses have been calculated for maximum stability and durability, and the entire instrument is voiced to suit the musical and acoustic characteristics of The Bridgewater Hall.
Technical Specification
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You can also view 3D illustrations of the organ workings. Diagram 1 (155kb) and Diagram 2 (120kb).