Pipe Organ

[Kelly Cleveland]

For my senior English project I have been building a small three stop pipe organ, which I thought some folks here might take interest in. I started about 20 weeks ago and it is only now making sound. It uses 42 metal pipes which I was given, and soon I will be making 84 more wooden pipes. The case is not finished either, and there are no knobs to control the stops. In a month or two it should be completely finished. Everything is mostly poplar and oak, the keyboard is made from yellowheart and sapele. It is not dependent on electricity like most organs, the bellows is hand pumped and the key action is all mechanical.
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This is a view into the windchest, which is were all the wind is directed to the pipes, the valves are at the bottom which allow air into the channels, from here it is distributed to all three sets of pipes. Next is the feeder bellows which is pumped in order to fill the reservoir. The air pressure is regulated by weights on top of the large bellows. Also is a view underneath the keyboard. I will put up some more pictures in a minute.
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[Kelly Cleveland]

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[Adam Herman]

neat project. honest question: what does it have to do with an English degree? I could see it for something along the lines of functional art or engineering technology.

[Kelly Cleveland]

This is a high school English class called WISE. We take regular English the first semester and then everyone does a big project the second semester, this is open to anything we want to do. Other projects were carpentry, bee keeping, music composition ect.

[John K Jordan]

That is wonderful! Please post more pictures of progress as you go!

It sounds like you are in a great class. When my oldest was in high school a famous knifemaker helped him make an incredible skinning knife for his History class project! :-)

I've never worked on a pump organ but I did rebuild a player piano years ago, basically stripping it down to pieces and replacing all the bellows cloth, valves, tubing, and anything broken. The player piano works on vacuum instead of pressure. It had the double foot pedals for pumping the vacuum generator bellows, a huge spring-loaded reservoir in the bottom of the cabinet, a 5-bellows vacuum motor, vacuum regulation bellows for speed control, automatic mechanical adjustment bellows, and 66 striker bellows. What an education!

Are you designing this, working from plans, modified plans?
You could make some very cool knobs on the lathe.

JKJ

[Larry Frank]

This is very interesting and unique. Please post more pics as you go along. It would be interesting to know more about your school.

Thanks for posting.

[Adam Herman]

That sounds great! I also, would like to know more about your school. Seems they have some interesting curriculum. Does your school compete in Science olympaid? we did and they have an even that requires you to build your own instruments, this would gold medal! We built a set of bagpipes and a trombone when i was competing.

[george wilson]

I thought I was a glutton for punishment just for making large harpsichords!! Incredible project!

They have a COMBINATION vertical grand shape piano and ORGAN in the musical instrument conservation shop in Williamsburg. An 18th. C.piece. A VERY complex instrument!! Talk about trying to keep something in tune and playing!! You'd have to be wealthy and be able to afford to have your own technician on hand to keep the thing working. Especially in a period when they had no air conditioning, nor any way to maintain humidity control. And,no cast iron harp in it to help it to stay in tune.

I saw an article years ago(don't recall where), about a guy who had a large church pipe organ in his house. He had taken the bottom out of his fireplace. The long pipes were in the basement(maybe the whole instrument was in the basement, I can't remember), and were run up the CHIMNEY ! The only place he could put them.

[Kelly Cleveland]

I don't think we do the science olympiad, I did that in middle school though. Our big thing is the First robotics which we tend to do very well at. I tried that for a while, but my interests have shifted away from electronics and machining, and more towards woodwork. The WISE program is something a lot of schools are doing now, I think it is a good representation of where our education system needs to be moving. I learned so much more about my own ways of working, in addition to many practical skills. It was certainly more useful than sitting in a regular English class every day.

[Alan Caro]

Kelly Cleveland,

That's a challenging project that you appear to be accomplishing at a high level- well done!

And, building a pipe organ is an excellent subject for placing the evolution of technology in a cultural- craft and economic context. Until probably the mid-19th Century, except for ships, pipe organs were the most complex, discrete machines in the World- and immensely expensive. They're expensive today too. The organ in Disney Hall, Los Angeles was $3.2 Million in mid 90's. In the 11th C., there were pipe organs with 10,000+ pipes and the Disney Hall organ has 6,500. No other new instrument (old violins can cost a lot more as antiques) can cost nearly as much as a pipe organ. The most expensive grand pianos- a Fazioli is $300,000 is still less than 1/10th the cost of the Dismal Hall organ - sorry- Disney.

Organs were also the progenitor of the concept of disparate systems integration: combining mechanical action and air pressure, but very importantly, the idea that a button- a key or stop control, amplifies or controls larger systems remotely. There was also a lot of precision necessary, the trackers and rollers had to be carefully designed and beautifully made to operate with low latency- quick response- and low friction under different conditions and the wind chest, registers, pallets, and bellows - everything in the wind system, had to be air tight. That's another important aspect of organs historically as only clocks shared that level of precision and combination of systems (clocks had a power system, a regulation system, and an indication system).

My interest in instrument making began in junior high and I made a harpsichord kit when I was 14-15 and later became interested in clavichords, which are amazing to me in their simplicity. Ironically, the conjecture concerning clavichord making is that many were made by organ builders- they had time between projects, knew how to make keyboards, and had odd offcuts of materials too small for organs but could make several clavichords. So, it's possible that organ builders were simultaneously making the most complex and very simplest keyboard instruments. There were other links. Clavichords were common as practice instruments for organists as they were inexpensive and the organist would have to pay someone- or several people- to pump the bellows of the local cathedral organ. To experience the full cultural /technological gamut of organ-building, you might make a little fretted clavichord out of the left-overs from the organ project- a kind of set.

By the way, if you wanted to add an extra level to your project, it's quite simple to make a few (perhaps eight or ten) pedal pull downs in the bass- simple levers with wires or tracker rods that pull down the front of the key levers. Those were used to have a bass note that sounded continuously for example the fundamental tone of a cantus firma. Portative organs that sat on the knees and were played with one hand and the bellows and were sometimes played by placing a Lead weight on a low note to sound against the musical line. For a long time I wanted to make a portative with about 20 notes and have gone so far as to shop for an appropriate set of pipes- 4' or 2' flutes on Ebahhh, Have a look at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO6H...6Hsf3xeuM#t=13

And there were Regals that used reed pipes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdJB...=RDAO6Hsf3xeuM

That's a great noise and portatives are neat little instruments. Medieval music can be mysteriously calming.

I envy you a high school that has a program of this kind. Making a complex device involving a study of design, history, technology, and craft evolution is a fantastic opportunity. I had an exposure to instrument making through visiting George Wilson at his shop in Williamsburg - a once in a lifetime opportunity- and later working in Williamsburg in the Summers- a four times in a lifetime opportunity. From some aspects, I think I learned more fundamentally important lessons from a study of instruments making- and in Summers in the boot and shoe-making shop- than I learned in architecture school. Craft is both inspiring and humbling, but architecture school at least fully develops the ego and desire to spend all- and more- of the clients' money,..

Alan Caro


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[george wilson]

Alan,I didn't find that buzzly little organ calming!!!!

I am not a student of early organs,Alan. Does that little "buzzy" one have reeds? Sounded like it did.

The Romans also had an early type of organ. The Hydralous(?) Been a LOOOOONG time since I thought about it. It compressed air by means of a column of water,had only a few keys,and the keys had to be hit with fists to operate.

Can you shed any light on these?

[Mel Fulks]

George,I can help with that one. When they wanted to play loud they "took the gloves off"

[Alan Caro]

george wilson,

The portative organs with flute pipes can have an interesting, dark and mysterious quality, especially playing Medieval lines with everything running in fifths and thirds that are tuned to be pure intervals- meantone temperament. The regals with reeds like the second YouTube video are intriguing in a different way- the sound was intended to cut through an ensemble and give it a kind of continuous flow of sound, which organs are good at.

There was a division in instrument timbre in the Medyval period into the Renaissance where one lot of instruments were dark and somber-lutes viol, rebec, recorder, and church organs and the other lot were very bright .biting sounds: citterns, crumhorns, hurdy-gurdies, various forms of bagpipes- and reed organs. This was an evolving concept of ensemble sound in which liturgical music took the dark and sombre- the flute pipe, and secular- dance music- used the sharp and biting reeds. Spanish organs evolved from the Renaissance to have a lot more reeds than in the north- usually prominent trumpet stops.

The thing is, even into the 18th C., music was not written specifically for a particular instrument, any instrument might take a line of the polyphony and play it on whatever they had. The earliest music supposed to have been written for keyboard, is from the Robertsbridge Codex. but, no one knows for certain and see how many different instruments and combinations of instruments have been recorded playing it:

https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...tsbridge+codex

I like both the flute and reed sound and at one time I worked out a design for a portative that had one 4' flute and one 2' reed stop. Not authentic, but would have allowed a strong contrast. Good portative players can give a lot of expression to the sound by the way the bellows are controlled to "breathe" and I thought an instrument like that could be interesting with a harp and a singer.

You mentioned what is considered to be the first keyboard instrument the hydraulis. This is a Greek invention of the 1st C, BC and it's remarkably sophisticated as it includes all the elements of a modern organ- air pressure supply, regulation, key control and pipes/ The air is pressurized by the weight of a of water that pressures air in a chamber above the water. The chamber is double and the water level in the outer chamber is higher than the inner chamber so it tries to equalize and that pushed the air out the top on the inner chamber. But the outer chamber level is maintained by regulation so new air enters by means of an inverted side pipe with a kind of one way valve so the pressure is constant- well somewhat constant. Because the air pressure is quite low, the key action- simple tilting lever pallets was said contemporaneously to be very light. This was a very effective, solution ands used into the 8th-9th C. when bellows took the place of the water-derived pressure.

See: http://users.ipa.net/~tanker/organs.htm

When Medieval organs 12th-13thC had thousands of pipes- and much higher higher pressures, pressing a key had to move dozens of pallets through all those trackers and rollers- probably not extremely precisely made and yes hose keyboard are depicted as two rows of little shovels with space between and probably needed a lot of strength to play.

Organs are intriguing to me as no other instrument has such an amazing range of scale- you can sit one on your knee of they can be the size of a three story building and are genuinely architectural. Also, they were such advanced technology 2,100 years ago and still in general use the same set of the basic components. Other, simple instruments do this- the drum, flute and harp, but a modern keyed flute, trumpet, French horn, and a double action harp are more different technically than a modern organ to one of 100BC as a flute did not have a key until about 1740 and harps first had single action in what-1730 or so.

Alan Caro

[Scott DelPorte]

Hi Kelly,
First time seeing your project. This is really impressive work. I remember my high school shop projects as not being so ambitious, let alone a project for English class. Must be a great school. Please keep us posted as you go along. Really wonderful.
Thanks for sharing
Scott

[george wilson]

Alan,as you know,I used to have to tune all the harpsichords in Williamsburg,and the one at Mr. Darling's house. They were all tuned mean tone. I was happy when they got someone else to tune those instruments! Took a lot of my time up.