This picture shows a beautiful example of one of the largest of all wind instruments. It is an organ. Just imagine how much air is needed to make all these organ pipes sound!

Of course, people don’t blow into organ pipes. Mechanical gadgets such as bellows and electric motors are used. In the very first organs, made in Ancient Greece and Rome over 2,000 years ago, water was used to force air through the pipes. The first organ was called a hydraulic, from the Greek words for `water’ and ‘pipe’. According to writers of the time, the sound was so powerful it could be heard many miles away and the players had to plug their ears!

A few hundred years later, bellows took over the job of supplying the air. A monk living in England about 1,000 years ago tells of a gigantic organ with 400 pipes that sounded like thunder. It had 26 bellows and needed 70 people to work them! Today, only one musician is needed to play an organ even as large as this one.

The sound of pipes

The types of organs that still exist today were first used about 300 years ago in European churches. They are able to imitate the sounds of many instruments of the orchestra — the violin, flute, trumpet, oboe and clarinet for example. Some of the pipes have ducts cut into them and work just like a recorder. Other pipes have metal reeds that vibrate like those of the clarinet.

Small organs

Not all organs were as big as this. The small, sweet-sounding portative organ was popular during the 1400s and 1500s in Europe. It could be held and played at the same time by one person. One hand worked the bellows and the other hand played the keyboard in the same way as the Indian harmonium player.

Choosing the sound

The organist chooses different sounds by pressing down or pulling out stops to open and close the pipes. Most organs have two keyboards, called manuals, for the hands and one keyboard for the feet, called a pedalboard. Each keyboard controls a separate set of pipes. The organist plays tunes on the keyboards and operates the stops at the same time. Eyes, ears, hands, feet and brain all have to work together to control such a complicated machine.

One of the greatest composers for the organ was Johann Sebastian Bach. He lived and worked in Germany in the 1700s. When he was young he once walked over 300 kilometres to hear a famous organist play. Perhaps this inspired him to write the organ music for which he became famous and which is still popular today.

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dodoMusic Box, Trumpet, Violin24 Oct, 2008