On 5 Mar 2003 at 10:48, Andrew Stiller wrote: > >> Hogwash! Organs as large as any ever built were in existence by > >> 1425--two centuries before the orchestra was even thought of. > > > >This statement is a bit of hyperbole; what would have been a very > >large organ in > >1425 would have been considered to be a modest size in 1725, and would be > >considered small today. > > "The most famous 14th-century organ is that of Halberstadt Cathedral > (c. 1361, rebuilt 1495), described in some detail by Praetorius > (1619)... four keyboards...The largest rank of pipes was at the > equivalent of 32' pitch, the total number about 1192, from 16 ranks > at pedal B to 56 at top manual a'... 20 bellows supplied the wind." > > --New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, article "Organ" > section IV/6 (vol. 13 p. 733)
That's not bay any stretch of the imagination close to "organs as large as any ever built." It's not even close -- it's off by an order of magnitude. And plenty of organs from the 19th century and later have 64' pipes (which don't sound like much themselves but really add a lot when played with others), 100s of ranks and 10s of thousands of individual pipes. The number of manuals really doesn't mean much at all, as the limitation on that is the physical length of the organists arms. If the number of manuals were proportional to the number of pipes/ranks, then the big organs of the present day would have 10-100 manuals, if the ratios of ranks to manuals were the same as the organ in your quotation. -- David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
