The English Organ of a Hundred Years Ago

Extract

Perhaps no musical instrument has been subjected to greater constitutional changes during the last hundred years than has the English organ—in the various directions of size, compass of key-boards, character of stops and methods of controlling their use, and last (but not least) its system of tuning. Changes are still being made, even to the extent of affecting the uniformity of those “playing arrangements” which the College of Organists endeavoured to regulate, systematize and settle more than a quarter of a century ago. It is an open question if the organ is being developed at the present time upon logical and really artistic lines, as a musical instrument deserving a separate and individual existence of its own; or whether it is daily becoming a merely servile (and therefore a degraded) mechanical imitation of the orchestra. It may help us to see more clearly in which direction we are now moving if we turn our thoughts back to the English organ of the first decade of the nineteenth century—when it was a comparatively small instrument, but one with a character all its own, and in many ways admirably adapted to fulfil the one great purpose of its existence—the accompaniment of the human voice.