Tutti Reedi

Organ Reeds

The organ has had reed pipes as well as flute-type pipes ever since the late Middle Ages. The first were the regals, sometimes as a separate instrument but often built into the positive organs and perhaps a little later into those bigger organs that were fixed on a church wall.

The regal had beating reeds, a metal blade beating against a frame, much like a clarinet mouthpiece but much smaller. Each blade and frame was fixed into a shallot, a shallow box, the pitch controlled by the length and mass of the reed. This series of very small units could be built into a box, the size and shape of a large Bible which, when opened, revealed a keyboard, a set of bellows, and the reeds; because of its shape it was called a Bible regal.

Various shapes of resonators, added to increase the sound, were added when there was more space in a church organ, and these shapes can be seen in the pages of Praetorius’s book Syntagma Musicum. The resonators were appropriately graduated in size to match the pitch of each reed, but the pitch produced was always controlled by that of the reed.

The same applied when pipes were added to replace the small resonators, but unlike the pipes of the flute-types, again they did not affect the pitch, only the tone quality. Each pattern of pipes was designed to imitate the sound of a real reed instrument such as the crumhorn and, pre-eminently, that of the trumpet.

On many Spanish organs these trumpet pipes were mounted ‘en chamade’, projecting horizontally below the regular sets of pipes. This was both for an impressive view and also so as to project the sound out into the church, and quite often directly aimed at a second organ the other side of the choir. Sometimes these organs could be coupled so that one player could play them both, but more often each had its own organist.

The pitch of each reed could be tuned by a bridle, a bent iron wire that could be moved up and down the brass reed to alter its length and thus its pitch.

An organ reed with its shallot and bridle

This example of an organ reed had been torn from its pipe by a vandal who was turning the pipes into fake coach horns to be displayed in a pub.

Most church and other larger organs include reed stops. The small positive organs, so called because they can be moved and placed in position, that are commonly used to accompany concert performances of oratorios and masses do not have reed stops. This may be correct for Handel’s oratorios, because in his period in Britain few organs had reed pipes, but it would seem to be a travesty for Bach’s works, for his cantatas and masses were written for performance in the German churches which all had the large organs, with ample reed stops, for which he wrote his organ music.

In eastern Germany and German and Russian Poland some ranks of free reeds (for which see a separate article in this series) were provided in the late eighteenth century. These are occasionally also provided in other countries today.

© Jeremy Montagu, 2018