leaderboard1 -

From Trompeta to Ophicleide: An Introduction to Historic Reed Shallots

June 9, 2003
Default

Herbert L. Huestis, Ph.D., is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with David Craighead.  He is a pipe organ technician in British Columbia and Washington State, where he specializes in restoring and renovating vintage reed stops.

One of the most fascinating essays to which Charles Brenton Fisk penned his name carried the unassuming title, "How Certain Musical Differences between the Historic Organs of Germany and France were Achieved by Differences in Construction."1 In this paper, Fisk leads the reader on a tour of national organ styles, which is a "must-read" for any serious student of reed making.

 Fisk's monograph, presented at a symposium entitled "L'Orgue à notre époque," focused on the differences among reed shallots endemic to various national styles of organ building.  He started with a quick primer on how reeds work.

Organ reed pipes consist of two parts, the motor and the resonator. The motor contains the block, shallot, tongue and tuning wire and corresponds to the mouthpiece and embouchure of an orchestral wind instrument. The resonator corresponds to the "horn" held in the players hands . . . Indeed, the tremendous variety of tone possible in organ trumpet stops is largely owing to differing designs of motor, especially since the resonator always has the same shape, namely that of an inverted cone.

With a simplicity that belied his genius, he elaborated on different shallot styles in such a way that the whole subject came alive. Students of the art of reed voicing must sink their teeth into this entire text to follow this magnificent description of the "all out" racket of renaissance reeds, the fire of French Trompettes and the pulsating throb of German Posaunen.

Fisk knew that the key to the incredible variety of reed tone lies in the size and shape of the shallot, more than any other element of the reed pipe, and that these differences must be fully understood to appreciate the finer points of reed voicing.

Of course, reed stops achieve a huge range of tone and effect with changes in resonator shape as well--but differences in shallot type affect each resonator shape in a predictable way. Differing shallot styles work their magic on any resonator shape, be it a conical Trumpet, double-conical Oboe, or cylindrical Dulcian or Clarinet. Resonators are fairly easy to visualize because of their striking similarities to orchestral or early renaissance instrumental counterparts. But shallots remain much more of a mystery--one that was artfully examined by Fisk as he looked at the shallot in various ways.  In his analysis of shallot styles, he concentrated on these points:

1. Essential elements of organ building.

2. National trends in the use of materials.

3. Characteristics of Renaissance, French and German shallots.

4. Influence of reed pipes at the note channel.

 Charles Fisk used his comprehensive knowledge of reed making to achieve tremendous variety and musical effect in his own organs.  A delightful detail is found in his notes on pipe scaling sheets for Opus 85 in the Memorial Church of Stanford University. Although he never heard this organ, he clearly indicated his intentions for the reeds with these instructions for the Great 8' Trumpet.  Beside a drawing of the Clicquot style shallots to be used to make these pipes he wrote: "This has to be a real carnivore."2 He couldn't get much clearer than that!

The history of the reed shallot follows an interesting continuum--of closure of the shallot face and increasing of wind pressures to compensate for that closure. Renaissance shallots, speaking on relatively low wind pressure, were wide and shallow with thin tongues that vibrated easily. This arrangement gave reed sounds that were incisive and robust--just the thing for the military and ecclesiastical pageantry of the time.

When these shallots found their way to Germany, they were changed to make the drum-like trumpets of the German organs. They were extremely powerful, but so very different in sound; they pulsed the entire flue work of the organ like drums, rather than the blazing Spanish and French trumpets.

When "Father" Bernard Smith came to England in the late 17th century, he brought German shallots with him.  With them, he laid the foundation of English reed making that culminated with the appearance of William Hill and Henry Willis in the 18th and 19th centuries. Hill's development of powerful organ reeds came when western civilization was in the throes of the industrial revolution. It is not surprising that Hill got invaluable experience by making railroad signals! Nicholas Thistlethwaite comments:

Whether Hill's experiments with organ reeds suggested the possibility of the signaling device, or whether the signaling device was the inspiration for the "Grand Ophicleide" will never be known.3

Hill did much to expand the reed department of the English organ.  By the 1840's he established his own style of reed voicing with the careful deployment of trumpets, trombones, cornopeans and horns.  Hill created the Cornopean organ stop imitating an early form of valved cornet, which appeared during the 1830s. Thistlethwaite continues:

Smoothness and sonority seem to have been the principal objectives of all Hill's innovations among the reeds (Thistlethwaite, 1990).

Hill's eventual development of the high-pressure reed was the culmination of a series of experiments involved with amplifying reed tone, and through it the power of the whole organ (Edmonds and Thistlethwaite, 1976). These experiments include increasing the scale of resonators and shallots, and attempting to improve regularity and promptness of speech.

Henry Willis followed Hill by making more radical changes in reeds in the nineteenth century. He introduced weights in the bass to control the vibration and torque of the tongue, and hooded trumpets to focus the tone.  Willis also adopted the practice of using harmonic or double length resonators to give more power to treble notes.

The shallots of these national schools of organ building progressed from the thin-walled, shallow and parallel construction of Spanish and French reeds to the wide and heavily plated German type and on to the tapered and closed English examples. This progression was accompanied by an increase in wind pressure which permitted more and more closure to the face of the shallot, and an increase of both fundamental tone and harmonic development.

These are generalizations, but they serve as a means to illustrate the changes that took place in some three hundred years of organ building. The North American continent inherited its eclecticism from all of these schools of organ building. No one understood this better than Charles Fisk:

It's a curious turn of fate that brings scholarly interest in the organ to its present state.  That the love of Bach's music should bring us to study antique Dutch and German organs--most of which Bach never heard--and that a still-alive tradition resting squarely on Cavaillé-Coll should indirectly fill us with yearning for the French Classic Organ--these are quirks of musical history we can only marvel at. And that all this overlies some two centuries of English domination of New World organ practice? Curious indeed!

Related Content

March 18, 2024
The celebration “These people will be your friends for life,” Karel Paukert pronounced to his organ class at Northwestern University in the mid-1970s…
March 18, 2024
That ingenious business Great Britain’s King George III (1738–1820), whose oppressive rule over the American colonies led to the American…
March 18, 2024
Robert Eugene Leftwich Robert Eugene Leftwich died January 13, 2024. He was born July 2, 1940, in Texas and grew up in Longmont, Colorado. He…