If this has piqued your interest, please speak to our Director of Music, Paul Buckmaster who will be delighted to talk to you.
QUESTION: The organ at St James’ was built by the Manchester firm of Jardine, and installed in 1890.
How many pipes do you think it has? See below.
Answer: If you counted the front pipes with the pretty patterns (‘diapered’) and said 21, you’re way off beam! (If you look very carefully, you can see some grey-coloured pipe mouths behind the front display.) Think of each pipe as being like a recorder that can only play one note. The organ at
St James’ has two keyboards for the hands, each of 56 notes, and one of 30 notes for the feet! Each manual keyboard has four sets of pipes, of different shapes, materials, and sizes, to give sounds of different pitches, volume and tones, so in total there are 2 (manuals) x 4 (sets of pipes) x 56 (notes) plus 30 for the feet! But there’s a slight cheat – on the top (‘Swell’) manual, two sets of pipes share one set of the longest 12 pipes to save space. So there are actually ((2 x 4 x 56) -12+30) = 466 pipes!
Question: How long is the longest pipe? How long is the shortest?
Answer: The manual keyboards on the organ at St James go from two octaves below middle C to the G two and a half octaves above middle C. Now, if you want a recorder or whistle to sound middle C, you need one which is about two feet (about 60 cm) from the mouth to the end. So one that sounds two octaves below has to be about eight feet (2.44 metres) from mouth to end. In the above picture, one of those is the third pipe from the left. Organ builders call a set of pipes made so that if you press middle C on the keyboard, middle C sounds, an ‘eight foot stop’. But you can have sets (we call them ‘ranks’, as in ‘rank and file’) of pipes that sound an octave below, or one, two or more octaves above the note you press, for instance to add ‘weight’ or ‘brilliance’ to the sound. St James has five, ‘eight foot’ stops, two ‘four foot’ stops, one ‘two foot’ stop, and a sixteen foot stop for the feet. So the shortest pipe (the top note of the ‘two foot stop’, two and a half octaves above the middle C key, plus two octaves for the change from eight to two feet), is a whistle only two inches (51 mm) from mouth to the top end.
Question: So you would think that the longest pipe on the St James’ organ would be sixteen feet from mouth to the end, sounding three octaves below middle C. But organ builders have at least one way of cheating – how do they do it?
Answer: The answer to the last question is related to how you tune organ pipes. All of the 466 pipes in the St James’ organ have to be tuned periodically – and at the normal temperature too, as changes in temperature and humidity have different effects on different pipes. Just imagine tuning the organ in. for instance, Liverpool Anglican cathedral, which has more than ten thousand pipes – a full time job! At St James’, some (the front ones) are zinc; most of the inner ones are ‘pipe metal’, a soft alloy of tin and lead, like solder. And 154 of them are made of pine wood. To tune a whistle-type pipe, you make the pipe longer or shorter (just like covering / uncovering the finger holes on a recorder.) Some pipes have a slot cut in the back at the top, which can be covered or uncovered. Many of the metal pipes have sprung ‘tin cans’ fitted at the top – these can be moved up or down to make the pipe longer or shorter. But 98 of the wooden pipes have stoppers in the end, that can be moved up or down, like a ‘Swanee Whistle’. A stopped pipe sounds an octave lower than an open pipe of the same length (Paul can explain the physics to you, if you’re interested.) So the lowest note of the 16′ pedal stop actually comes from a stopped wooden pipe, eight feet long, situated in the south east corner of the organ chamber, and sounds at’C’, 32.7 Hz (vibrations per second.) (The Liverpool Cathedral organ has several 32 foot stops, and one that sounds at 64 foot pitch – the bottom note is 8.175 vibrations per second: you can just about count them.
Questions: How else might you ‘cheat’ to get low notes? (The 64′ stop mentioned is one example of this!) And how is air blown through all these pipes to make sounds?