Blow little winds, blow
But blow not on my toe
Like a good child be kind
And blow me the organ wind.
Anonymous inscription on an old organ bench
Without wind there is no sound: this is true for every wind instrument, particularly for the organ with its hundreds and often more than 2000 pipes.
“To my eyes and ears the organ is the king of all instruments”, wrote Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in a letter to his father on October 18, 1777.
How does such a “king” work?
The organ, perhaps the most complex of all musical instruments, belongs to the family Aerophone. It functions as a combination of wind and keyboard instruments.
The French organ builder and theoretician, Dom Bedos, provides 1766 in his Art du facteur d’orgue an excellent presentation of the construction and functioning of a pipe organ with mechanical action.
A person called a Kalkant (bellows treader or organ blower) operates – on large organs not without considerable effort – usually two bellows and thereby pumps air into the wind canals; at the console sits the organist, who, by pressing a key, releases the path of the compressed air from the wind tunnels to the organ pipes, thus producing the sound until the player releases the key again. Apart from a few historic organs, the wind supply has long since been generated by an electric motor..