I've come across a little book which mentions a church where the organ has "one of its manuals fitted with black 'natural' keys and white 'sharp' keys" [sic]. The book was probably published in the late 1930s so the organ may not be around any more but I wondered if anyone had ever come across an organ like this? And does anyone know the reason why it would have been made this way?

i don't know about the organ in question, but i believe "reversed" colours for the keys was actually quite common until fairly recently (19th century or so).

ETA: that is, common for keyboard instruments in general, not organs specifically.

Yes, i quite like black natural and white accidentals personally. Alot of harpsichords are like that.


Very nice!

Yup, for organs too.

I've come across several modern organs with such keyboards. One is the new von Beckerath at Marlborough College:

I think these "reversed" keyboards look rather nice. On the practical side they don't show the dirt so much!

http://www.morleypianos.com/p2.asp

I think that the organ at Christ Church, Oxford has black "natural" keys and white "accidentals".

Edit: Photo here: http://www.chchchoir.org/organists.cfm

One of the churches in our parish has an organ with black natural keys. It was built in 1982 by Church & Co, and has only one manual and a pedalboard. The pipes are unenclosed, and the pedals are permanently coupled to the manual.

The keys on the organ are unusually narrow for some reason, which has its benefits, but takes some getting used to.

I will post a photo when I can.

SB

I've seen them but I don't think I would like to play one; at least with white(ish) keys you can see the divisions reasonably easily, but unless the photos shown here are taken in the gloom I think I would be hitting an awful lot (more) wrong notes.

Just reading this thread made me wonder if there are any organs where the pedal board notes are painted black and white ? Ive never seen one.

Shhhh! You're not supposed to look.

Which reminds me; the light bulb on our pedalboard went pop one Saturday morning, and typically, there wasn't a spare one to replace it with. Junior carried on with his organ practice as normal, and didn't really miss it too much. However, our resident organist (also a keen Jazz musician) turned up to play for a wedding, took the bulb out of the music desk lamp, fitted it into the pedalboard and carried on as normal in the dark.

............ all of which rather confirmed what we had all been thinking for a long time.

SB

I know of another Church & Co organ with "reversed" key colours - it's of a similar age and is in St Edward's Church, Dringhouses, York. I think Church & Co organs are deffo kewl - there's one at St Joseph's RC church in Wetherby, West Yorkshire. It's bonkers but genius, and works very well. It's at the back of the church, but you sit with the pipes behind you and face the same way as the congregation The pipes are cleverly arranged, partly on the rear wall. Here is the spec...

I've seen a digital that was installed less than two years ago like this.

It tends to be when new organs are built in neo-classical style that reverse-coloured keys are considered. Has anybody come across any 'Romantic' new organs where this colour scheme has been chosen?

As I said above, our local Church & Co organ has unusually narrow keys, which take some getting used to, especially for someone like me with chubby fingers.

However, the material the natural keys are faced with is a hard, textured plastic which is quite slippery to the touch, and can be rather disconcerting.

Sadly Church & Co. ceased trading some time ago, which is a shame in my view, as judging by our local instrument they built some good quality organs with nice voicing.

On a similar note, I visited Harrisons organ works at Durham on Saturday, and on my way there noticed a nearby hardware shop called Nelsons - which I am told is run by the one remaining member of the Nelson orgn building family.



I doubt it: The accidentals on many pedalboards have a hardwood capping for better wear properties, and of course hardwoods are usually dark.

SB

If black was the original colour for the natural keys, I wonder why they changed? Did they change when exploration of Africa and the subsequent trade in ivory took place in the 19th century? And what were keys made of before ivory?

I am guessing here, but from my knowledge of boat building: I would imagine that keys were originally made of wood, or perhaps bone, as these materials were readily available, and were easy to fashion using tools of the day. However, if the keys were made of wood, it would be difficult to tell the naturals apart from the accidentals, especialy in the dim light of a candle or oil lamp. White paints were available, but were not very white or hard wearing.

Ivory would have been harder wearing, and was of course white. And it was probably easier to face naturals with ivory than accidentals.

As I said, I am guessing here, but many fashions have purely practical origins.

SB

A well-educated guess, there, Swell Box. Yup, bone and wood were the most-preferred materials. They're starting to be used again increasingly nowadays, and much better they are than plastic, wood and bone being somewhat adsorbent....

That's a relief!

We should also remember that tropical hardwoods, such as teak and mahogany were not plentiful supply in Europe before about the mid 19th century. Organ builders, like boat builders therefore had to rely on less stable softwoods, which were more prone to shrinking and attack by woodworm, and were less suitable for use as working parts. Composites, such as plywood, were still a long way off at that time.

Oak was available, but has never been an easy material to work, and doesn't have ideal properties for smaller components. Being rather acidic, oak also tends to cause corrosion in iron fastenings (an effect known as 'nail sickness').

Anyhow, enough of that; it's getting late!

SB

Organs and boats are two of my main hobbies! I've done some pretty major work in 'fibreglass' with one of my boats, and enjoyed the learning curve

Out of interest, do you think that GRP might possibly be of use in any aspect of organ building? It has gradually replaced wood in most aspects of boat-building over the last 50 years (would that my present boats were without time-consuming brightwork! ). Do you think there's potential for it to be utilised in organ building, SB?

This is all very interesting

Bone Are the bones of any particular animal preferred (due to size, density etc)? I take it they don't use human bone

Argghhhg. Plastic organs? What a thought! Anyhow, the 32' ranks might get blisters.

Seriously though, there is no technical reason why an organ should not be built using composites. After all, plywood and particle boards, both of which are widely used in organ building, are themselves composites. However, there are a number of practical difficulties:

1) In my view, composites would be ideal for some components, such as wind chests and conveyances; but these are nearly always 'one-offs' nowadays, so the tooling costs would be disproportionally high.

2) Composite organ pipes would probably sound very different to woods or metal pipes. Lead alloys are acoustically quite dead, (being both soft and heavy), but a composite pipe would almost certainly introduce a ‘colour’ of its own; which may not be unpleasant, but would be 'different' all the same. (Think of a plastic acoustic guitar, for instance.)

Whilst lead alloys have their drawbacks, they are easily fashioned into the desired shape; which composites are not. This would make individual ‘voicing’ of composite pipes very difficult, unless of course the pipes were designed to accept metal mouths.

Large woods, like Bourdons, would introduce their own problems owing to their box like shape. A conventional single skinned bourdon would need to be quite heavily laid up (and therefore both heavy and expensive) to avoid 'panting', which would add unwanted colour to the sound, and may sound rather ‘flatulent’. That is why boats, and cars, tend to have lots of curves, which provide what we call 'shape stiffness'.

A sandwich construction bourdon (using a balsa or polyurethane foam core, sandwiched between thin layers of GRP) would be lighter and stiffer; but again, the costs involved would be disproportionally high.

3) There is also the question of Health and Safety: Wood is easy and pleasant to fabricate using normal hand or power tools, and does not require special handling. GRP composites, on the other hand, are fabricated using hazardous materials, and once cured are much more difficult to machine. Furthermore, the glass reinforcement in GRP creates irritating dust, and cutting tools have a much shorter lifespan than when cutting wood.

Your comparison with the boatbuilding industry is interesting: Production boat builders switched to GRP composites because the raw materials were much cheaper than timber, and were more readily available. But more to the point, mass fabrication was quicker, cheaper, and more consistent (owing to the use of moulds), and did not require a skilled workforce; which is why so many GRP boats from the 1970’s and early 80’s were so badly laid up! And of course GRP was widely regarded as ‘maintenance free’ in those days, and so we were told would not even attract marine fouling. It’s just a shame nobody told the barnacles!

Organ building, by contrast, is very labour intensive, and usually involves one-off components, so the raw materials account for a much smaller proportion of the manufacturing costs than in boatbuilding.

Regarding the use of bones: as far as I know, the bones from any long-lived creature (elephants, horses and whales come to mind ) can be used to make knife handles, or to face the keys on a piano or organ. I don’t think that the bones of short lived creatures would have the desired mechanical properties, but I may well be wrong on this subject.

SB

During the late 1800s, there was an organ designer in the UK, F.H.Sutton, who liked the idea of reversed keys. A number of organs associated with him tended to have this pattern, such as at the following:

http://www.npor.org.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch.cgi...ec_index=N01499

On the subject of materials, I have heard of a few organs which have organ pipes made of paper. Indeed, in his book Organ Building for Amateurs, Mark Wicks describes his method of building organ pipes in this manner. While their success may be questionable, the author seems quite adamant that positive results can be had.

The relevant section is available as a free preview here:

http://www.bardon-music.com/media/pdf/978-1-902222-21-9.pdf

Thank you for such a comprehensive, detailed and well-considered answer, SB. Fascinating!

At least GRP organs wouldn't suffer from the dreaded 'O'....

The posts in this thread thus far, suggest that the organ in Auckland Castle chapel may well be unique. The Great has black naturals and the Swell has white naturals. Better than that though, the Great is formed around the five ranks of its original Father Smith spec of 1688. Thus it is possible to play both a fairly standard IIP of 1903 vintage, and, an historic 1688 instrument at the same console.

Npor #N13277 - and click through for rebuild and later spec.

Chris Baker - Durham UK

http://www.npor.org.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch.cgi...ec_index=N13277

What a pity the only reed stop was removed in 1983.

That way madness lies....

Must look like a console made out of liquorice allsorts ...

Thanks for the link to the NPOR - I've been able to find the church which was in the little book which started the thread:

http://www.npor.org.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch.cgi...ec_index=N00248

It's All Saints Church at Cawthorne, near Doncaster, and it was built in 1880 by Wordsworth and Maskell. This is an extract from the register:

The console is also rich - reversed key colours on
Choir and Swell - normal on Great! - with arcaded key fronts
to C.

[mwl1 - let me know if you fancy a trip down to look at it some time, and perhaps we could ask if you could play it ]

Another one which must look like it's made out of liquorice allsorts!

Perhaps they should book this chap to give a recital: http://wolfsbarbershop.homestead.com/Photogallery.html

(For those not in the know, the barber in the top photo is Wolfgang Rübsam, who is better known as an organ virtuoso: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_R%C3%BCbsam.)

I never knew he did that as well!

That link didn't work for me. This one might be better:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Rübsam

This page has a photo of his house organ too.
http://wolfsbarbershop.homestead.com/phototour.html

I've got The Great Composers video on at the moment (the BBC series years ago) and in the Bach episode, reversed key harpsichords are featured quite a lot.