Frontispiece
PRACTICAL
ORGAN-BUILDING
By W. E. DICKSON, M.A.
PRECENTOR OF ELY CATHEDRAL
SECOND EDITION, REVISED, WITH ADDITIONS
LONDON
CROSBY LOCKWOOD AND CO.
7, STATIONERS' HALL COURT, LUDGATE HILL
1882
[All rights reserved]
LONDON:
PRINTED BY J. S. VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED,
CITY ROAD.
PREFACE.
This little work is undertaken because it is believedthat no treatise on the construction of organs, atonce short, practical, and accessible by all classesof readers, is extant.
The bulky volume of Hopkins and Rimbault,worthy as it is of all commendation, and aboundingwith matter interesting to the musician, does notprofess to enter into details essential to the workman.The same remark may be applied to sundrytreatises in the form of articles contributed toEncyclopædias, or to periodicals of a popular kind.The writers of these articles, probably fully mastersof the subject, cannot, from the very nature of thecase, command the time, space, and amplitude ofillustration absolutely necessary for the full elucidationof the mechanical processes involved in theconstruction of the most elaborate and ingeniousof all musical instruments.
Readers of the French language, indeed, mayfind all that they require in a most admirableand exhaustive work, the "Facteur d'Orgues," byM. Hamel, forming one of the series of the[Pg vi]"Manuels-Roret," published in 1849 by Roret ofParis, in three volumes, with an atlas of plates.The author of this complete exposition of theorgan-builder's art has taken for the foundation ofhis book the great work of Dom Bedos, a Benedictinemonk, who printed in 1766-78, at Paris, twosumptuous folio volumes, with plates, which leaveunnoticed nothing which was known or practisedby the workmen of his period. The modern editor,however, who displays a most intimate knowledgeof his subject, together with an enviable power ofexplaining it in all its minutest details, aided, ashe is, by the most accurate of all Europeanlanguages, has produced in his third volume amanual of the art of organ-building in recenttimes, which covers the whole field of investigation,and of which it is not too much to say that itcan never be surpassed.
A somewhat indifferent translation of a Germantreatise on the "Organ and its Construction," byHerr Seidel, of Breslau, appeared some years ago.But this work, like the English publication firstnoticed, is not for the dwellers in workshops, butfor organists, choir-masters, clergymen, and othersentrusted with the care of existing organs, or likelyto be concerned in the erection of new ones.
The writer has lately perused, with much