CHAPTER XVII Germany Enters—Organs, Organists and Organ Works It is rather hard to believe that the largest of all instruments, the pipe organ, is a descendant of Pan’s Pipes, played by the shepherds on the hillsides of ancient Greece, is it not? The pipes of the church organ of today are of different lengths and are built on the same principle as were the pipes of Pan, our goat-footed friend, who broke off the reeds by the bank of a stream way back when the world was young, to pour out his grief in music for his lost love, Syrinx. The next step was to supply the organ pipes with wind so they could be made to produce tones without blowing on each one separately. A wooden box was invented, and each pipe inserted into a hole in the top of the box, which is still called the wind-chest. At first this was supplied with air by two attendants who blew into tubes attached to the wind-chest. Soon the tubes were replaced by bellows, and were worked with the arms, and as the instrument grew larger, with the feet like in a treadmill. An organ is spoken of in the Talmud as having stood in the Temple of Jerusalem, and the hydraulic (water) organ in which air was supplied to the pipes by means of water power was built in Alexandria, Egypt, about the year 250 B.C. The small organ with keys that could be carried from place to place was called a portative (from the Latin _porto_—to carry); the larger organ sometimes stationary and sometimes moved on wheels was called a positive. The levers needed to produce the sound were soon exchanged for keyboards which at first had only a few keys, and you may remember our telling how the keys were pounded with the fists and elbows, in the Winchester organ. A Greek writer of the 4th century A.D. gives us a vivid description of an organ: “I see a strange sort of reeds—they must methinks have sprung from no earthly, but a brazen soil. Wild are they, nor does the breath of man stir them, but a blast, leaping forth from a cavern of oxhide, passes within, beneath the roots of the polished reeds.” It is not known just when the organ was first used in the churches, but there are records of its having been known in Spanish churches as early as the 5th century A.D. Pope Vitalian introduced it in Rome in 666, and in the 8th century in England, organ-building became a very popular profession. Cecil Forsyth says: “In those days a monk or bishop who wished to stand well with society could not take up essay-writing or social-welfare: what he could do was to lay hands on all the available timber, metal, and leather, and start organ-building.”