17th/18th Century France

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century France
French Classical Disposition

Divisions and Position | Stops | Compass | Review Quiz

Sample Stoplist

One of the characteristics of the French Classical organ is the consistent disposition of stops in instruments of the period. Look at this hypothetical stoplist, a composite of several actual organs built in the late seventeenth century.

Grand Orgue Positif Récit
Montre 16 Bourdon 16 Cornet V
Bourdon 16 Montre 8

Montre 8 Bourdon 8 Echo

Bourdon 8 Prestant 4 Cornet V
Prestant 4 Flûte 4
Flûte 4 Nazard 2 2/3 Pédale

Tierce 3 1/5 Doublette 2 Flûte 8
Nazard 2 2/3 Tierce 1 3/5 Trompette 8
Doublette 2 Larigot 1 1/3
Quarte de Nazard 2 Fourniture IV Tremblant doux
Tierce 1 3/5 Cymbale IV Tremblant fort
Fourniture IV Cromorne 8
Cymbale IV
Cornet V
Trompette 8
Clairon 4

Sample Stoplist | Divisions and Position | Stops | Compass | Review Quiz

Divisions and Placement

In the French Classical case, there is no visual evidence of the number of divisions you can expect to find in the main organ. The stoplist above has four manual divisions and a pedal:

Positif
The Positif will be located in its own case, of course, behind the player, and is generally played from the first manual, counting from the bottom.

Grand orgue
As its name implies, the Grand orgue is the primary division of the main case; its pipes form the façade and it is played by the second manual.

Récit
The pipes of the Récit are also located in the main case, although you don't see them. This small division typically has a short compass, beginning on middle c, and is played by the third or fourth manual, depending on the presence of an Echo division. The chest for this division is located above the main chest, in an elevated position. As you can see in the stoplist above, there is typically only one stop, a five-rank Cornet.

Echo
The division is located in the main case, but is placed below the chest of the Grand orgue. The name of this division was used by several builders in the early part of the twentieth century to indicate a division located in a remote part of the room. In the French Classical Echo, however, the effect of distance is achieved by the placement of the pipes in a position where they cannot speak clearly into the room: en fenêtre ("in the window"), i.e., behind the panel or music rack above the top manual keyboard.
Like the Récit, the French Classical Echo also has a short compass and is normally played by the third manual.

Pédale
The pipes of the Pédale division stood on the same chest as those of the Grand orgue. They were divided and the pipes placed at the ends of the chest. One of the typical features of the stoplist above is that the lowest pitches appear on the Grand orgue, not the Pédale. The longer pipes of the 16' Montre would normally have been in the façade, and the pipes of the Pédale would not be visible.
Although you can expect any French Classical organ to have Grand orgue, Positif, and Pédale divisions, there isn't always a consistency in the other two. Sometimes an organ had a Récit but no Echo, sometimes the reverse.

Sample Stoplist | Divisions and Position | Stops | Compass | Review Quiz

Stops

Principals
Take a look at the stop names in the Grand Orgue and Positif, and find the principals. On any French Classical organ, the name used for a 16' or 8' principal is Montre, and you can expect to find the lower-pitched principal on the Grand orgue. The other stops of the principal chorus also had specific names:

Prestant for a principal rank at 4' pitch.
Doublette for a principal rank at 2' pitch.
Even though the principal chorus of the Positif is based on a higher pitch, the Prestant and Doublette will always be at 4' and 2' pitches respectively on each of these divisions. French Classical organs did not have independent principal ranks higher than 2' pitch. Only when there is no lower-pitched principal tone on a division will you see a 4' principal named Montre.

Chorus mixtures
Each division has two chorus mixtures that complete the harmonic series of principal-toned stops. Both are made up of octave- and quint-sounding ranks, and, like similar compound stops in the lowlands and Germany, they are survivors of the Medieval Blockwerk. On either single division, the Fourniture is based on a lower pitch than is the Cymbale. The two chorus mixtures, though, will always have the same pitch relationship, but not the same absolute pitches. This means that the Fourniture of the Positif is based on a higher pitch than the Fourniture of the Grand Orgue, and the same is true of the two Cymbales: the Positif is higher than the Grand Orgue.

Flutes
Look a second time at the flutes on both the Grand Orgue and the Positif. They are all stops of wide scale, the two Bourdons stopped and the others open.¹²⁶ The Grand Orgue has more flutes at a greater variety of pitches than would be found on a similar instrument built without French influence, including the Nazard, the Tierces, and the Larigot. In fact, a large number of flute-scaled mutation stops is typical of French Classical organs, and these mutations derive from the harmonic series of the fundamental pitch on either manual division. For example, the Grosse Tierce, at 3 1/5' pitch, is a harmonic of the 16' fundamental on the Grand Orgue, while the Larigot 1 1/3' extends the harmonic series of the 8' fundamental on the Positif. The scales of the Positif flutes might be slightly smaller than those of the Grand Orgue, but the difference in their sound, as heard from the nave, is caused more by their placement closer to the listener - - on the gallery rail, than by their voicing.

Cornets
A Cornet V, a compound stop of flute scales, is found on three of the four manual divisions, and the appearance of so many of these stops is one of the most typically "French" elements of this stoplist. This particular stop plays only in the treble range, usually from c' to the top of the keyboard, distinguishing it from a similar group of individual ranks on Grand Orgue or Positif, which would play the full range of the keyboard. You might think that the three Cornets are different in composition, or that one is louder, softer, more piercing or rounder in tone than the others. It would appear that three stops that sound alike would not be necessary. The three Cornets, however, are essentially made alike, and their sounds are quite similar. The primary differences that let us tell one from the other are

placement - - where they are located in the case,
and use.

Internally, the windchests of both Grand Orgue and Pédale are placed at impost level, and all their pipes are standing on that plane - - with the exception of the Cornet of the Grand Orgue. In the diagram to the left, the red shapes represent the pipes of the 16' Montre in the hypothetical organ described above. If you place your cursor over the image, you will see the façade replaced by a view of the interior pipe placement. The blue shapes are the pipes of the Pédale, divided on either side, while the red shapes standing at the same level are those of the Grand Orgue. What appears to be a pair of floating black rectangles with additional pipes is actually the Cornet of the Grand Orgue.

The diagram below is a cross-section of the windchest of the Grand Orgue. The view is from the side of the chest, with the façade to the left, as indicated by the arrow. You can imagine that this is a slice through the chest at middle c (c'), or at any higher pitch on the windchest. This chest includes the pallet box, key channels, and sliders that direct the wind to individual pipes of selected stops.

In the diagram, you can see how all the stops of the Grand Orgue are actually played from the same windchest. The blue squiggle that is the first thing coming from the upper side of the chest is a tube that conducts wind to the middle c pipe of the 16' Montre, which is located in the façade. There is a slider for this stop, just as there is for each of the other stops of the Grand Orgue. Moving from left to right, we see the 16' Bourdon, 8' Montre - - all the stops of the Grand Orgue, ending with the 8' Trompette and the 4' Clairon. Between the Tierce and the Fourniture, there is another blue line that leads up to the auxiliary chest where the Cornet pipes (green in the diagram) sit.

The extra chest has no pallet box, so it serves only the limited purpose of distributing the wind from a single opening on the topboard of the chest to five pipes. You can think of this arrangement as one that saves space, because the main chest is not as wide as it would be if all the pipes of the cornet were placed on it between the other pipes that play middle c. This helps keeps the case shallow so that sound can be projected better through reflection from the back of the case. A Cornet in this position is sometimes called a "mounted Cornet" because its pipes are "mounted" (monté) above the topboard of the chest from which it plays. Its main purpose is to strengthen the sound of the 8' Trompette in the upper registers, where the sound thins out in the reed pipes.

The Cornet on the Récit is also placed on a separate chest, this one complete with its own pallet box and played from a separate keyboard. In scale and sound, it is normally a duplicate of the Cornet of the Grand Orgue, differing from it only in its function and use. Again, placing the mouse pointer over the diagram will show one of the usual placements of the Récit Cornet - - in the center of the case. (The green pipe shapes represent the Récit Cornet.) For several reasons, the Récit Cornet can be viewed as a parallel to the Bovenwerk of a Dutch organ:

The sole pipes of this division are usually of flute scale,
standing on a separate chest,
placed above the main chest of the Grand Orgue/Hoofdwerk,
and played from a separate manual.

The Cornet of the Echo is placed immediately above the keydesk, where a Brustwerk, or Borstwerk division would be located in a lowlands ancestor of the French Classical organ. The Lowlands organ would have been provided with doors, or shutters, that could be opened or closed in front of the division. The French Classical Echo Cornet, however, was permanently enclosed, after a fashion, in its location inside the case, below the chest of the Grand Orgue. Its "echo" function was the result of the muffling effect of this enclosure, not of its placement in a remote location.

The diagram to the right shows the relative location of all three Cornets in the hypothetical stoplist above. If you place the mouse pointer over the outline of the case, you will see the

the pipes of the Grand Orgue Cornet in red, placed higher than the main chest level,
the green pipes of the Récit Cornet,
and the yellow pipes of the Echo Cornet.

In addition to the cornets listed above, there is also the possibility on two manual divisions of drawing the components of a cornet as individual stops.

On the Grand Orgue, the Bourdons at 16' and 8', the Flute, the Tierces at 3 1/5 and 1 3/5, the Nazards, and the Quarte de Nazard can be combined to create a composite tone color that is based either on a 16' fundamental or (if the 16' and 3 1/5' stops are omitted) on an 8' fundamental.
Similarly, on the Positif, a composite of similar stops could even add the Larigot to sound the 8' fundamental and the first five overtones in a six-rank ensemble similar to a cornet.
However, even though it has become common in the United States to refer to similar combinations of individual stops - - ones that include a third-sounding rank - - a tierce - - as Cornets, or as a "Cornet décomposé," they are more properly called "Jeux de tierce." While it is not uncommon in organs of other national traditions to include tierces, the French Classical Organ is distinguished by its inclusion of different compound stops each called "cornet." Their presence and their disposition in the different manual divisions according to the plan outlined above is typical of the French Classical organ and of no other type of instrument.

Reeds
The final group of manual stops in the typical French Classical disposition consists of the reeds, listed to the right. Both the Trompettes and the Clairon are conical reeds with full-length resonators, while the Cromorne is a short-length cylindrical reed, and the Clairon was simply a Trompette at the higher octave. The Cromorne was made to balance the Trompette, and in the Parisian organ typically produced an equivalent volume of sound.
In larger instruments, two additional reeds might be found:

a Voix humaine on the Grand Orgue.
a second manual Trompette or an Hautbois on the Echo or Récit

Pedal stops
The only two stops in the Pédale are both at 8' pitch. The Flûte is an open stop, and like most open flutes, its color is almost that of a soft principal in the lower registers. The Trompette is similar to the one of the Grand Orgue.

Tremulants
The two tremulants each affected the entire organ, not just single divisions.

The Tremblant doux imparted a gentle wavering to the pitch, and is called for by several composers in playing their pieces that have a melody and accompaniment texture.
The Tremblant fort (sometimes called a tremblant à vent perdu, or "lost-wind" tremulant) was more vigorous in its effect, and was often used in the large ensemble registration called Grand jeu.

Couplers
The French Classical organ typically had some mechanism for coupling the Positif to the Grand orgue, so that the stops of the smaller division could be played from the primary manual. The usual manner of accomplishing this was through what is commonly called in the United States by the German term Scheibekoppel. In operating a coupler of this type the player grasps the key cheeks of the Grand orgue manual and literally moves the entire keyboard - - "shoves" it, to use the English cognate to scheiben - - either forward or backward to engage or disengage the coupling action.
Couplers from any one of the manuals to pedal were not commonly found on these instruments, and the music of the period does not require them.

Sample Stoplist | Divisions and Position | Stops | Compass | Review Quiz

Keyboard Compass

Both manual and pedal keyboards in the French Classical organ commonly began on the note C, as do keyboards on organs in the United States today. Manual keyboards typically extended to c" or d", pedals to c'. Short octaves were common.
One distinguishing trait of the French compass was the occasional inclusion of AA - - a third below the lowest C of the keyboard. On some instruments an additional key was provided, on others the low C# key played the AA, C# being omitted as it would be in a short octave.

Sample Stoplist | Divisions and Position | Stops | Compass | Review Quiz

Grand Orgue		Positif		Récit
Montre	16	Bourdon	16	Cornet V
Bourdon	16	Montre	8
Montre	8	Bourdon	8	Echo
Bourdon	8	Prestant	4	Cornet V
Prestant	4	Flûte	4
Flûte	4	Nazard	2 2/3	Pédale
Tierce	3 1/5	Doublette	2	Flûte	8
Nazard	2 2/3	Tierce	1 3/5	Trompette	8
Doublette	2	Larigot	1 1/3
Quarte de Nazard	2	Fourniture IV		Tremblant doux
Tierce	1 3/5	Cymbale IV		Tremblant fort
Fourniture IV		Cromorne	8
Cymbale IV
Cornet V
Trompette	8
Clairon	4

Divisions and Placement
In the French Classical case, there is no visual evidence of the number of divisions you can expect to find in the main organ. The stoplist above has four manual divisions and a pedal:
Positif	The Positif will be located in its own case, of course, behind the player, and is generally played from the first manual, counting from the bottom.
Grand orgue	As its name implies, the Grand orgue is the primary division of the main case; its pipes form the façade and it is played by the second manual.
Récit	The pipes of the Récit are also located in the main case, although you don't see them. This small division typically has a short compass, beginning on middle c, and is played by the third or fourth manual, depending on the presence of an Echo division. The chest for this division is located above the main chest, in an elevated position. As you can see in the stoplist above, there is typically only one stop, a five-rank Cornet.
Echo	The division is located in the main case, but is placed below the chest of the Grand orgue. The name of this division was used by several builders in the early part of the twentieth century to indicate a division located in a remote part of the room. In the French Classical Echo, however, the effect of distance is achieved by the placement of the pipes in a position where they cannot speak clearly into the room: en fenêtre ("in the window"), i.e., behind the panel or music rack above the top manual keyboard. Like the Récit, the French Classical Echo also has a short compass and is normally played by the third manual.
Pédale	The pipes of the Pédale division stood on the same chest as those of the Grand orgue. They were divided and the pipes placed at the ends of the chest. One of the typical features of the stoplist above is that the lowest pitches appear on the Grand orgue, not the Pédale. The longer pipes of the 16' Montre would normally have been in the façade, and the pipes of the Pédale would not be visible.
Although you can expect any French Classical organ to have Grand orgue, Positif, and Pédale divisions, there isn't always a consistency in the other two. Sometimes an organ had a Récit but no Echo, sometimes the reverse.

Stops
Principals	Take a look at the stop names in the Grand Orgue and Positif, and find the principals. On any French Classical organ, the name used for a 16' or 8' principal is Montre, and you can expect to find the lower-pitched principal on the Grand orgue. The other stops of the principal chorus also had specific names: Prestant for a principal rank at 4' pitch. Doublette for a principal rank at 2' pitch. Even though the principal chorus of the Positif is based on a higher pitch, the Prestant and Doublette will always be at 4' and 2' pitches respectively on each of these divisions. French Classical organs did not have independent principal ranks higher than 2' pitch. Only when there is no lower-pitched principal tone on a division will you see a 4' principal named Montre.
Chorus mixtures	Each division has two chorus mixtures that complete the harmonic series of principal-toned stops. Both are made up of octave- and quint-sounding ranks, and, like similar compound stops in the lowlands and Germany, they are survivors of the Medieval Blockwerk. On either single division, the Fourniture is based on a lower pitch than is the Cymbale. The two chorus mixtures, though, will always have the same pitch relationship, but not the same absolute pitches. This means that the Fourniture of the Positif is based on a higher pitch than the Fourniture of the Grand Orgue, and the same is true of the two Cymbales: the Positif is higher than the Grand Orgue.
Flutes	Look a second time at the flutes on both the Grand Orgue and the Positif. They are all stops of wide scale, the two Bourdons stopped and the others open.¹²⁶ The Grand Orgue has more flutes at a greater variety of pitches than would be found on a similar instrument built without French influence, including the Nazard, the Tierces, and the Larigot. In fact, a large number of flute-scaled mutation stops is typical of French Classical organs, and these mutations derive from the harmonic series of the fundamental pitch on either manual division. For example, the Grosse Tierce, at 3 1/5' pitch, is a harmonic of the 16' fundamental on the Grand Orgue, while the Larigot 1 1/3' extends the harmonic series of the 8' fundamental on the Positif. The scales of the Positif flutes might be slightly smaller than those of the Grand Orgue, but the difference in their sound, as heard from the nave, is caused more by their placement closer to the listener - - on the gallery rail, than by their voicing.
Cornets	A Cornet V, a compound stop of flute scales, is found on three of the four manual divisions, and the appearance of so many of these stops is one of the most typically "French" elements of this stoplist. This particular stop plays only in the treble range, usually from c' to the top of the keyboard, distinguishing it from a similar group of individual ranks on Grand Orgue or Positif, which would play the full range of the keyboard. You might think that the three Cornets are different in composition, or that one is louder, softer, more piercing or rounder in tone than the others. It would appear that three stops that sound alike would not be necessary. The three Cornets, however, are essentially made alike, and their sounds are quite similar. The primary differences that let us tell one from the other are placement - - where they are located in the case, and use.

The diagram below is a cross-section of the windchest of the Grand Orgue. The view is from the side of the chest, with the façade to the left, as indicated by the arrow. You can imagine that this is a slice through the chest at middle c (c'), or at any higher pitch on the windchest. This chest includes the pallet box, key channels, and sliders that direct the wind to individual pipes of selected stops.
In the diagram, you can see how all the stops of the Grand Orgue are actually played from the same windchest. The blue squiggle that is the first thing coming from the upper side of the chest is a tube that conducts wind to the middle c pipe of the 16' Montre, which is located in the façade. There is a slider for this stop, just as there is for each of the other stops of the Grand Orgue. Moving from left to right, we see the 16' Bourdon, 8' Montre - - all the stops of the Grand Orgue, ending with the 8' Trompette and the 4' Clairon. Between the Tierce and the Fourniture, there is another blue line that leads up to the auxiliary chest where the Cornet pipes (green in the diagram) sit.
The extra chest has no pallet box, so it serves only the limited purpose of distributing the wind from a single opening on the topboard of the chest to five pipes. You can think of this arrangement as one that saves space, because the main chest is not as wide as it would be if all the pipes of the cornet were placed on it between the other pipes that play middle c. This helps keeps the case shallow so that sound can be projected better through reflection from the back of the case. A Cornet in this position is sometimes called a "mounted Cornet" because its pipes are "mounted" (monté) above the topboard of the chest from which it plays. Its main purpose is to strengthen the sound of the 8' Trompette in the upper registers, where the sound thins out in the reed pipes.

The Cornet of the Echo is placed immediately above the keydesk, where a Brustwerk, or Borstwerk division would be located in a lowlands ancestor of the French Classical organ. The Lowlands organ would have been provided with doors, or shutters, that could be opened or closed in front of the division. The French Classical Echo Cornet, however, was permanently enclosed, after a fashion, in its location inside the case, below the chest of the Grand Orgue. Its "echo" function was the result of the muffling effect of this enclosure, not of its placement in a remote location.
The diagram to the right shows the relative location of all three Cornets in the hypothetical stoplist above. If you place the mouse pointer over the outline of the case, you will see the the pipes of the Grand Orgue Cornet in red, placed higher than the main chest level, the green pipes of the Récit Cornet, and the yellow pipes of the Echo Cornet.
In addition to the cornets listed above, there is also the possibility on two manual divisions of drawing the components of a cornet as individual stops. On the Grand Orgue, the Bourdons at 16' and 8', the Flute, the Tierces at 3 1/5 and 1 3/5, the Nazards, and the Quarte de Nazard can be combined to create a composite tone color that is based either on a 16' fundamental or (if the 16' and 3 1/5' stops are omitted) on an 8' fundamental. Similarly, on the Positif, a composite of similar stops could even add the Larigot to sound the 8' fundamental and the first five overtones in a six-rank ensemble similar to a cornet. However, even though it has become common in the United States to refer to similar combinations of individual stops - - ones that include a third-sounding rank - - a tierce - - as Cornets, or as a "Cornet décomposé," they are more properly called "Jeux de tierce." While it is not uncommon in organs of other national traditions to include tierces, the French Classical Organ is distinguished by its inclusion of different compound stops each called "cornet." Their presence and their disposition in the different manual divisions according to the plan outlined above is typical of the French Classical organ and of no other type of instrument.

Reeds	The final group of manual stops in the typical French Classical disposition consists of the reeds, listed to the right. Both the Trompettes and the Clairon are conical reeds with full-length resonators, while the Cromorne is a short-length cylindrical reed, and the Clairon was simply a Trompette at the higher octave. The Cromorne was made to balance the Trompette, and in the Parisian organ typically produced an equivalent volume of sound. In larger instruments, two additional reeds might be found: a Voix humaine on the Grand Orgue. a second manual Trompette or an Hautbois on the Echo or Récit
Pedal stops	The only two stops in the Pédale are both at 8' pitch. The Flûte is an open stop, and like most open flutes, its color is almost that of a soft principal in the lower registers. The Trompette is similar to the one of the Grand Orgue.
Tremulants	The two tremulants each affected the entire organ, not just single divisions. The Tremblant doux imparted a gentle wavering to the pitch, and is called for by several composers in playing their pieces that have a melody and accompaniment texture. The Tremblant fort (sometimes called a tremblant à vent perdu, or "lost-wind" tremulant) was more vigorous in its effect, and was often used in the large ensemble registration called Grand jeu.
Couplers	The French Classical organ typically had some mechanism for coupling the Positif to the Grand orgue, so that the stops of the smaller division could be played from the primary manual. The usual manner of accomplishing this was through what is commonly called in the United States by the German term Scheibekoppel. In operating a coupler of this type the player grasps the key cheeks of the Grand orgue manual and literally moves the entire keyboard - - "shoves" it, to use the English cognate to scheiben - - either forward or backward to engage or disengage the coupling action. Couplers from any one of the manuals to pedal were not commonly found on these instruments, and the music of the period does not require them.

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century France French Classical Disposition

Sample Stoplist

Divisions and Placement

Stops

Keyboard Compass

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century France
French Classical Disposition