Does Size Matter?

Let's get a little discussion going! An Organ below 36 Keys is a Joke, and cannot play any tune to the full ability Both the Wurlitzer 125 and 150 scales, if you discount the counter melody section, have 28 notes. Both had over a thousand tunes arranged for them. Take for instance this Waldteufel potpourri on a Wurlitzer 105: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqhFH21Tu90 It is registers that make an organ sound twice the size, not the number of keys Yes and no. A Wurlitzer 165 is 70 keys and only 52 notes, but it sounds much bigger because it relies heavily on its register box. On the other hand, a 100-key Wurlitzer 'Monster' doesn't need automatic registers because it can switch the melody around to its various divisions. (Clarinet, piccolo, trumpet) any organs above 89 keys are pointless, any bigger than that and you won't notice Sometimes those extra bass notes do come in handy... (This coming from someone who does most of his arranging with 3 bass notes...)

Quote: "An organ below 36-key is a joke and cannot play any tune to full ability". Well not so true. One time at a band organ rally I operated a 22-key Perlee Dutch Street Organ. when I cranked out the "My Fair Lady" boook the crowd loved it. One lady even cranked the organ her self. Quote: "It is registers that make the organ sound twice the size" . As a church organist I can relate. Some organs with the 22-key scale have passed as a larger organ with more and larger pipes.

Musical Ranges
Check out the following chart: http://www.dolmetsch.com/musrange.gif See how the various instruments fall on the range of a piano keyboard. It is interesting! Remember that the composer of a march or overture knew the range of the various instruments and wrote his march, waltz, etc. accordingly. Fairground organs were designed to emulate a brass or concert band. The less range or chromatic notes in each section causes the original music to be compromised. For example the Wurlitzer 150 scale has just three base notes. Imagine a marching band or a concert band that could just play 3 bass notes! Also the scale is not very chromatic. YET many songs sound good on these organs which is a -*test*-('")ament to great arrangers who cleverly shoehorn the arrangement in. But then many of the early Wurlitzer scales were derived from Limonaire. Limonaire had some very unusual non-chromatic scales, ie the 49 note scale and its cousin the 60 note scale. There ARE many songs that sound good on these scales BUT they would sound better on a more chromatic scale. It is interesting to see how clever arrangers "fudge" the song to fit the not chromatic organ. If you have heard the Charleston on a Wurlitzer 125 or a recent arrangement of Entry of the Gladiators on a Wurlitzer 146, you know what I am taking about! By the way the original name for the Entry of the Gladiators was the Chromatic March! Now lets look at the popular 89 and 98 key scales. The Bass section is non-chromatic with 8 notes. The orchestral trombone countermelody parts are often moved by the arrangers into the countermelody sections. A lot of compromise was made in the name of weight, size, and portability. Even with such compromise, these fair organs sound good. Now if you add full chromatic ranges and large chromatic bass sections you DO get to the nirvana stage of fair organ music enjoyment ie Mr. Gavioli's masterpiece, BUT you get a VERY heavy massive exensive fair organ weighing about 4 tons! Thus in the name of compromise and cost vs benefit, you most almost always find smaller, less chromatic, more portable organs. In a German book on crank organs, the 42 key roll operated Bacigalupo Violin Pan was listed as the Rolls Royce of crank organs. WHY? The melody and accompaniment sections were chromatic and there were 9 bass notes. But unless you have the Hofbauer version, the original Bacigalupo is a real workout to crank! I know, I cranked the Poet and Peasant Overture on one which left me with an aching arm! The music was great but the organ was large and difficult to crank. The comparable Hofbauer based on the same design is easy to crank because the grinder is only supplying the wind pressure to the pipes by cranking. You are not supplying the player mechanism which is electronic. Small organ scales can be enjoyable to listen to BUT I think it is a mistake to try to fit all songs onto a small non-chromatic organ scale. Too much fudging and shoehorning of the original song into the scale makes you wince when you listen to the organ!

Quote: "If you discount the counter melody section you have 28 notes". You cannot discount the counter melody at all. This especilly goes for the Wurlitzer 125 scale, the counter melody is the only part with any reed pipes in that scale.

"Does Size Matter?" it's what you do with it that is important - so say people with small ones. Still, ya know what they say, "large organ : small ...er...organ....." Of course some people own several large ones which must surely beg the question mustn't it! :wink:

I always think of the wise words of Ted Reed when this question crops up: "You don't have to have a large organ to enjoy it!"

hahaa, . I think size does matter (please dont throw rocks at meeee, cos i do love little organs tooo. <i>Please</i>) But thats probably because im used to the gavi. I like it when an organ screams at you, (esp. <i>Amparito Roca</i>) it makes the Fair Organ more to how it was designed to be made. Although I do appreciate Street Organs (I wish I had one), size makes the differance to me. But hey, im probably being naive, and not aware of the abilities of a 70 or below organ. :>

QUOTE: "Now if you add full chromatic ranges and large chromatic bass sections you DO get to the nirvana stage of fair organ music enjoyment ie Mr. Gavioli's masterpiece, BUT you get a VERY heavy massive exensive fair organ weighing about 4 tons!" QUESTION: Does this organ weigh 4 tons?

http://carousels.com/photoalbum/0403photoalbum.php This is a fully chromatic band organ made by Wurlitzer late in the era. It only has 184 pipes. This is supposedly the "only one" ever made and was used at Cabana Beach Park, but unless they made another one, this organ was more famously originally on the Illions "Supreme" carousel at the Prospect Park hotel in New York in the late 1920's.

The only gripe I see is that it uses Wurlitzer APP rolls which are made for coin pianos and orchestrions. According to some collectors, the so-called "Caliola" rolls were nothing more than APP rolls with different labels, and the length of the perforations was not changed to suit organ versus piano. So... arrangements which sound droning and plodding on the piano sound good on the organ, whereas snappy staccato piano arrangements make the organ jump up and dance! I'm sure that with better register control and a set of bells this could make a really nice organ. I have not yet heard how this organ sounds. If anyone has a video or recording of this organ in the museum, would they please share it with us now. --- Finally, Wurlitzer made a model 100 organ which uses it's own unique scale, the style 48 scale. It is only 5 bass but nearly fully chromatic in the melody. I would be very interested to know whether any of this model (or rolls for that matter) survive. This was a very early organ and probably the only very early model that did not have a barrel organ equivalent.

Here you go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39fih1lFzmI This was made a few years ago with our older camera so the quality is not as good, but you get the idea. It probably would sound better with some registers, which the APP scale does have. The only register control it currently has is through draw stops. Trombones, I believe, are played in the lowest octave+ of the scale, so they're separate from the bass flutes. It, however, doesn't have a separate countermelody section, so that's what separates it from most other large band organs.

Thank you for the video! I realize about the countermelody section; however, if the right kind of pipes are allocated in the range where countermelodies are typically played (usually in the octave or so below middle C), then they can still be heard clearly. The arrangers for APP rolls, after all, knew that the pianos had no separate countermelody section, and arranged the music accordingly. Often in a march arrangement, you will hear the baritone or trombone counter-melody part as an octave tremolo in the tenor range. How well this would sound on pipes is open to debate. If you look at some fairground organ scales, the "countermelody" section doesn't really overlap the melody section that much except in the case of countermelody ranks pitched an octave higher, which do overlap. Typically, the organ's musical sections more-or-less adjoin each other if taken in the context of the piano keyboard. Taking a look at the 87-key Gavioli scale, for instance, the scale is more-or-less continuous, diatonically, from the lowest bass note to the highest piccolo. The countermelody section overlaps the octave (4') bass pipes and the lower accompaniment notes, but if the upper octave bass helpers could be turned off so only the lowest octave of pipes sound, the counter-melody would be the only section playing in that range. Now, in most organs, the countermelody DOES overlap the accompaniment section. However, this section is not taken seriously by most arrangers and is used for one purpose only: soft background chords. In fact, the pipes are voiced deliberately to be soft and indistinct so that they do not distract from the melody and counter-melody sections. This seems quite a waste to me that even very large organs do not have separate registers for ranks in the accompaniment section, to allow an alto line to be brought out, separate from the tenor (countermelody) and soprano (melody) lines dominating the ensemble. Instruments such as the viola, "French" horn (orchestra), alto horn, and alto clarinet (band) all play these kind of lines in actual band and orchestra music. Now, I like the sound of this Wurlitzer organ, but I think it would sound better if it had regular quieter stopped flutes as a foundation instead of large-scale Caliola open flutes, which tend to dominate the ensemble. Perhaps if another one were built, they would have done this.

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