The medieval period is considered by many to be a period of stagnation: Few new inventions, few societal developments, and few changes in the standard of living for the average person. It wasn't even in the medieval period that the organ was invented — the greeks were the first to do it. However, in periods of stagnation, things are given centuries to come to their logical conclusions. Slow, imperceptible improvements over a thousand years of medieval Europe, culminated in the grandest and most impressive instrument. Here's why I think the Pipe Organ is just brilliant:
With music being such a creative and free pursuit, I have never really understood why the instruments are so fixed, and rigid. I, of course, know that my fantasy of a cyberpunk-esque do-it-yourself instrument scene, where people are bolting on boards of extra strings to their guitars is somewhat unrealistic, but it does exist in many places. Synths are, of course, one of the places where this shines most brightly, with people tacking on oscillators and adding filters with their unwieldy switchboards of wires. The other place is with the organ. Every stop is a custom commission to produce another specific sound, be it a trumpet, oboe, or even a drum. Even the number of keyboards, or manuals, any one organ has varies wildly, not to mention the foot-operated keyboard, or pedalboard. Truly, if the wooden panelling were to be stripped away and replaced with cold black musician-grade plastic, a seven-manual organ would dwarf the synthesizer in complexity.
Pipe Organs are as much architecture as they are instrument. The pipe organ is often designed alongside the
church to work out how to marry the two acoustically and visually. Few buildings are as cavernous and open as a
church, and few instruments are as loud as the organ. The guitar and violin, of course, produce sound
physically, but they can be played anywhere, and the acoustic qualities of the room are decoupled from the
acoustic properties of the instrument. The piano is the middle ground here: usually fixed in a room, sometimes
thought is put into acoustic synergy, usually thought is put into interior design, though not to the extent that
a pipe organ is built physically in a building.
This physicality not only leads to a unique and better sound, but physicality is preserved through recording and
playback. Some organs have been brought to the modern age, with electronic actuation (which is much more
reliable than thousands of tiny wooden rods). This means that the organists every exact keypress can be
recorded, and physically played back, in the same way, on the same organ, at a later date. The exact same sound,
exactly how the audience would have experienced it originally, and exactly how it was intended to be
experienced.
The sound of an organ is unmatched because of two primary reasons. The first is the range of voices, and the
second is the size.
The range of voices of each organ is different, but in the later medieval and renaissance period, there was a
push to give the organ the power of the orchestra. Many additional stops (modes, but you can have as many as you
like be on or off) were added to the organ. Stops to emulate the sound of trumpets, flutes, oboes, human voices,
drums, literally anything. This made them so useful in adding sound to silent movies, and actually inspired the
synthesizer pianos to have so many voices. As you can play any of these instruments in any combination, the
skilled organist can produce a symphony all by themselves.
The size of an organ is essential to the sound it produces. Following the ancient links between mathematics,
geometry, beauty and music, most organs will have thousands of differently-sized pipes. Doubling the size of a
pipe lowers its octave by one, and halving the size of a pipe raises its octave by one. Depending on the tuning
(with earlier organs being made with other ratios like tripling the size or multiplying it by five, and modern
ones being made with the use of irrational numbers, a luxury that was not available to the medieval organist).
Making the high notes is easy, but to make lower notes, bigger and bigger pipes are needed, being sixty-four or
even one hundred and twenty-eight feet tall (which you can hear here). You can only have something as big as this in
an organ — the one hundred and twenty-eight foot long flute remains to be invented. These notes are so low they
aren't even audible — they simply shake you.