DICTIONARY OF MUSIC - El Atril

302 HARMONIUM HARMONIUM
works. He told the writer that the story of
the Blacksmith at Edgware was pure imagination,
that the original publisher of Handel's
lesson under that name was a music-seller at
Bath, named Lintern, whom he knew personally
from buying music at his shop, that he had
asked Lintern the reason for this new name,
and he had told him that it was a nickname
given to fdmself because he had been brought
up as a blacksmith, although he had afterwards
turned to music, and that this was the piece he
was constantly asked to play. He printed the
movement in a detached form, because he could
sell a sufficient number of copies to make a profit,
and the whole set was too expensive. [It is
worth mentioning that Beethoven has taken the
theme, whether consciously or unconsciously, for
the subject of a two-part organ fugue published
in the supplementary volume of his works issued
in 1888.] w. c.
HARMONIUM (French, also Orgue ex-
prcssif). A well-known popular keyed instrument,
the tones of which are produced by thin
tongues of brass or steel, set in periodic motion
by pressure of air, and called ' vibrators.' They
are known also as ' free reeds '
; reeds, because
their principle is that of the shepherd's pipe ;
free, because they do not entirely close the
openings in which they vibrate at any period
of their movement, while those generally used
in the organ, known as ' beating or striking
reeds,' close the orifice at each pulsation. It
is not, however, the vibration of the tongue
itself that we hear as the tone : according to
Helmholtz this is due to the escape of the air
in puffs near its point, the rapidity of alternation
of the putfs determining the pitch. The timbre
of the note is conditioned in the first place by
this opening, and then by the size and form of
the channel above the tongue and its pallet
hole, through which the air immediately passes.
The Harmonium is the most modern of keyed
instruments, if we include the nearly related
American Organ, in which the vibrator is
set in motion by reverse power, that is by
drawing in the air ; for if we go back to the
earliest attempts to make instruments of the
kind we are still within the 19th century.
The usefulness and convenience of the harmonium
have gone far to establish it, almost
as a rival, in a commercial sense, to the piano-
forte. It has been too much the practice to
regard the harmonium only as a handy sub-
stitute for the organ, and this has been fostered
by interested persons to the detriment of its
individuality and the loss of the perception
that it has reason to exist from its own merits
as a musical instrument. It is true that like
the organ the tones of the harmonium may be
sustained at one power so long as the keys are
kept down, and variety of timbre is obtained
by using the stops ; but when the Expression
stop is used, by which the air reservoir is cut
off and the pressure made to depend entirely
upon the management of the bellows, the harmonium
gains the jiower of increase and decrease
of tone under the control of the player, who by
the treadles can graduate the condensation of the
wind almost as a violin player manages his tone
by the bow. To use this power artistically the
harmonium player must have skill ; and few
take to this instrument with anything like the
high technical aim with which the pianoforte
and violin are studied. There is, however, no
reason that there should not be a school of composers
and players competent to realise and
develop the individual character of the instrument.
The history of the harmonium is intimately
connected with that of the different wind harmonicas
which, from the musical fruit and baby
trumpets of Nuremberg, to accordions and concertinas,
have during the past seventy years had
such extensive popularity. Unlike as the whole
tribe of reed organs have been to any notion of
music that pertained to ancient Greece, it is
not a little surprising that a large vocabulary
of Greek names should have been adopted to
describe them. The first name, and one still
in use, that of Orgue expressif, was due to a
Frenchman, Grenie, who, according to Fetis
(Fabrication des Instru'nients de Mu^iquCy Paris,
1855), very early in the 19th century imagined
the construction of a keyboard instrument,
which, by tongues of metal vibrating under
variable pressures of atmosphere, should give
nuances, or varying intensities of sound. His
tongues were not ' beating ' but ' free ' reeds
having an alternative movement, the energy
depending upon the density of the air-cuiTent
affecting them. It was not a novel principle,
for the Chinese cJieng might have suggested the
employment of it ; but be this as it may, Fetia
informs us that Grenie never assumed that he
was the inventor of it. The experiments of
Sebastian Erard with free reeds, of which
Gretry thought so much, were already known.
A few years later than these, about 1814 some
say, and quite independently, Esohenbach of
Koenigshoven in
instrument mth
Bavaria invented a keyboard
vibrators, which he named
' Organo-violine. ' Then began the Greek era.
In 1816 Schlimbach of Ohrdruff, improving
upon Eschenbach, produced the .ffioline. The
next step was an apparatus for continuous wind,
by Voitof Schweinfurt, who called his instrument
.ffiolodicon. In 1818 Anton Hiickel of Vienna
constructed a diminutive teoline as an instrument)
to be used with a pianoforte, bringing it out as
Physharmonica.i This bellows-harmonica Professor
Payer took with him to Paris in 1823, and
several imitations were made of it, one of which,
the Aerophone of Christian Dietz, was described
by him in the sixth volume of the Revue Mnsicale
1 This name is stiUretaiued for a free-reed atop in tbeorgan, with
tremolo and Bwell box of its own, by Walcker of Ludwigaburg and
others.