Background
At least three notable British pipe organ builders made reed organs. Henry Willis developed a two manual and pedal instrument when working with the organ and harmonium builder WE Evans. It had “manuals and pedals in the orthodox positions and several stops” and was admired by SS Wesley. Rushworth & Dreaper built the excellent “Apollo” two manual and pedal reed organ after Wallace Holt (son of John, a noted reed organ builder) joined the firm. These organs were adaptations of existing harmonium (Willis) and American-organ (Apollo) technology to provide instruments with console layout and specification similar to an equivalent small pipe organ without, of course, needing space for the pipes.
An Evans harmonium
Evans nameplate
A Rushworth and Dreaper ‘Apollo’
The reed organs built by Hill & Sons were different. The history of their beginnings and the reasons why they were built are somewhat confused, and not helped by loss of the Hill records by fire.
The story starts with James Baillie-Hamilton (=BH, 1837 – ca.1927). He developed an instrument or instruments, known as “Vocalion”, containing free reeds whose tone was modified by the attachment of springs or wires to the tongues or by the connection of several tongues with wire bridges. Early models were demonstrated in a number of prestigious venues and impressed several important organists but were quite impractical in terms of commercial production. The real genesis of the ” Vocalion” as a commercial proposition began after BH read Hermann Smith’s treatise on free-reed tone. In essence Smith said that the harsh sound of free reeds, especially harmonium reeds, was due to undesirable harmonics being generated in several ways, e.g:
by the use of over-long tongues which were prone to diagonal torsion which then caused irregularities in the longitudinal vibration of the tongue (“a long reed is a wrong reed”)
by the use of weighted tips in the bass, which also led to irregular vibration
by making the frame surrounding the tongue too thick.
Smoother and freer tone could be had by making tongues very broad – even square; by having a thin frame; by not weighting the basses; and by having the reeds speak into broad channels or cavities of various shapes. Smith and BH were later to quarrel over the source of some of these ideas.
As developed by BH the defining characteristics of the Vocalion were a) the use of pressure bellows, b) the use [but only partially – see later] of broad-tongued reeds of American-organ type but with longer, wider and proportionately thinner frames (Table 1), and c) by the use of elaborate and varied resonating chambers.
Reed Dimensions
| Organ | Frame Size* | Tongue Size | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| L | B | L:B | L | B | L:B | |
| American Organ ** | ||||||
| 16'C Pedal w | 113 | 16 | 7.1 | 88 | 9 | 9.8 |
| 16'C manual w | 89 | 10 | 8.9 | 62 | 6 | 10.3 |
| 8'C manual w | 79 | 10 | 7.9 | 50 | 6 | 8.3 |
| Hill Vocalion | ||||||
| 16'C Pedal | 144 | 22 | 6.6 | 106 | 13 | 8..2 |
| 16'C manual | - | - | ||||
| 8'C manual (lge)*** | 108 | 22 | 4.9 | 74 | 11 | 6.7 |
| 8'C manual (normal) | 77 | 12 | 6.4 | 52 | 7 | 7.4 |
| US Vocalion | ||||||
| 16'C Pedal w | 150 | 35 | 4.3 | 100 | 19 | 5.3 |
| 16'C manual w | 143 | 21 | 6.8 | 100 | 12 | 8.3 |
| 8'C manual | 112 | 20 | 5.6 | 70 | 11 | 6.4 |
| * to nearest millimetre | ||||||
| ** a typical instrument; there are no "standards" in American-organs | ||||||
| w weighted or thickened tips | ||||||
| *** large reeds are used only for the Pedal Bourdon and the bottom 30 notes of the Great Diapason and Clarabella. All the other reeds are the usual American-organ size with broad tongues | ||||||
Of course as early as the 1840s Debain had used simple resonators (reed cells) of varying shape and size to give tonal variety in his “Harmonium”. However, the scope for variation among these resonators was limited by their location inside the reed pan. As we all know, the standard wind-path in harmoniums is windchest – reed – resonator – pallet, i.e. the pallet is on the “outside” with the resonator underneath, and the width of the pallet, and therefore of the resonator, cannot exceed that of the key above it.
The Vocalion on the other hand had the same wind-path as the pipe organ: windchest – pallet - reed/pipe – resonator so because the resonators were on the “outside”, like organ pipes, their shape and size (and thus the tone they produced) could be more varied.
How did Hill & Sons become involved with the Vocalion? Some sources say that after having a dozen or so instruments custom made by Hills, BH emigrated in 1884 to the USA. Others say Hills made a dozen or so Vocalions under licence or under the BH patents. All the Hill Vocalions I know have the same specification and nearly identical cases, so if BH was just experimenting, why should he get Hill to build a series of virtually identical instruments – as implied by the first quote above. On the other hand, if he was trading them on his own account, why are they so clearly badged as Hill instruments, with BH’s name nowhere to be seen, inside or out?
Vocalion, dressed. The overhanging top was added later to protect from bird and bat droppings
Vocalion, Hill-style console
Vocalion, broken nameplate
Vocalion, undressed. Tone ranks with various different resonators
Vocalion, bass jamb
Vocalion, treble jamb
Also unclear are the dates: if all the Hill Vocalions were made by or before 1884 when BH went to the USA, what of Orde-Hume’s assertion in his book Harmonium that the Hill Vocalion in the Saltaire museum was built circa 1886 to the specification of BH and that the first instrument of this type was shown in 1885 at the London Inventions Exhibition? More intriguingly, the instrument to be described has the date 1894 written in a place which would only have been accessible during construction. Had the Hill archives survived they might have resolved these problems.
On the other hand, if Hills built Vocalions not for BH but under licence to trade on their own account, what was the rationale? I question whether the instrument could ever have had commercial success as a compact, low cost alternative to a pipe organ. In the first place it is not particularly compact -I doubt that a pipe organ of the same Gt 3/Sw 2/Ped 1 specification would take much more space.
I also wonder how much cheaper it would be to build, at least in labour costs. As described in the next instalment, each tone-qualifier array had to be “tuned” to the reeds by careful hand-cutting, every reed has its own pallet, a lot of the “stickers” are not simple rods but have individual backfalls attached to them, and the instrument is festooned with various other bulky ancillary resonators and acoustic-coupling devices which could never be amenable to high volume production. The tone units (pallet, reed, and reed housing) are not really standard enough to be considered as modules, and the associated stop and key actions are at the same time cumbersome, flimsy, and difficult to regulate.
This contrasts with the story of the Vocalion in America, where the US patent was granted in 1884. Through many changes of ownership the BH designs were developed to admit flexible application and multiple production at reasonable cost. A two manual and pedal US Vocalion by, for example, Mason & Risch of about the same dimensions as the Hill version could accommodate 17 or more ranks. The final manifestation was in the various models of the sophisticated Aeolian “Orchestrelle”, a manual and roll-playing reed organ still much sought after today. Like the Hill Vocalion it has tone ranks but these are truly modular, and also like the Hill every reed has its own pallet, but the key action is entirely pneumatic and the stop action is all by ventils.
Orchestrelle, truly modular tone units with various resonators
Orchestrelle, back of tone units, fully pneumatic