Product Code Database
A portative organ (from the Latin verb portare, "to carry"), also known during Italian Trecento as the organetto, is a small pipe organ that consists of one rank of , sometimes arranged in two rows, to be played while strapped to the performer at a right angle. The performer manipulates the bellows with one hand and fingers the keys with the other. The portative organ lacks a reservoir to retain a supply of wind and so it produces sound only while the bellows are being operated. The instrument was commonly used in European secular music from the 12th to the 16th centuries."Portative organ." Encyclopædia Britannica (2007). Encyclopædia Britannica Online, accessed December 23, 2007. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9060959.
The Italian composer Francesco Landini is known to have played the instrument. There are performers on the instrument again as a result of the Early Music Revival. Some contemporary music has been written for it, for example by José María Sánchez-Verdú. Dolly Collins also used it in modern English folk music.
In practice, however, since the organ reform movement revival of small organs, also small positives with a bass register and played with both hands have come to be called portatives, especially when their pipe arrangement or general layout resembles that of the genuine portative. One of the most well-known modern proponents of that kind of 'large portative' organ was Dolly Collins, who accompanied her vocalist sister Shirley Collins on many albums of traditional English folk songs.
Medieval portative organs, so extensively used during the 14th and the 15th centuries, were revivals of those used by the Ancient Rome of which a specimen excavated at Pompeii in 1876 is preserved in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale Napoli. The case measures and contains nine pipes, of which the longest measures only ; six of the pipes have oblong holes at a short distance from the top similar to those made in gamba pipes of modern organs to give them their reedy quality, and also to those cut in the bamboo pipes of the Chinese , which is a mouth organ furnished with free reeds. From the description of these remains by C. F. Abdy Williams, cites Quarterly Musical Review, (August, 1893). it would seem that a bronze plate having 18 rectangular slits arranged in three rows to form vandykes was found inside the case, with three little plates of bronze just wide enough to pass through the slits lying by it; this plate possibly formed part of the mechanism for the sliders of the keys.
The small instrument that is often taken for a Pan pipes on a contorniate medallion of Sallust in the Cabinet Impérial de France in Paris may be meant for a miniature portative.
|
|
