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That was my house - on the extreme right, with Snowdon in the background |
Including a pink harmonium.

It was operated by two foot pedals which you pumped to
get air into the bellows, while your knees could press outwards on two wooden
bars, the one on the left controlling the volume, the one on the right cumulatively
adding the stops, of which there were about fifteen. The more energetically you pedalled, the more
consistent was the tone, but equally the more insistent was the noise of the
pedals. Its stops, with names like “Flute
Harmonique”, “Diapason” and “Clarionet” all made roughly the same sound – a kind
of wheezy reedy warble which by no stretch of the imagination could pass as the
sound of the organ it most pitifully tried to emulate. It was even called a “Reed Organ”.
Memories of my pink streaky harmonium have been
stirred this week as I prepare to perform tonight, at Singapore’s Victoria Concert
Hall, the harmonium part of Schoenberg’s arrangement of Johann Strauss’s Roses from the South.
Yes – you read that right – Schoenberg, arranging Johann
Strauss II for harmonium (and piano, and string quartet).

Why the fringe protestant prayer meetings?
Well, for those who don’t know, the harmonium was
originally conceived by a French instrument maker in 1842. It was seen as a portable organ which Christian
missionaries could take with them to outposts of Empire in order to provide appropriate
musical support for their worship services.
Thus harmoniums found themselves spread far and wide, cropping up in
Mission churches and carted through jungles along with Bibles and Prayer Books. Most famously the missionaries took it to
India during the 19th century, where the Indians took it to heart
and made it an integral part of their own musical culture, reducing the size
and scope and thereby expunging any lingering residue of Christianity from
it. In Asia, most people regard the
harmonium as an Indian instrument, and when people got to hear that I was
playing a harmonium in tonight’s concert, they wondered how I would look
sitting cross-legged on the floor in Indian fashion.
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The Indian Version |
The harmonium, in its European guise, is generally a free-standing
single keyboard instrument which makes sufficient sound to support a small
congregation and has a limited dynamic and tonal range, restricted largely by
the fact that the sound is entirely produced by small reed tongues which
vibrate freely within the instrument and are usually placed just below the
keyboard. It was ideal for the myriad of
non-conformist chapels which spread around Wales during the 19th
century, and I imagine my pink model had been removed from one of these. But while it was popular in Wales, and parts
of England where worship was carried on in small chapels, that was nothing to
its popularity in America. No less than
247 different US-based companies were manufacturing the harmonium in the last
decades of the 19th century.
No wonder it is often referred to as the “American Organ”.
In France it was taken rather more seriously as a musical
instrument in its own right, and it was so accepted as a practice and teaching instrument
for organists to have in their homes, that it started to gather its own repertory;
recognisable from the title page which will often describe a work as being for “orgue espressif” – the name the French
gave to the seriously musical harmonium.
With some major French composers treating the instrument seriously,
others found a use for it in their scores; notably Tchaikovsky (Manfred Symphony), Rossini (Petite
Messe Solennelle) and Korngold (Much
Ado About Nothing), while it seems that Saint-Saëns’ so-called “Organ”
Symphony was given its first performance in London’s St James’s Hall on a
harmonium, because the main organ had been dismantled. In the light of that, Schoenberg’s use of the
harmonium should not seem quite so outlandish as it does to our minds today.
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The Hammond Organ killed the Harmonium |
The harmonium’s demise was as rapid as its rise. The end of European colonial ambitions saw a
change in the approach of Christian Missionaries (today missionaries carry
food, medicines and education rather than harmoniums, which might or might not
be a good thing), the widespread closure of non-Conformist chapels in Wales and
the falling away of church-going generally in the west saw worship services
concentrated in larger buildings, while the final nail in the coffin of the
harmonium was the invention of electronics.
The colourless Hammond organ and the bland Lowry killed off the harmonium barely 100
years after it had first been patented.
So the ultimate irony is that, without a single working
harmonium in Singapore (excluding, of course, the Indian derivative, which has
shrunk to the point whereby it cannot realistically work in a western musical setting)
tonight’s performance will be on an electronic organ. Hours of careful experimentation have
resulted in my finding a harmonium-like sound from it, but how I wish I had my
old Pink Friend with me; that would have been just the right colour for
Schoenberg’s eccentric take on Strauss.
Interesting. I recently played the harmonium in a chamber arrangement of Mahler 1 in the same tradition of Schoenberg you described but alas not from the man himself. The combination of knee and foot pedalling was a challenge right from the opening long A, especially because the intonation was directly affected by the wind it received. I wonder if there exists a single harmonium in SG.
ReplyDeleteI know of someone who has a working one at home salvaged from a church, albeit a rather small one.
ReplyDelete