nctive characteristics as we have it at the
present time. As this instrument, from the nature of its tone
qualities and its peculiar limitation to serious music of grave
rhythm, is naturally suited to the service of the Church, it has
remained till the present day in the province where it had already
firmly established itself at the time now under consideration. The
origin of the organ is very difficult to ascertain. There are traces
of some sort of wind instrument before the Christian era. The
so-called hydraulic organ was probably one in which water was used to
perfect the air-holding qualities of the wind chest, in the same
manner as now in gas holders. One of the earliest mediaeval references
to organs is to that sent King Pepin, of France, father of
Charlemagne, in 742 by Constantine, emperor of Byzantium at that time.
This instrument, says the old chronicler, had brass pipes, blown with
bellows bags; it was struck with the hands and feet. It was the first
of this kind seen in France.

Praetorius says that the organ which Vitellianus set in church 300
years before Pepin, must have been the small instrument of fifteen
pipes, for which the wind was collected in twelve bellows bags.

According to Julianus, a Spanish bishop who flourished in 450, the
organ was in common use in churches at that time. In 822 an organ was
sent to Charlemagne by the Caliph Haroun Alraschid, made by an Arabian
maker. This instrument was placed in a church at Aix-la-Chapelle.
There were good organ builders in Venice as early as 822, and before
900 there was an organ in the cathedral at Munich. In the ninth
century organs had become common in England, and in the tenth the
English prelate, St. Dunstan, erected one in Malmesbury Abbey, of
which the pipes were of brass. The instruments of that time were
extremely crude.

[Illustration: Fig. 43.

(From Franchinus Gaffurius, "_Theorica Musica_," Milan, 1492.)]

From this time on there are many authentic remains in the way of
treatises on organ building and description of organs. The essential
elements of this instrument consist of pipes for producing sound, of
which a complete set, one pipe for each key of the keyboard, is called
a stop; bellows and wind chest for holding the wind, sliders or valves
for admitting it to the pipes, and keys for controlling the valves.

In his studies for a history of musical notation, Dr. Hugo Riemann
quotes an extract from an anonymous manuscript of the tent