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Your Questions... Answered
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YOU REFER TO THE 64-FOOT "DULZIAN" BUT I THOUGHT IT WAS A "DIAPHONE"?
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It's a Dulzian, a reed stop, with 85 pipes in its rank. It has diaphone pipes for only the lowest 22 notes, from (32-foot) AAAA down to CCCCC. Despite this, it remains a reed stop – in the same way that a 4-foot Clarion remains a reed, even if its top 12 (or 24) notes consist of flue pipes, and a Clarabella is classified as an open flute, even if its bass octave is stopped.
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The voicing of diaphone stops can vary from smooth to reedy in tone. The Auditorium organ's 64-foot stop is towards reed tone, so the changeover from reed pipes to diaphones is undetectable.
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The original Convention Hall scheme specified two 64-foot stops, a Diaphone (stop number 1) in the Pedal Right and a Dulzian in the Pedal Left. The organ's designer, Emerson Richards, feared the huge diaphone (40"×40" scale) would crowd-out the chamber, so it was deleted in the revised scheme. The Pedal Left's Dulzian was retained but, later, it was moved to other side. This is why the Pedal Right (with stops numbered from from 1 to 10), now also includes stop number 17, i.e. the Dulzian from the Pedal Left (stops 11 to 20).
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However, this still begs the question: Why are there 64-foot Diaphone stop-keys on the consoles? The answer is simple: After the original Diaphone was deleted, there was some experimentation to see if diaphone and reed tone could be produced from a dual mechanism fitted to a single pipe. The device wasn't a success and the idea was abandoned – but the stop-keys were already on the consoles (incidentally, they all bear the stop number 17, i.e. the Dulzian's number).
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The main reason why the 64-foot "Diaphone" at Atlantic City is so entrenched in the organ world's psyche is because it's the very first thing people see when they look at the stop list, which invariably starts with the Pedal Right's registers [for an example, click here]. By the time they get to "Dulzian 64" – some 50-or-more lines further into the list – they've largely given-up reading it properly.
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"Dulzian" is a curious choice of name for this stop. It's certainly not the light-toned voice that we associate, these days, with ranks of that name. Richards described the stop, in the contract, as of "Tromba quality", and the blocks of its treble pipes are stamped "Posaune". So, it's obviously a chorus reed. One has to wonder if Richards was running out of stop names for the instrument and had seen this somewhere – perhaps on one of his trips to Germany? – and thought "I'll use that"!
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To return to the previous page, click here.
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ATLANTIC CITY CONVENTION HALL ORGAN SOCIETY, INC.
1009 BAY RIDGE AVENUE PMB 108, ANNAPOLIS, MD 21403, U.S.A.
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© 2011 ACCHOS, Inc. Please read Copyright Notice
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