Saint-Maur · 1766-1778

L’Art du facteur d’orgues

dom François Bédos de Celles · Paris, printed by L. F. Delatour · four parts, 137 engraved plates

A Benedictine who had spent twenty years building organs was asked by the Académie royale des sciences to set down how it is done. He answered in four parts and 137 engraved plates, beginning with the three kinds of lever and ending with the hurdy-gurdy. Organ builders still work from it.

A builder asked to write it down

François Lamathe Bédos de Celles was born at Caux, in the diocese of Béziers, on 24 January 1709, and professed among the Benedictines of La Daurade at Toulouse in 1726. He built the organ of Sainte-Croix at Bordeaux between 1744 and 1748, then worked at Saint-Allyre in Clermont-Ferrand, at Saint-Thibéry, Aire-sur-l’Adour and Saint-Sever-de-Rustan. The Académie royale des sciences made him a correspondent in 1758; in 1763 he withdrew to the abbey of Saint-Denis to write.

The book belongs to the Descriptions des arts et métiers, the Academy’s series on the trades, which ran from 1761 to 1788. Duhamel du Monceau and Grandjean de Fouchy signed the foreword as commissioners: the Academy had asked for the description because, they wrote, no existing work had treated the building of the organ. Delatour printed the first part in 1766, the second and third in 1770, the fourth in 1778. The general title page is blank in the copy digitised from Google Books, and the booksellers are named elsewhere as Saillant & Nyon and Desaint. Antiquarian catalogues credit 125 of the 137 sheets to the copper engraver Pierre-Claude Delagardette, of the rue Saint-Jacques — a count no library catalogue confirms.

Beginning with the lever

The treatise opens not with a pipe but with a lever. Its first chapter sets out the notions of mechanics and statics — the three kinds of lever in the first three sections, the pulley in the sixth, all of them on Plate I — because without these, Bédos says, enormous mistakes are made. The bench and the tools follow, then the stops and their scaling, the windchests, the keyboards, the bellows, the cutting and voicing of pipes. The text runs in numbered articles, each tied to a plate: article 125, on page 34, describes an anemometer for measuring the strength of the wind.

Bédos wrote on his first page that he divided the treatise into three parts. The fourth, of 1778, leaves the church for the chamber: table organs, the serinette on which canaries were taught their tunes, and organs played by a pricked cylinder. Its fourth chapter explains how to set the pins so that the machine plays as a musician would — how long a note is held, where it is detached, how much silence to leave for the taking of breath — down to the pricking of a romance by Balbastre. The method had been published in 1775 by the Augustinian Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle as La Tonotechnie; Engramelle is credited with collaborating on the treatise, though Bédos nowhere says how much of the chapter is his. Article 1482, on page 644, opens the last chapter of all, on the organised hurdy-gurdy.

What became of it

The book outlived most of the instruments it describes. Marie-Pierre Hamel reprinted it entire inside his Nouveau manuel complet du facteur d’orgues (Paris, Roret, 1849); Bärenreiter began a facsimile edited by Christhard Mahrenholz in 1963, Léonce Laget issued another at full size in the 1970s, Slatkine reprinted the whole at Geneva in 1984, and Charles Ferguson translated it into English in 1977. Bédos’s own organ at Sainte-Croix fared worse: it was dismantled in 1817 and carried off to the cathedral of Saint-André, only the case and the façade pipes staying behind, and the sources disagree even on its specification — forty-five stops on five manuals, or forty-four on four. What stands on the gallery now is a reconstruction by Pascal Quoirin’s workshop, begun in 1984 and inaugurated in May 1997; 1,647 old pipes from thirty-seven stops and nine windchests went back into it, and the builders worked from two inventories of 1756 and 1795, from recovered stop labels, and from the treatise.

Its authority has limits. Bédos describes the French organ of his own generation and no other, and the series he wrote for never reached the readership of the Encyclopédie. Builders use it all the same: at San Domenico in Rieti, Bartolomeo Formentelli built between 2004 and 2009 an organ modelled on the book, of five manuals, fifty-seven stops and 4,054 pipes. Dom Bédos died at Saint-Denis on 25 November 1779, a year after the fourth part appeared.

Why it is here

The Conservatoire keeps this book in view for its method rather than its subject. Bédos measures what exists, describes each operation in the order it is performed, numbers the article and points to the plate, so that a man who never stood in his workshop can follow him. That is what the ateliers at Mas-Grenier attempt with the trades still practised on this building, and what the research programme attempts with what survives of the abbey itself: a record plain enough to be checked, and an account of where the record stops.

SourcesThe four photographs reproduced here were published on Wikimedia Commons by the contributor SVpellicom under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0); the printed page and the engravings they show are in the public domain. No holding library is named on the file pages. Plate and article numbers are given as they are printed on the sheets. The complete text of the four parts, digitised from a copy in Google Books, may be read at Wikimedia Commons, and Hamel’s reprint of 1849 at the Internet Archive. The Bibliothèque nationale holds its own digitisations under ark:/12148/bpt6k1067216j and bpt6k1067218c, not consulted here.