Sub bass
The sub-bass (or sub-bass , french: Soubasse) is a most gedacktes flue stops to 16 'or 32' in the pedal mechanism of the organ . The open construction is rare. The pipes are mostly made of wood. The sound is round and fundamental, very low in overtones, "dark" and "indefinite".
A quint (duodecime emerges tonally) is not desired and shows that the register is of poor quality. The hacked sub-bass 16 'is even found in most small organs with their own pedals and forms the sound basis of the pedal.
history
The earliest evidence can be found in the last third of the 16th century. Master Andreas built a register "Grober unter Bass" for St. Paulus in Hildesheim in 1564 , Fabian Peters said in 1575 that an "Unterbass" 32 ′ should be built for the Greifswald Cathedral and Julius Anthoni Friese created a "Groß UnterBaß" 32 ′ in 1583–1585 and a “UnterBass” 16 ′ for the Marienkirche in Gdańsk . All these registers were on the wind chest of the manual work and were fully developed. In these cases, the name refers to the lowest manual register that could be played using a transmission in the pedal. At the same time there was the sub-bass as an independent pedal register. Early evidence can be found in Gabriel Raphael Rodensteen ( Schlaggenwald , St. Georg, 1578), Michael Schmied ( Stiftskirche Stuttgart , 1580) and Heinrich Compenius the Elder ("Gedacten Unterbaß Contra pedaliter" for the Fritzlar Cathedral , 1588–1590). Compenius put it on the top drawer, but it could only be played from the pedal. The construction could be explained by the attributes "covered" or "open" (then on its own drawer). A sub-bass in the prospectus with principal gauging was called “principal sub-bass” or “principal sub-bass”.
From the second half of the 17th century, the alternative name "Unterbass" was no longer used and the register was no longer built on manual drawers (with pedal transmission). While the sub-bass was open or closed in the 18th and early 19th centuries and mostly made of wood in 16′- and, more rarely, 32′-position, in the late 19th and 20th centuries the subbass was almost exclusively a closed wooden register in 16′- Position with a wide scale. The name "Subbass" was initially found in central and northeastern Germany and is found from the end of the 16th century in Württemberg and Bohemia, at the beginning of the 17th century in Bavaria and Austria, in western and the rest of northern Germany only from the 18th century Century, in the Netherlands during the 18th century and in France 1842 with Aristide Cavaillé-Coll , in England from the second half of the 19th century and in Italy from 1890.
See also
literature
- Roland Eberlein : Organ register. Their names and their history . 3. Edition. Siebenquart, Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-941224-00-1 , p. 635-636 .