A post just went by on my dash with a picture calling itself a “positive organ”, and I, not knowing what this is, had to consequently go burn a half hour and find out. Thanks largely to this site about the Organ in the Middle Ages...
 http://faculty.bsc.edu/jhcook/orghist/history/hist002.htm
...I learned roughly that there were 3 kinds of organs in the middle ages - positive organs, portative organs, and church organs. Â
The positive organ (Wikipedia seems to be incorrect about this as they say it was an organ to be moved, where that is more the case with the portative organ) - this was a bigger instrument that at least sat on a table or else the floor. It had no pedals and a keyboard that you played with both hands and a few stops that let you choose different banks of pipes for a different sound...and somebody or something else had to work the bellows (wives and small children worked well until electricity!). Above is a charming video to give you the sound, but you can’t see it very well - so here is a better pic.Â
The portative organ (portatif) I have posted about before and it was the smallest kind of organ and it was indeed very portable (where the name comes from). You held it on your knee and pumped the bellows with one hand and played the keyboard with the other. According to what I read, this was an early medieval instrument and grew less popular and then eventually extinct, where the positive organ and the church organ eventually grew together. Â
I am not going to deal with the earliest form of church organ - except to quote this sentence from the above linked site “By the end of the Middle Ages, very large organs were being built in both abbey churches and cathedrals, and the organ appears to have been an expected part of any such new building. These instruments are most often referred to now as Blockwerk organs, and the term is used to denote a large instrument permanently installed in a church, with multiple pipes (perhaps more than 50) for each key, but no stop mechanism present to give the player control over how many pipes were to be sounded.
Here is a charming performance with a portative organ and what the video calls a “fidel” (A Youtube commentator says it looks like a precursor to a viola de gamba, so maybe that is true. I’m not dealing with it tonight!). This is quite a large instrument for a portative but it fulfills all the criteria so it counts. The video starts (confusingly, for this post!) with a close up of a glorious cathedral organ...but that is not what they are playing in this video. But maybe I chose that on purpose right? To tie the post together...on a history of organs? Sure I did.
