At a banquet given in his honor in New York in 1906, the late Alexandre Guilmant complained that no organ that he had played in this country possessed majesty of effect. The advent of Hope-Jones has entirely changed the situation. Tertius Noble, late of York Minster, England, who has just come to this country, asserts that organs can be found here equal to or superior to any built in England, and the celebrated English organist, Edwin Lemare, pronounced the reeds at Ocean Grove, N. J., the finest he had ever heard.
We now purpose to give a brief account of the leaders in revolutionizing the King of Instruments, the men whose genius and indomitable perseverance in the face of prejudice, discouragement and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, financial and otherwise, have made the modern organ possible. First of all these comes
who was born at Bath, England, on Oct. 10, 1806. Left an orphan when five years old, he was brought up by his godfather, who gave him such an education as would fit him for the medical profession, and he was in due time apprenticed to an apothecary and druggist in Bath. This apothecary used to draw teeth, and it was Barker's duty to hold the heads of the patients, whose howls and screams unnerved him so that he refused to learn the business and left before his term of apprenticeship expired.
Dr. Hinton does not credit the story that Barker, accidentally witnessing the operations of an eminent organ-builder (Bishop, of London) who was erecting an organ in his neighborhood, determined on following that occupation, and placed himself under that builder for instruction in the art. It seems to be admitted, however, that after spending most of the intervening time in London, he returned to Bath two years afterwards and established himself as an organ-builder there.
About 1832 the newly built large organ in York Minster attracted general attention, and Barker, impressed by the immense labor occasioned to the player by the extreme hardness of touch of the keys, turned his thoughts toward devising some means of overcoming the resistance offered by the keys to the fingers. The result was the invention of the pneumatic lever by which ingenious contrivance the pressure of the wind which occasioned the resistance to the touch was skilfully applied to lessen it. He wrote to Dr. Camidge, then the organist of the Cathedral, begging to be allowed to attach one of his levers in a temporary way to one of the heaviest notes of his organ. Dr. Camidge admitted that the touch of his instrument was "sufficient to paralyze the efforts of most men," but financial difficulties stood in the way of the remedy being applied. Barker offered his invention to several English organ-builders, but finding them indisposed to adopt it, he went to Paris, in 1837, where he arrived about the time that Cavaillé-Coll was building a large organ for the Church of St. Denis. M. Cavaillé-Coll had adopted the practice of making his flue and reed pipes produce harmonic tones by means of wind of heavy pressure; but he encountered difficulty as the touch became too heavy for practical use. Mr. Barker's apparatus, which simply overpowered the resistance that could not be removed, was therefore an opportune presentation; he took out a _brevet d' invention_ for it in 1839, and M. Cavaillé-Coll immediately introduced it, together with several harmonic stops, into the St. Denis organ. Besides the organ of St. Denis, Barker's pneumatic lever was applied to those of St. Roch, La Madeleine, and other churches in Paris.