Tubular wind chest
A historical organ wind chest design using movable tubes to distribute air; rare, mainly 18th–19th century.
What it means
The tubular wind chest is a historical design for an organ's wind chest, the component that distributes wind (air) to the individual pipes. Unlike the more common slider chest, wind supply here is controlled not by fixed sliders but by movable leather tubes.
Each pipe or group of pipes is connected through its own tube to a valve that opens the tube and lets wind through when the corresponding key is pressed.
Musical use
The tubular wind chest was used mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by certain regions and workshops, in part to gain technical advantages over the more rigid slider chest for more complex playing aids such as finer registration control. Compared with the pneumatic cone chest, however, it remained a rarer intermediate design, since the tubes were prone to wear and could develop leaks over time.
With the development of pneumatic and later electro-pneumatic action in the late nineteenth century, the tubular wind chest was largely displaced by other, more reliable wind chest systems and today survives mainly in historical organs.
The tubular wind chest should be distinguished from the slider chest, where a continuous, sliding wooden bar controls wind for an entire rank of a stop, and from the cone chest, where cone-shaped valves beneath each individual pipe control the wind.
Performance practice
If you play a historical organ with a tubular wind chest, expect a possibly somewhat slower, softer key response than with a slider chest, since the air must first travel through the tubes. Ask an organ builder or organist to explain the particular instrument's technical quirks before you register it.