(Fr. positif de dos; Ger. Rückpositiv; It. positivo tergale).
The keyboard and chest secondary to the Great organ are correctly called Chair organ if the chest has its own case, separate from the main organ and placed behind the organist’s back or chair. In England, all known second manuals were of this kind until 1631 when the Chirk Castle organ had both chests placed within the one case. Most later secondary chests were also like this, their sound discreet enough for choral accompaniment; hence the term ‘Choir organ’ (see also Brustwerk). Hawkins (A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 1776) thus had it wrong when he said the manual was called ‘Choir and by corruption the Chair Organ’. The term ‘chaire’, ‘chayre’, ‘cheire’, etc., is known only from the 17th century (King’s College, Cambridge, 1605–6) although the manuals themselves were known much earlier. Whether such terms as ‘lytell organis’ (Sandwich, 1496) indicated a Chair organ is unknown.
Continental terms show much variety before le positif and das Rückpositiv were adopted as the name for the Chair organ: organum parvum (Rouen Cathedral, 1387), positivum tergale (Arnaut de Zwolle, MS, c1450, F-Pn lat.7295), positieff an die Stoel (Oude Kerk, Delft, 1461), positif de devant (Rouen, 1524), au doxal (Hesdin, 1623), positiff en rück (A. Schlick, Spiegel der Orgelmacher und Organisten, 1511), orgue a la cadira (St Mathieu, Perpignan, 1516), achter den rug (Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, 1539–42) etc. In den stoel seems to have been widely used (Antwerp, 1505; Herkenrode, 1522; Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, 1539) though this too may not always have denoted Chair organ, since im Stuhl could mean ‘In the foot of the main case’. Usages such as chaière (Argentan, 1463) or la cheyere (Valenciennes, 1515) probably led English builders to call it Chair organ. Such manuals or departments were known at the end of the 14th century from Rouen to Utrecht, and in the 15th through from Spain to Silesia, while in Italy there was only ever a handful of examples. An example of a Spanish Chair organ (cadireta) exists in an instrument by Jacobus and Sebastianos Guilla (1705) at Torredembarra, near Tarragona.
See Rückpositiv; also Double organ and Positive.
B.B. Edmonds: ‘The Chayre Organ, an Episode’, JBIOS, iv (1980), 19–33
S. Jeans: ‘The English Chaire Organ from its Origins to the Civil War’, The Organ, lxv (1986), 49–55, 141
J. Brennan: ‘Settle for a Chayre’, The Organbuilder, xii (1994), 20–22
PETER WILLIAMS, CHRISTOPHER KENT