(Fr. régale; Ger. Regal; It. regallo).
(1) A kind of small organ in which the sound is produced by one or more sets of beating reeds provided with little or almost no resonators. It usually has ‘pin’ action (see Organ, fig.2), in which the key depresses a short rod below the finger-end, which in turn presses down and opens the pallet. The bellows are usually placed on the same level as the keyboard, at the other side of the row of reeds. Thus the whole instrument at its simplest is several centimetres deep, and square or rectangular in horizontal section (of which the shorter side is that of the keyboard). Such instruments were placed upon a table, although larger ones could have an integral stand.
(2) A group of organ stops in a larger flue-pipe organ, built on the same principle as (but without the longer resonators of) reed stops, and often provided in about 1600 with a prefixed name describing their sound or construction (Apfelregal, Rackettregal etc.). See also Organ stop and Organ, §III, 2.
The terminology, etymology and origin of the regals are equally uncertain. Like ‘virginals’ and orgues the plural is the more traditional form of the name. English versions are ‘regalles’ (1537 etc.), ‘regalls’ (1538 etc.), ‘reygaals’, ‘regols’ (1554, 1556) and ‘regal’ (1676); French stop names include ‘ung jeulx de regalles’ (Bordeaux, 1531), ‘régalle pour servir de voix humaine’ (Gisors, 1580) and ‘regales ou voix humaine’ (Mersenne, 1636–7); German instrument names were Regale (Virdung, 1511), Regahll (PraetoriusSM, ii), Rigal, Rygal (16th century). However, one of the earliest references to organ reeds, in Arnaut de Zwolle's manuscript of about 1440, uses instead l'anche. The word ‘regal’ does not appear in England until at least 1500; and some later Italian sources call the regals organi di pivette (1565). For the more general name ‘regal’ many explanations have been offered. Praetorius said some people thought it so named because it could serve as a royal gift; more recent authors have related it to rega (a ‘row’ of reeds, cf Reihe), to rigole (late French term for the reed-pipe shallot), to rigols/régale (for Grassineau a kind of xylophone or row of wooden strips, hence régale à bois), to rigabello (obscure term in one 16th-century source), to regula (‘regulating’ the pitch of the singers, cf regolo).
Already by 1511 (Schlick, Virdung) there was a clear distinction in central Europe between reed stops with long resonators, organ stops of the regall oder super regall kind (8' and 4', Schlick), and the independent keyboard instrument called regals or Regal. But it is noticeable that the Flemish and Dutch organ builders who were most inventive in creating reed and regal stops about 1510 found more picturesque names than simply ‘regal’ – for example the moesele (‘bagpipes’), queenkens (‘old woman's voice’) and hommelkens (? a Zink stop) at the church of Our Lady in Antwerp (1505). Such names as Vox humana arose as descriptive adjectives for the organ stop regal (or reael at Diest in 1530), as seen in the phrase from Gisors above. As far as the organ stop is concerned, both the name ‘regal’ and its sound are neutral until for the one a prefix and for the other an adequate resonator are supplied, as they both were during the 16th century.
As instruments, the regals also underwent certain development. In England from about 1540 a ‘payre of Regalls’ was a standard term, while ‘Double Regals’ almost certainly indicated a compass below G; the two phrases are very likely related. Already in the various royal inventories of 1547 etc., it is clear that makers had begun to add other, presumably small-scaled flue stops to the regal rank(s), such as ‘one Stoppe of pipes of woode’ and ‘a Cimball’ (high metal Mixture); a set of spinet or virginal strings (8' or 4') might also be added, the whole making an instrument still relatively portable (see Claviorgan). The regals illustrated by Praetorius may be considered the standard simple type, but clearly the small boxed section holding the reeds would be enlarged if larger resonators were added. Several German cuts of the 16th century show such resonators as already very fanciful in shape though still rather drastically diminished in scale, that is the bass pipes were very short in relation to the treble; also, the resonator, whatever its shape, was basically a half-stopped pipe. The completely open, inverted conical resonator (often of a hard metal such as copper, but occasionally of turned wood) was a recognized type of regal, the so-called Trichterregal; but most ingenuity was to be found in the little cylindrical or square-section stopped or half-stopped regals, right through from 1500 to 1750, and across Europe from Seville to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). Praetorius noted that Austrian builders were distinguished regals makers, and mentioned others in Augsburg, Nuremberg and Regensburg, as well as an unnamed maker who, to Praetorius’s scepticism, claimed to be able to make a regals that would stay in tune.
It was a Nuremberg maker, G. Voll, who was said to have made the first ‘Bible regals’ towards the end of the 16th century, that is a regals whose pair of bellows are shaped like two halves of a book, the whole folding up to resemble a large closed Bible. Praetorius also credited another Nuremberg maker in the late 15th century with inventing a stop that was ‘said to sound like a Schalmey’ but which was probably known by many makers before 1500.
In large organs regal ranks served to give varieties of tone-colour, especially in the manual and pedal Brustwerk departments. The latter were in many instances before about 1650 nothing more than a kind of regals instrument incorporated in a church organ. The regals instrument in its own right was used in many ways. By 1713 Mattheson thought its sound ‘extremely disgusting’ (‘höchst eckelhafft’) and recommended the use of other keyboard instruments for continuo in church; but his remarks suggest that it was still in use in some Hamburg churches. Earlier it had been useful to the writers of intermedii in Florence (c1589), of music at English guild feasts (Parish Clerks, 1522), pageant plays (Coventry, 1550s) and drama (mourning song in Edwards's Damon & Pythias, 1565). It was used in early opera and its later imitations (Orfeo, 1607, to accompany Charon; Pomo d'oro, 1667, for the infernal scene) when expense was not spared, in princely chapels with cori spezzati groups of instruments for motets (Praetorius, Schütz) or Passions (Selle, 1643), where an organ might be used for the chorus, regals for the soloists, or organ for accompanying brass instruments, harpsichord for strings, regals for cornetts and oboes, etc.
Although the regals can never have been very common outside Germany, Praetorius (1619, pp.72ff) showed that it was used there for continuo (for which it was better than a harpsichord because more sustained in tone, and could play loud or soft depending on whether the cover above the reeds was open or not), in princely convivial assembly, in large and small churches (‘almost better than a positive organ’) and portable enough to be taken from one to the other (hence requiring care if taken from a cold church to a warm dining-room).
In England ‘tuner of the regalls’ was one of the titles in the court appointments from the time of Henry VIII until at least 1767, but it is doubtful if it kept its literal meaning beyond the Commonwealth period, for references to regals were becoming rare even by the time of Elizabeth I. To James Talbot (MS, c1695) the name ‘regal’ was puzzling. He applied it both to full-length reed stops in general and to a little 4' Vox humana stop, but not to a self-contained keyboard instrument. Many of the major theorists in about 1700 (North, Muffat, St Lambert) and even about 1600 (Banchieri, Agazzari) mentioned it as a continuo instrument rarely if at all. Praetorius seems to have preferred the soft sound of the stopped, sweet Dolcian-like regals (regale dolce in Munich intermedii, 1568); and it is possibly the coarser sound of regals with short, open copper-alloy resonators that helped to make the instrument lose its popularity, even in central and north Germany.
F.W. Galpin: Old English Instruments of Music (London, 1932)
R. Menger: Das Regal (Tutzing, 1973)
S. Ferre: ‘The Development & Use of the Bibelregal'’, The Diapason, lxviii/2 (1976–7), 1
B. Owen: ‘The Henrician Heyday of the Regal’, Continuo, vii/10 (1984), 2–6
J. Koster and others: Keyboard Musical Instruments in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, 1994), 62–9
PETER WILLIAMS