Mutation stop · 2 2/3 ft

The Nazard

A mutation stop that sounds not the note played but its fifth, an octave higher: it colours the foundation stops without being heard on its own.

Mutation stop

What it is

Mutation stops, Dom Bedos explains, are so called because they are not at the octave pitch of the foundation stops, but at the fifth or the third. The nazard (also spelled nasard) is the most common: a wide-scaled open stop of étoffe, running the full compass, which speaks a fifth above the prestant. Its first pipe measures 2 feet 8 inches; today it is written 2 2/3 feet. When a C is pressed, it sounds the G of the octave above.

There is always one on the positive, of narrower scale and with chimney pipes; the trebles may be made of “à fuseau” (spindle) pipes. There is also a gros nazard, an octave lower, for large organs. The name is thought to come from the nose (nez), because the stop gives the combination a more nasal sound.

L'Art du facteur d'orgues

What Dom Bedos says

Le Nasard est un Jeu de mutation, de grosse taille, tout ouvert. On le fait en étoffe & de toute l’étendue du Clavier. Il parle à la quinte du Prestant, ou à l’octave du gros Nasard. On emploie ce Jeu dans toutes les Orgues tant grandes que petites.

TranslationThe Nasard is a mutation stop of wide scale, fully open. It is made of étoffe and runs the whole compass of the keyboard. It speaks at the fifth of the Prestant, or at the octave of the gros Nasard. This stop is used in all Organs, large and small.

Dom Bedos de Celles, L’Art du facteur d’orgues, Part I (1766), ch. IV, sect. I, § 168, p. 46.

In practice

In the music of the Couperins and their contemporaries

The nazard is used only in combination. It is one of the five stops of the jeu de tierce (bourdon, prestant, nazard, quarte, tierce) described by Boyvin in 1690. With the foundation stops alone, without the tierce, it can also carry a récit: Boyvin says récits are played “on the Nasard without the Tierce, with the foundations”.

Dom Bedos warns against the habit some organists have of almost always adding a nazard to the cromorne: the combination is useful, he says, only when the cromorne is weak. Two small nazards, one on the great organ and one on the positive, serve him on the other hand to imitate birdsong.

The works