Distinct Stops

With nearly 2200 index entries and over 1000 separate entry files, this Encyclopedia might beg the question “how many really different stops are there?” This question is, in the final analysis, unanswerable. Are Bourdon, Gedeckt and Stopped Diapason different stops? The answer depends on historical and geographical context, how finely you want to make distinctions, and, ultimately, who you ask. Still, on this page we offer one possible answer. If we take the index for this Encyclopedia, removing synonyms, prefixes and suffixes such as Bass, Celeste, Contra, Double, Echo, Gross, Grand, Holz, Klein, Octave, Major, Minor, Solo, and Sub, variants based solely on pitch, and stops of dubious origin or distinction, we are left with the following collection of 376 stops: