The craft of organ building remains today essentially the same as it was during the development of the organ in the middle ages. Although machinery can be employed to save time and perform repetitive tasks, the core crafts of woodwork and metalwork remain at the heart of the industry. Moreover, although the metal pipes are the most distinctive feature of an organ, it is the wooden structure of the instrument that absorbs the bulk of the organ builder's time and effort. Wood remains an astonishingly useful and versatile material. Weight for weight, it is stronger than steel. Despite the alarming deforestation of the planet, a conscientious workshop can find supplies of many different species and grades of timber from renewable sources. Timber is the ideal material for custom building anything; with relatively simple equipment it can be formed into virtually any shape and adapted to almost any purpose – including, in organ building, complex air-tight components containing many moving parts.

The structure of an organ consists of a frame (usually still of solid timber, though some builders use steel) and a case. Very often, especially in small instruments or those inspired by historic precedent, the frame and case are integrated in a monocoque structure. In the Anglo-American tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries organ builders did not concern themselves much with casework – its design often left to architects and its construction to specialist joiners – but still used wood for supporting framework. Even an organ with no case, such as those built by Walter Holtkamp and others with the pipes on open display (mid-twentieth century) will still have the familiar wooden structure within.

Albert Schweitzer's status as a guru of twentieth-century organ building remains undiminished as the century draws to a close. The application of his intellect to an obscure musical craft remains a surprise to those who know him more as a philosopher, missionary and philanthropist. In fact the study of Bach and the organ was the major preoccupation of his early career and was a matter that he took as seriously as any other intellectual endeavour.

In this personal admission Schweitzer explains in the simplest possible terms why the organ, dependent on the technology and craft techniques of the middle ages and, at best, a complex and intractable means of making music, remains of enduring interest in a later age where entirely different technologies rule our daily lives (see Joy 1953: 186–213).

Twenty years ago – indeed perhaps at any time between 1930 and 1980 – it would have been obvious to explain Schweitzer's mission in terms of the classical revival: the Orgelbewegung or organ reform movement, built round the rediscovery of early instruments and the corresponding repertoire. In fact, though Schweitzer deplored the heaviness and (as he saw it) crudity of the average organ of c1900, he also had a message that links him to Ruskin and William Morris.

The organ is unique amongst musical instruments in that it makes an architectural contribution to the building in which it stands. This is not solely on account of size: the layout and decoration of organ cases has traditionally been a branch of architectural design with its own grammar and traditions, but still allowing free interpretation according to changing fashions, local influences, and the skills of the designer and organ builder.

The organ case has an effect on the sound of the organ, though this may be difficult to define. For the neo-classical builders of the mid-twentieth century the revival of the traditional organ case – with side walls, back and roof – was an important argument in the ideology of organ reform. The casework was believed to focus the sound, assist the blend of the various ranks of pipes and project the sound into the room (usually down the main axis of the building). There is still considerable debate as to whether the organ case is essentially a passive structure, like a loudspeaker cabinet, or whether it has an active role as a resonator, bringing it more into line with other musical instruments where the body or soundboard is vital in creating power and timbre.

In practice many variations are possible, and as with other factors in the design and building of organs, success is not dependent on this element alone. If one allows that good organs exist in many forms and from many different periods, then one must acknowledge the success, on their own terms, of organs built in less than ideal cases or indeed without any case at all.

In 1845, Félix Danjou, the director of the French firm of organ builders Daublaine-Callinet, writing in the first edition of his magazine Revue de la musique réligieuse, populaire et classique, commented on the state of German organ composition:

Danjou's generalisations on the music of the Thuringian Christian Heinrich Rinck (1770–1846) and the Silesian Adolf Friedrich Hesse (1809–1863), composers who might be said to have laid the foundations for nineteenth-century German organ music, while having an element of truth, are one-sided and not entirely accurate – for example, both composers wrote in equal measure in the legato fugal style and in the free variation manner. If organ music had failed to maintain the lofty standards of J. S. Bach, one has to look at least a hundred years earlier and to forces external to music for the causes of decline. Movements in philosophy and the arts such as Aufklärung (Enlightenment) and Empfindsamkeit (sensibility) had challenged accepted norms and traditions. The Church lost its centrality in society, and had to compete with man's growing belief in his own self-sufficiency, as well as with a rise in nationalistic fervour.

The early nineteenth century

In her major study of American organ building, Orpha Ochse notes that ‘the early nineteenth-century American organ was an instrument without a repertoire’ (Ochse 1975: 111ff.). Although various method books included examples of original organ compositions, improvisation was a mainstay of church organists well into the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century organ builders inherited traditions of eighteenthcentury organ building in the English and German styles. David Tannenberg's last organ, built in 1804 for Christ Lutheran Church, York, Pennsylvania, shows his German heritage (Armstrong 1967: 110). An early three-manual instrument by William Goodrich of Boston for the First Presbyterian Church, New Orleans, Louisiana (1815–20) shows English influence (Owen 1979: 425):

The roots of eclecticism, the juxtaposition and reconciliation of diverse elements, run deep in American society. The mixture of various national traditions, fascination with technical complexity, innovation and experimentation (‘tinkering’) were natural parts of an organ culture separated from the regional traditions of Europe. For example, William Goodrich owned a copy of Dom Bédos's L'Art du Facteur d'Orgues. With regard to organ building traditions in New England, Owen points out that ‘the teachers were American and the subject matter was English, but the textbook was French’ (Owen 1979: 45).

By mid-century, American-born musicians had written and published a repertoire of literature and instruction books (Owen 1979: 109ff.; Owen 1975–91). American Church Organ Voluntaries, published in 1856 by A. N. Johnson, was the first anthology of organ music compiled and published by an American-born composer.

The symphonic tradition in French organ music that was to find its first real expression in the works of César Franck had its roots in the period that followed the French Revolution of 1789.

This so-called ‘post-classical’ era has often been criticised as a time when musical quality fell sharply after the glories of the ‘Grand Siècle’, but there were important cultural reasons for the changes in public taste that many organists felt obliged to follow. Furthermore, one must distinguish between the music that composers published (often very light in character) and their reputations as performers and improvisers.

The ‘Terror’ that followed the revolution, when thousands were executed or arrested as ‘enemies of the Revolution’ also marked the secularisation of the Church: her assets were seized and services abolished, leaving organists (and organ builders) without a livelihood. The churches themselves were used as storerooms, barracks or stables and many organs were sold or destroyed. Stories abound of organists trying to save their instruments by playing patriotic songs, thus following a musical trend that was to reflect the political and military mood of the time. The foundation of the Conservatoire in 1795 and the increasing interest in opera heralded a musical liberation that would mark a decline in solemn church music. Napoleon was not slow to appreciate the power of music as a propaganda tool, asking composers to write music that would glorify his armies: this was the era of ‘battle’ pieces that were by no means confined to the orchestra.

Temperament

It is not improbable that a high proportion of the readership of this book will have accepted early in their musical education the principle of an octave being divided into twelve semitones of equal size, implicit within this being the notion of enharmonic notes and equal temperament tuning. Yet the second half of the twentieth century has seen an increasing preoccupation on the part of musicians with matters relating to heightened stylistic awareness in performance. Amongst players and makers of keyboard instruments quests for ‘historically informed’ or ‘authentic’ performances include the issues of pitch and temperament. For the organ, unlike the pianoforte, equal temperament tuning has been the universal norm for barely a century, but the current desire for enlightened performances of the pre-romantic repertoire has seen the rehabilitation of historically appropriate systems of tuning. As the keyboard instrument with the widest repertoire, the organ also has the richest heritage of historic instruments and artefacts. The issue of temperament is therefore of considerable significance with regard to restorations and for new instruments which seek to replicate historical styles.

The scope of this chapter is such that it can only attempt to provide an introduction to the concept and history of a very large and complex subject. The plan is threefold: first, to consider the principles of temperament, secondly, to consider three historically important systems (equal temperament, mean-tone temperaments, irregular temperaments), and thirdly, to consider the subject chronologically in relation to the repertoire and modern performance conditions.

Johann Sebastian Bach spent almost his entire life in a small region of central Germany whose boundaries are marked by the town of his birth, Eisenach in Thuringia, and the place of his death, the Saxon city of Leipzig, which lies only one hundred miles to the east. Unlike his famous contemporary Handel, who was also born in the region, Bach did not venture beyond this relatively confined area save for two years spent as a chorister in the north German city of Lüneburg, and occasional trips to the important musical centres of Lübeck, Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin. But Bach's music stands in counterpoint to the provinciality of his biography; his organ works encompass an unprecedented range of diverse traditions, demonstrating a mastery of the organ art that flourished in his native Thuringia, a fluency in the flamboyant language of north German organ playing of the preceding generation, and a profound knowledge of French and Italian idioms, the dominant national styles of the eighteenth century. Bach transformed and synthesised techniques and styles ranging from the stile antico of renaissance polyphony to the most up-to-date thrills of Italian orchestral writing.

According to C. P. E. Bach his father had been exposed to a wide range of music from an early age: he had studied the music of ‘some old and good Frenchmen’, Italian and south German composers of the seventeenth century including Girolamo Frescobaldi, Johann Pachelbel, Johann Jakob Froberger, Johann Caspar Kerll, Nicolaus Adam Strungk, and the most important north German organists of the period – Dieterich Buxtehude, Johann Adam Reincken, Nicolaus Bruhns, and Georg Böhm (David and Mendel 1966: 278).

In 1812, A. F. C. Kollmann, the German-born theorist and organist at the Royal German Chapel, St James's Palace, summarised the state of organ music in Britain as follows:

Kollmann's expression of confidence in Bachian textures as models for the future development of a British organ repertoire is not surprising given his profound interest in his countryman's music. He found it remarkable, however, that despite London's importance as ‘the most opulent city on the face of the globe’, there was not a single instrument equal to the organs of Germany and the Netherlands, and that even some of the most populous and richest churches in England lacked an organ. He further lamented the general inadequacy of an organist's remuneration and concluded that organ playing as a ‘particular study’ was not encouraged as on the continent (Kollmann 1812: 21).

Kollmann's thirty-year residency in London notwithstanding, the typical British organ must have remained ineffectual in his opinion when compared with the continental giants at Haarlem, Weingarten and Hamburg (Michaeliskirche), and the laissez-faire attitudes to the art of organ playing perplexing. The extant 1764 John Byfield organ at St Mary’s, Rotherhithe (restored by Noel Mander in 1959; see Figure 5.9, p. 69) provides an excellent opportunity to see what Kollmann knew as a large indigenous organ around the time of his arrival, an instrument fully commensurate with the full and solo-stop voluntaries of Stanley, Boyce, Walond and their imitators then in circulation.

The Neo-Russian style

To assert that a particular historical moment marks the beginning of a particular cultural movement is a hazardous proposition inasmuch as any such moment is only one link in a chain of preceding and subsequent conditions that characterize or define such a movement. However, while precedents to, and consequences of, a “magic moment” (e.g. 1917) can always be found, there is often a constellation of events and circumstances that hastens or emphasizes what may have been a latent action, giving rise to its manifestation as a cultural expression (e.g. constructivism after the October Revolution) and there is at least a conventional wisdom in pursuing this method. The decade of the 1850s is such a moment, for it marked an important juncture in the evolution of Russian culture and gives us a strategic date for establishing a division between what could be called the “classical” and “modern” eras of the Russian visual arts.

From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the Russian school of painting and sculpture, as opposed to the Moscow and regional schools of icon painting, had been centered in St. Petersburg, where the Imperial Academy of Arts held sway, supporting the neoclassical, idealist canon. Distant from the wellsprings of native culture, the St. Petersburg Academy had elaborated its artistic ideal according to the techniques and aesthetic canons of classical antiquity and cultivated the models set by the Old Masters. But with the passing of Karl Briullov and Aleksandr Ivanov, its greatest sons, in the 1850s, the autocracy of the Academy quickly waned and its official style became increasingly conservative.

The Revolution of 1868 marked the beginning of a cultural process that by 1936 left Spain torn into warring camps. The period that began with revolution and ended in Civil War was punctuated by the short-lived First Republic (1874-1875), the restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy (1875), a disastrous war with the United States (1898), a coup d'etat by General Primo de Rivera (1923) and the proclamation of the Second Republic (1931). No wonder that in 1897 the novelist and playwright Perez Galdós wrote of living in a time of “confusión evolutiva” (evolving confusion) and underscored the “rapidez con que se transforman ahora nuestros gustos” (the rapidity with which our tastes are now being transformed). What was the role of the theater in such tumultuous times? Poised at the center of social and intellectual life in urban centers and enjoying a popularity that no other art form could rival until the advent of film, the stage served as a point of mediation between tradition and modernity, high culture and mass culture, Spain and the rest of Europe.

No less than other peoples, Russians have traditionally been open to the proposition that there is a logical meaning and significance to be read into their geographical position in the world. And because they are further inclined to believe that this significance of location has direct implications for the most basic questions about their national identity and destiny, it has commonly been the object of rather intense preoccupation. In the case of Russia, “location” is to be understood first and foremost in terms of a gradient running east and west, that is to say from the Orient to the Occident. The country, it is well appreciated, had the peculiar historical-geographical fate to emerge and develop in a vast intermediary space between highly differentiated zones of global civilization, and the ensuing sense of occupying some sort of critical middle ground has been pervasive, throughout modern Russian history at least.

Introduction: problems of terminology

Russian peasants, factory workers, artisans, and small traders have by tradition lived in a world made colorful by endless shades of difference, one not easily demarcated under the typical definitions and categories of popular culture. Their first loyalties have been to kinship groups, to work collectives, to the villages or districts where they lived, rather than to their own class or social group in a broad sense. For those traditional villagers who lived all their lives close to home, the opposition svoi/chuzhoi ( “our own/strange,” but close to the English polarization “us and them”) was fundamental to organizing life. Nenash (“Not-ours”) was one of the many dialect terms for the Devil, and considerable hardship awaited the nevesta (bride, but literally “unknown woman”), displaced by patrilocal tradition to her husband’s parents' family, and treated there as a stranger, though she might herself come from a village only a few miles away, or even from a household in the same village.

The industrialization of Russia, which led to a massive population movement from villages into cities, did much to soften conservatism, but did not erode it entirely; nor did peasants who went to the cities necessarily change attitudes overnight. Loyalty to a particular village was replaced by the wider, but still extremely concrete, affiliations of krai and rodina (birthplace).

Throughout her history, Russia has assumed an ambivalent attitude toward the West, an attitude conditioned by the diverse sources of initial contact. The influence of Byzantium, realized through Russia’s conversion to Christianity toward the end of the tenth century, was of signal importance. By devising an alphabet for the spoken language, her missionaries gave the Kievan state access to an established literature and facilitated the further development of an indigenous culture based upon the tenets of Orthodoxy. Yet the Greek heritage common to the cultures of Europe assumed particular forms of expression in Russia.

Many of the documents which were available in translation contributed to a conservative definition of the relations between church and state and of the ruler’s rights and duties. Together with Christian doctrine, they were “incorporated into the political structure of the state of Kiev … [and] became a basis for Russia’s further evolution.”1 With the decline of more democratic traditions during the ensuing period of Mongol conquest, this autocratic inheritance from Byzantium gained the ascendancy, putting its stamp upon the emerging state of Muscovy.

The fragmentation of Kievan Rus’ altered the primary means of communication with the West, Novgorod assuming central importance by virtue of its location on the trade routes linking Northern Europe with the Middle East. A high rate of literacy among its landowning classes and the assembly of free citizens in the veche or town council contributed to the success of a republican form of government quite unlike Moscow’s. Its function as one of medieval Europe’s most important manufacturing towns and its close commercial ties to the Hanseatic League further strengthened its identity with the West.

Until the advent of radio in the 1920s, the principal medium of 309 social communication in Spain was the press. In the first decades of the twentieth century newspapers continued to be vehicles of opinion, owned and directed by parties, groups, and individuals wishing to impress their views on society at large. As society changed they became more commercial enterprises, dependent on readers and advertisers; their aim was to satisfy the multiple interests and enthusiasms of their increasingly literate, urban audience. In spite of the domination of companies whose ownership was spread amongst mostly anonymous shareholders, pressure groups like the Catholic church, political parties (including Basque and Catalan nationalists) and trade unions figured as major players. Nevertheless, publications promoting narrow political and social ideologies led a precarious existence and were subject to restrictions when the political tide ran against them. In Barcelona the no longer party-inspired daily La Vanguardia (founded 1881) thrived, as did the Madrid-based ABC (1905), both run by family companies. Though at heart the major dailies favored particular political options, they mixed variety of coverage with political moderation in order to appeal to a wide readership.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 was fought along the multiple lines of cleavage - of class, ideology, and region - that had been opened by the processes of economic, social, and political modernization over the previous century. Yet despite its complex origins and internal dynamics, participants, commentators, and historians, then and since, have tended to reduce the war to a set of simple oppositions: democracy vs. fascism, Christian civilization vs. godless Communism, the working class vs. the rich, the center vs. the periphery, and so on. This dichotomizing tendency was perhaps inevitable in a war in which propaganda played such an important role, but it was also a consequence of a growing habit of mind among educated Spaniards to conceptualize their society in terms of the “two Spains.” Since the early nineteenth century Spaniards had disagreed - often violently - over the desirability and direction of political and social change.

Suddenly, Spain seems to be exporting culture. While the death of Generalisimo Francisco Franco in 1975 failed to usher in the radical shift in literature and the arts predicted by many observers of Spanish culture, it did mark a real conceptual change in Spain's image of itself and of the world's image of Spain. The political and historical phenomenon known as “the Transition” carried Spain away from its old image as a backward, slightly bumbling country toward a new image as a modern, democratic, chic, and vigorous cultural center. For many years, Franco's tourism industry had sold Spain as “different,” and indeed it was, but not in the way government officials hoped it would be perceived. Spain, slow to return to the international community of nations following the devastating Civil War (1936-1939) and the repressive years of the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975), was different in the sense that politically it had not kept up with the rapid move into the modern world experienced in the rest of Europe and was viewed as a pariah among modern nation-states. Spain remained closed to many international influences and proudly put forth its “difference” in images of what Kathleen Vernon in her essay in the present book calls the españolada, that is, the clichéd, tradition-ridden view of flamenco girls, hot-tempered males, sunny beaches, and sculpted landscapes. La España de pandereta (the Spain of the tambourine) - the romantic and Catholic land of Bizet's fiery Carmen and Zorrilla's amorous but repentant Don Juan - was issued forth as the fetichized image of the “real” Spain.