Making Sound Present: Re-enactment and Reconstruction in Historical Organ Building Practices

Abstract

Discussions regarding reconstruction, replication, or re-enactment in music can be fruitful only if musicians are experts in understanding the quality of the material with which they make their music: sounds. Such expertise can be acquired by analyzing and adapting the ways organists and organ builders deal with organ sounds, as each organ is an individual to a far greater extent than any other musical instrument. Organ builders discern how the thousands of pipes in an organ should sound and cooperate; organists have to able to understand the frames thus set. Generally speaking, it follows that composers’ intentions are subordinate to musicians’ and listeners’ ones: music is something that sounds.