Benedict

The honor accorded the pipe organ in Christian worship represents a curious paradox. On the one hand, the Christian church through most of its history has had an abiding antipathy toward instruments; on the other, the organ (together with bells) has, since the late Middle Ages, become so identified with the church that it embodies the very essence of “churchliness.” How could this have happened?

The early church’s rejection of instruments in worship and its mistrust of instrumental music of any kind is well known. In particular, the Roman hydraulis or water organ, a predecessor of the medieval church organ, was linked with pagan rites, games, and the theater. The early church writers had no more use for the organ than for any other pagan instrument. St. Jerome (fourth century) spoke out sharply against the organ, warning that Christian virgins should be deaf to its music (Johannes Quasten, Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity, trans. Boniface Ramsey [Washington, D.C.: The Pastoral Press, 1983], 125; 112, n. 128). The Eastern Orthodox churches have never included instruments in their liturgies. In the West, the use of instruments in worship did not become commonplace until the Renaissance, and Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authorities remained somewhat averse to them until well into the twentieth century.

A Gift to Pepin

Yet in spite of its general hostility toward instruments, the Western church accepted the organ into its worship at a relatively early date—perhaps at some point during the tenth century, far in advance of any other instrument except bells. The normal explanation for this paradox begins with the gift of an organ from the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Copronymus to Pepin, king of the Franks, in 757. The gift evoked great curiosity—a fact mentioned in many contemporary chronicles—not only because all knowledge of the organ had died in the West but also because of the organ’s imperial connotations. The instrument played a central role in ceremonial occasions at the Byzantine court; indeed, the organ had become the unmistakable symbol of the emperor’s imperial majesty.

Pepin’s organ was later destroyed, but in 826 there arrived at the court of Louis the Pious (Pepin’s grandson) a Venetian priest, Georgius, who was trained in the art of organ building. At Louis’s behest, Georgius constructed an organ to replace the earlier instrument. A contemporary poem indicates just how significant the organ was to the self-esteem of the Frankish monarchs:

Thus, Louis, do you bring your conquests to Almighty God
And spread your aegis over noble kingdoms.
The realms your forbears could not gain by force of arms
Beg you of their own accord to seize them today.
What neither mighty Rome nor Frankish power could crush,
All this is yours, O Father, in Christ’s name.
Even the organ, never yet seen in France,
Which was the overweening pride of Greece
And which, in Constantinople, was the sole reason
For them to feel superior to Thee—even that is now
In the palace of Aix [the Frankish capital].
This may well be a warning to them, that they
Must submit to the Frankish yoke,
Now that their chief claim to glory is no more.
France, applaud him, and do homage to Louis.

Whose valor affords you so many benefits. (E. Faral, Ermold le Noir (Paris, 1932), 2515–2527, in Jean Perrot, The Organ from Its Invention in the Hellenistic Period to the End of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Norma Deane [London: Oxford University Press, 1971], 213)

It is generally assumed that the adulation accorded a distinguished Eastern court instrument by the more primitive Western court and church led to its eventual admission into the liturgy of the Western church. There may be some truth in this statement, for church and state were much intertwined during the Middle Ages. But the assumption does not suffice to explain why the Western church should so summarily dismiss its centuries-old prejudice against all instruments and so wholeheartedly embrace an instrument with hitherto unmistakably secular connotations—an about-face reflected in the fact that the most recognized early medieval experts in organ building were monks, e.g., Gerbert of Aurillac (later Pope Silvester II, reigned 999-1003) and Constantius of Fleury. Nor does it explain why early medieval accounts place organs in churches but do not link them with liturgical functions.

An Embodiment of Cosmic Harmony

These curious inconsistencies are perhaps best explained by understanding the organ of that time as an embodiment of cosmic harmony and a means of manifesting and teaching basic Neoplatonic doctrines associated with the classical educational curriculum, the quadrivium, and the medieval cosmic worldview.

The traditional Christian worldview, inherited from ancient Greek philosophy—especially from Plato—understood the cosmos as pervaded by harmonia, a quality that caused all things to be related and interconnected, and manifested to humans particularly through music. In his Timaeus, Plato, following Pythagoras, asserted that God constructed the universe according to specific proportions or ratios that were none other than those of the perfect musical intervals: the octave (2:1), the fifth (3:2), and the fourth (4:3). For Plato and for medieval Neoplatonic thinkers following Augustine, music was of divine origin. It was the means by which humans could contact and absorb into their souls the balance and perfection of cosmic harmony.

Platonic teachings on music won Christian support not only because they were embedded in the quadrivium but also because they were sympathetic to the suspicious attitude toward the sensuous enjoyment of music voiced by most of the church writers. That attitude insisted on strict regulation and restraint in musical expression and eventually fostered a “Christian” music with specific characteristics: ascetic severity, subtlety, rhythmic reserve, serene balance, and repose. The Christian cosmic worldview persisted throughout the Middle Ages (indeed, here and there until the eighteenth century), governing and energizing all facets of musical activity.

The evidence for understanding the organ as a symbol of cosmic harmony is scanty and inconclusive, as is much source material from the early Middle Ages; yet we can trace a slender thread of support for this view. The evidence begins with a statement by the early Christian writer Tertullian (third century), proto-Puritan who, it seems, would be least likely to approve a pagan instrument such as the organ.

Look at that very wonderful piece of organic mechanism by Archimedes—I mean his hydraulic organ, with its many limbs, parts, bands, passages for the notes, outlets for their sounds, combinations for their harmony, and the array of its pipes; but yet the whole of these details constitutes only one instrument. In like manner the wind, which breathes throughout this organ, at the impulse of the hydraulic engine, is not divided into separate portions from the fact of its dispersion through the instrument to make it play: it is whole and entire in its substance, although divided in its operation. (Tertullian, De Anima 14; translation and commentary in Robert Skeris, Musicae Sacrae Melethmata 1 [Altötting, W. Ger.: Coppenrath, 1976], 43)

Tertullian goes on to say that precisely like the windblown in the pipes throughout the organ, the soul displays its energies in various ways by means of the senses, being not indeed divided but distributed in the natural order. Behind Tertullian’s words, one can detect not only an assumed Christian monism but also the Greek, Neoplatonic presupposition of a harmonically ordered cosmos.

Some early medieval writers merely hint at this interpretation, as if they take it for granted. Thus St. Aldhelm (ca. 639–709), English poet, scholar, and teacher, wrote:

If a man longs to sate his soul with ardent music,
And spurns the solace of a thin cantilena,
Let him listen to the mighty organs with their thousand breaths,
And lull his hearing with the air-filled bellows,
However much the rest [of it] dazzles with its golden casings
Who can truly fathom the mysteries of such things,
Or unravel the secrets of the all-knowing God? (De Virginitate; trans. in Perrot, 224)

And in 873 Pope John VIII charged Anno, Bishop of Freising in Bavaria, “to send us, for the purpose of teaching the science of music, an excellent organ together with an organist capable of playing upon it and drawing the maximum amount of music from it” (Monumenta Germania Historica, Epist. Merov. et Karol Aevi. V, anno 873, p. 287; trans. in Perrot, 222).

Baldric, Bishop of Dol, is much less ambiguous in his estimation of the organ. In a letter written to the people of Fécamp sometime between 1114 and 1130, he says:

For myself, I take no great pleasure in the sound of the organ (ego siquidem in modulationibus organicis non multum delector); but it encourages me to reflect that, just as divers pipes, of differing weight and size, sound together in a single melody as a result of the air in them, so men should think the same thoughts, and inspired by the Holy Spirit, unite in a single purpose.… All this I have learned from the organs installed in this church. Are we not organs of the Holy Spirit? And let any man who banishes them from the church likewise banish all-vocal sound, and let him pray, with Moses, through motionless lips.… For ourselves, we speak categorically—because organs are a good thing, we regard them as mysteries and derive from them a spiritual harmony; it is this harmony that the Moderator of all things has instilled in us, by putting together elements entirely discordant in themselves and binding them together by a harmonious rhythm.… As we listen to the organ, let us be drawn together by a two-fold charity. (Patrologiae latinae clxvi, 1177–1178; trans. in Perrot, 220–221)

Even in such a late source as the Syntagma Musicum of 1619, Michael Praetorius implies a similar attitude toward the organ: a respect for the instrument’s paradigmatic perfection, evident above all in its complex and ingenious mechanism:

Almighty God alone can never be given sufficient thanks for having granted to man in His mercy and great goodness such gifts as have enabled him to achieve such a perfect, one might almost say the most perfect, creation and instrument of music as is the organ … in its arrangement and construction; and to play upon it with hands and with feet in such a manner that God in Heaven may be praised, His worship adorned, and man moved and inspired to Christian devotion. (Michael Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum II: De Organographia, trans. W. L. Sumner (Wolfenbüttel: Elias Holwein, 1619), 117–118)

The early appearance of organs in churches, then, may well not have been so much for practical music-making as for symbolic and didactic ends: symbolic in that the instrument was the material embodiment of cosmic harmony, and didactic in that it provided a visible, tangible “sermon” on that harmony. Together with the complex astronomical clocks still extant in some of the medieval cathedrals, organs may have witnessed the divine basis for the quadrivium and its underlying worldview. The clock represented divine order evident in the heavens, while the organ represented it in music; mathematics and geometry, the other disciplines of the quadrivium, were represented by the architecture of the cathedral church itself. (See Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral [New York: Harper & Row, 1962], 43.)

The Later Middle Ages

Organs in the earlier Middle Ages normally consisted of a single rank of pipes. At some point during the later Middle Ages, however, the organ underwent a new development in which each key began to control a number of pipes sounding intervals of fifths and octaves above a fundamental pitch. Thus the instrument became, in effect, a single large mixture—a Blockwerk, to use the proper German term. This development was most likely brought about by the perception of the overtone series on the part of an organ theoretician or builder. Given the medieval preference for theory over practical observation, however, such an advance was probably grounded in a desire to make the organ embody even more perfectly the Pythagorean proof of cosmic harmony.

Had the medieval organ possessed a sensuous, affective tonal quality, no amount of praise for its perfect structure would have won it the church’s approval. Like Bishop Baldric, who was quoted above, the church hierarchy prized the organ not for its sound but for its symbolism. Indeed, the very quality of sound produced by the medieval organ had an affinity to the Christian ideal of cosmic harmony and to the objective, nonaffective music produced by that ideal. The sound had practically no expressive qualities, only the slightest capacity for nuance, little variety in tone, very limited rhythmic capabilities, and no potential for crescendo and diminuendo. The medieval organ was remote in its playing mechanism, remote from its listeners (organs were often set in a balcony or “swallows nest” high up on the church wall), and was situated in a remote, mystic, and awe-inspiring acoustical environment. Its most unique musical characteristic, the ability to hold a tone at a static dynamic level for a theoretically endless period of time, was distinctly superhuman. If one assumes, as the Middle Ages did, that variation and fluctuation belong to the human sphere, while awe, remoteness, and constancy are characteristic of the divine, the mysterious, the holy, then the qualities enumerated above would seem to render the organ a peculiarly hieratic musical instrument.

Whether or not the organ gained entry into the church because it was the embodiment of cosmic harmony, it seems fairly certain that the organ was not brought in at first to aid in the conduct of the liturgy. Again the sources are few and inconclusive, but the gradual incorporation of organ music into liturgical celebrations seems to parallel the rise to prominence of polyphony (see Peter Williams, A New History of the Organ ([Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1980], 47ff.)—a development that may also have gained impetus from Neoplatonic musical speculation. Since the organ’s mechanical advances succeeded in keeping pace with the demands placed on it by musical developments, the instrument became capable of performing intellectual, contrapuntal music as that music evolved in the church. Thus with the support of both speculation and practice, the organ gained a firm foothold. By the thirteenth century, most major churches in Europe—abbeys and secular cathedrals—possessed an organ, and by the fifteenth century, many of them had two: one for solo performance and a smaller one to accompany and support choral singing.

Papal and Conciliar Decrees

By the same conservative process that granted approval to other previously foreign elements after long-established use, the Roman Catholic church hierarchy gradually sanctioned the organ’s official use in the church’s liturgy. This process is best traced through papal and conciliar decrees that include statements on the organ. The only instrument mentioned in the decrees of the Council of Trent is the organ; its playing had to be free from any element that might be considered “lascivious or impure.” Other sixteenth-century ecclesiastical ordinances likewise mention no instrument other than the organ (St. Charles Borromeo, Council of Milan in 1565; Ceremoniale Episcoporum, 1600). By the eighteenth century, the use of the organ in churches was almost universal, yet Pope Benedict XIV was less than enthusiastic about it, a view shared by his successors up through the early twentieth century. As Benedict wrote in the eighteenth century:

Thus the use of the organ and other musical instruments is not yet admitted by all the Christian world. In fact (without speaking of the Ruthenians of the Greek rite, who according to the testimony of Father Le Brun have neither an organ nor any other musical instruments in their churches), all know that Our Pontifical Chapel [the Sistine Chapel], although allowing musical chant on condition that it be serious, decent and devout, has never allowed the organ.… In our days we find in France renowned churches that use neither the organ nor figurative chant [i.e., polyphony] in sacred functions.… (Pope Benedict XIV, Encyclical Annus Qui, February 19, 1749; trans. in Robert F. Hayburn, Papal Legislation on Sacred Music, 95 A.D. to 1977 A.D. [Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1979, 96])

Benedict’s successors wrote in the nineteenth century: Figured organ music ought generally to be in accord with the grave, harmonious and sustained character of that instrument. The instrumental accompaniment ought decorously to support and not drown the chant. In the preludes and interludes, the organ as well as the other instruments ought always to preserve the sacred character corresponding to the sentiment of the function. (Congregation of Sacred Rites, Encyclical Letter, July 21, 1884; in Hayburn, 141)

And so wrote the three popes who bore the name Pius in the twentieth century:

• Although the proper music of the Church is only vocal, nevertheless the accompaniment of an organ is allowed. In any special case, within proper limits and with due care, other instruments may be allowed, too, but never without special leave from the Bishop of the Diocese, according to the rule of the Ceremoniale Episcoporum.
• Since the singing must always be the chief thing, the organ and the instruments may only sustain and never crush it.
• It is not lawful to introduce the singing with long preludes or to interrupt it with intermezzi.
• The music of the organ in the accompaniment, preludes, interludes, and so on must be played not only according to the proper character of the instrument but also according to all the rules of real sacred music. (Pope Pius X,Motu proprio tra le sollecitudini, November 22, 1903; in Hayburn, 228–229)

There is one musical instrument, however, which properly and by tradition belongs to the Church, and that is the organ. On account of its grandeur and majesty, it has always been considered worthy to mingle with liturgical rites, whether for accompanying the chant, or, when the choir is silent, for eliciting soft harmonies at fitting times. In this matter also, however, it is necessary to avoid that mixture of sacred and profane which through the initiative of organ builders on one hand, and the fault of certain organists who favor ultramodern music on the other threatens the purity of the holy purpose for which the church organ is intended. While safeguarding the rules of liturgy, We Ourselves declare that whatever pertains to the organ should always make fresh development. But We cannot refrain from lamenting that, just as formerly, in the case of styles of music rightly prohibited by the Church so today again there is a danger lest a profane spirit should invade the House of God through new-fangled musical styles which, should they get a real foothold, the Church would be bound to condemn. Let that organ music alone resound in our churches which expresses the majesty of the place and breathes the sanctity of the rites; for in this way both the art of organ builders and that of the musicians who play the organ will be revived and render good service to the sacred liturgy. (Pope Pius XI, apostolic constitution Divini cultus, December 20, 1928; in Hayburn, 331)

These norms [against exaggerated, bombastic music] must be applied to the use of the organ or other musical instruments. Among the musical instruments that have a place in the church, the organ rightly holds the principal position, since it is especially fitted for the sacred chants and sacred rites. It adds a wonderful splendor and a special magnificence to the ceremonies of the Church. It moves the souls of the faithful by the grandeur and sweetness of its tones. It gives minds an almost heavenly joy and it lifts them powerfully to God and to higher things. (Pope Pius XII, encyclical Musicae sacrae disciplina, December 25, 1955, #58; in Hayburn, 353)

In the Latin Church, the pipe organ is to be held in high esteem, for it is the traditional musical instrument and one that adds a wonderful splendor to the Church’s ceremonies and powerfully lifts up man’s mind to God and to heavenly things. (Pope Pius XII, encyclical Musicae sacrae disciplina, December 25, 1955, #58; in Hayburn, 353)

Changing Tastes

The organ experienced its golden age during the Renaissance. By that time, its mechanism was much refined and improved, and sixteenth-century writings attest to the high proficiency level attained in organ performance. Most of the art from this period is unfortunately lost to us since it was largely improvised—the extant compositions represent only a minute fraction of its glory. There was enormous activity in organ building at this time; ordinary parish churches, as well as prominent ones, acquired organs. By the time of the Reformation, the organ’s place in worship was so well established that its use continued undisturbed among Lutherans and Anglicans, even though Luther and others were in fact less than enthusiastic about it.

Luther rarely mentioned organ playing, but occasionally he did express an opinion against it, reckoning it among the externals of the Roman service; on the other hand, he was also musician enough in this area to appreciate and praise the art of a Protestant organist like Wolff Heintz.… Most Lutheran church regulations, at least in the Reformation period, paid no attention to the organ, a few left it as “adiaphorous” (neither forbidden nor approved) as long as “psalms and sacred songs” rather than “love songs” were played upon it, and as long as the organ playing did not, through its length or autocracy, encroach upon the principal parts of the service. (Friedrich Blume, Protestant Church Music [New York: W. W. Norton, 1974], 107)

The growth of alternatim praxis (chants divided into versets for choir and organ in alternation; the term is also applied to the Lutheran chorale) continued to insure an important role for the organ in worship. By this means the organ was raised to a prominence equal to the pastor or priest, congregation, and choir, since it could “sing” an entire segment of chant or stanza of a chorale, leaving the people to meditate on the text (which they usually knew by heart).

The baroque era witnessed a decline in enthusiasm for the organ in southern Europe. Its mechanical development was arrested, less and less music was written for it (and what was written was of lesser quality), and there were fewer well-known organists. Calvinism stifled organ music in Switzerland, and Puritanism inflicted mortal wounds on it in Great Britain. The Ordinance of 1644 mandated the speedy demolishing of all organs, images, and all matters of superstitious monuments in all Cathedrals, and Collegiate or Parish-churches and Chapels, throughout the Kingdom of England and the Dominion of Wales, the better to accomplish the blessed reformation so happily begun and to remove offenses and things illegal in the worship of God. (1644 Ordinance of Lords and Commons; quoted in William Leslie Sumner, The Organ, Its Evolution, Principles of Construction and Use [London: Macdonald, 1962], 135)

The use of organs in the public worship of God is contrary to the law of the land and to the law and constitution of our Established church [of Scotland]. (Presbytery of Glasgow, Proceedings [1807]; see Ian Crofton and Donald Fraser, A Dictionary of Musical Quotations [New York: Schirmer, 1985], 107:15)

In the early seventeenth century, however, Protestant north Germany found a new purpose for the organ: to accompany congregational singing. Thus the organ continued to be assured a secure place in the church, not only for philosophical or theological reasons but also for practical ones. The instrument reached another mechanical and artistic high point in middle and northern Germany during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as Michael Praetorius’s enthusiastic affirmation quoted above indicates. More than coincidence explains the fact that the authors who furthered ideas about world harmony during this period are the same ones who showed the greatest interest in the organ: Praetorius, Kircher, Werkmeister. Indeed the organ has flourished wherever the Neoplatonic worldview has been cultivated. The seventeenth-century English poets who eulogize the Neoplatonic concept of world harmony praise the instrument:

Ring out, ye crystal spheres,
Once bless our human ears,
(If ye have power to touch our senses so)
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time;
And let the Bass of Heav’ns deep Organ blow,
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to th’ Angelick symphony. (John Milton, “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” [1645])

But oh! what art can teach,
What human voice can reach
The sacred organ’s praise?
Notes inspiring holy love,
Notes that wing their heav’nly ways
To mend the choirs above. (John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” [1687])

When the full organ joins the tuneful choir, Th’immortal Pow’rs incline their ear. (Alexander Pope, “Ode for Musick on St. Cecilia’s Day” [c. 1708])

J. S. Bach’s music represents the final glorious flourish, both for the concept of cosmic harmony in music (see Timothy Smith, “J. S. Bach the Symbolist,” Journal of Church Music 27:7 [September 1985]: 8-13, 46) and for the organ as a vitally important factor in the music world; even during Bach’s lifetime, the organ was being relegated to the fringe, where it has remained. Yet by that composer’s time, the interplay of sacred and secular ideas made paradox the order of the day: it is a measure of Bach’s profound synthesizing genius that he made the organ “dance”; a less likely instrument for dancing can hardly be imagined!

The pressure of the radically new Enlightenment ideas about music, such as the idea that its primary function consisted of expressing human emotion or providing entertainment and relaxation, had an enormous impact on the status of the organ and its music. The latter half of the eighteenth century witnessed a rapid decline and trivialization of the organ and its music, a trend that prevailed through the first half of the nineteenth century. The instrument could not compete with the new intimate, affective gestures, the rapid shifts of mood and emotional range of preclassical and classical symphonies and secular keyboard music (e.g., the works of the Mannheim School, or of C. P. E. Bach and Haydn). Compared with them, “the organ quite naturally was thought of as a clumsy, screeching, dynamically monotonous instrumental monster” (Arnfried Edler, “The Organist in Lutheran Germany,” in Walter Salmen, ed., The Social Status of the Professional Musician from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century [New York: Pendragon, 1983], 89).

If it were to be asked what instrument is capable of affording the greatest effects? I should answer, the Organ.… It is, however, very remote from perfection, as it wants expression, and a more perfect intonation. (Charles Burney, A General History of Music [London, 1776-89], quoted in Dictionary of Musical Quotations, 107–113)

[Organ playing] in France was generally irreverent, although once in a while a significant talent came to my attention within this irreverence. Not rarely is a gay pastorale heard during a church service which turns into a thunderstorm before closing with a sort of operatic grand finale in freestyle. Given that this is untenable from the German religious point of view, it must be admitted that such things are often done quite talentedly. A requiem mass for Lafitte in the church of Saint Roch gave me the opportunity to hear one M. Lefébure-Wély play in a solemn, appropriate manner, whereas he worked up a tremendous gay mood during the mass on Sunday. In response to my astonishment over this, I was told that the clergy, as well as the congregation, expect light-hearted music. (Adolph Hesse, “On organs, their appointment and treatment in Austria, Italy, France and England” [observations on a trip made in 1844], Neue Zeitschrift fr Musik [1853]: 53; trans. in Rollin Smith, “Saint-Saëns and the Organ,” The American Organist 20:4 [April 1986]: 190-191)

In spite of this decline, however, the organ continued to solidify its position as the musical instrument of the church. By the nineteenth century its sound had come to be regarded as the epitome of churchliness; even those church bodies whose Puritan heritage had hitherto rejected the organ now began to embrace it. Yet significant composers of the period between 1750 and 1850 wrote little or nothing of note for the organ, and no organist of this period was accorded the degree of international recognition granted to the premier violinists, pianists, and singers of the time. This held true even until the present day.

The Modern Revival

The mid-nineteenth century marked the beginning of attempts to rescue the organ from neglect and trivialization; for example, the outstanding work of Mendelssohn in Germany; S. S. Wesley in England; Cavaillé Coll, Hesse, and Franck in France. These attempts were essentially within the framework of the church; the corresponding groundswell to restore the organ to a position of prominence in the world of secular music never attained the same degree of intensity. The revival of the organ within the church was bound up almost entirely with efforts toward church renewal after its first disastrous encounter with Enlightenment ideas. Revival was largely fueled by Romantic sentiments, especially those of historicism (e.g., the revival of gothic architecture and the music of Palestrina and Bach) and aestheticism (the devotion to and cultivation of beauty). As neither of these movements had a firm theological basis, the organ’s continued existence in the church came to rest on its practical usefulness as a means of supporting large-group singing and on the increasingly unshakable conviction among the majority of Christian worshipers that the organ is the church’s instrument. (The latter notion has at times created problems for the organ, as well as discomfort for organists, especially those who do not wish to be associated with the church.)

Nineteenth-century attempts to make the organ conform to the new taste and the new “enlightened” worldview included enclosed divisions with swell shades and devices for rapid change of registration. These were quite clumsy, especially when compared with the flexible expressivity of the orchestra or piano, and they were only partially successful. Thus there arose in the early twentieth century a countermovement (the Orgelbewegung or Organ Reform Movement) that did away with the questionable “improvements” and once again built organs that were in greater conformity with older musical ideals—and inevitably with the old worldview. The revival of older organ-building techniques and concepts has only exacerbated the antipathy of those increasingly prevalent forces in the twentieth-century church that promote the ideal of a popular, intimate, and human-scaled church and worship.

The demise of the antique and medieval worldviews has relegated the organ to the fringe of the post-Enlightenment musical scene: to the degree that the modern instrument participates in the characteristics of the medieval organ, it evokes and espouses by the very character of its sound the medieval worldview. The notion that the organ is the church’s proper instrument is still strong in many quarters, but the idea has powerful detractors. The rise of styles of worship that deemphasize or exclude the organ while featuring the use of other instruments underlines the gradual dethronement of the organ as the special instrument of the church.