Organ reform at South Bend

Abstract

A conference-concert festival ‘Reformations and the Organ, 1517–2017’, held on 10 to 13 September 2017 at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, explored the organ, from the historical models used by European and American reformer-builders to the completed instruments and associated repertories and sound-worlds. Organized by Craig Cramer and Annette Richards in conjunction with the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, this event celebrated the inauguration in 2017 of organ-builder Paul Fritts & Co.’s op.37 in South Bend, with two masterclasses by Christophe Mantoux, nine recitals on four different organs, a harpsichord and a fortepiano, six pairs of paper sessions, and a final discussion. The concerts and papers were of very high quality. In the keynote address, Kerala Snyder applied the multiple meanings of the word ‘reformation’ to 19 stages in the history of the organ going back from the Fritts op.37 to Martin Luther’s Reformation of 1517. The stages included the Holtkamps at the Universities of Notre Dame and Yale, initially valued but later white elephants; the Von Beckerath tracker with slider chests on which Bach’s ‘Neumeister’ chorales discovered at Yale were premiered; and the Yale Taylor & Boody organ of 2007. She then surveyed a series of American organs on European models—at Wellesley by Fisk (1981), at Oberlin by Brombaugh (1981), at Cornell by Yokota (2011), at Eastman by GOArt/Yokota (2008)—before moving to the Gothenburg GOArt/Yokota (2000), and then organs in Hamburg by Schnitger (1693), Ahrend (1993) and Hans Henny Jahnn (1930). This last instrument led Snyder to discuss Jahnn’s (d.1959) role in the German organ reform movement and early music revival. His Ugrino press made Baroque organ works available in the 1920s (and its Buxtehude edition would later be transferred to Broude and continued by Snyder). Snyder’s reverse chronology highlighted the problems builders confronted in unique and even chance situations.