Music in the 1800s, as in earlier times, was influenced by the instruments for which it was written. As far as the organ is concerned,...

Music in the 1800s, as in earlier times, was influenced by the instruments for which it was written. As far as the organ is concerned, traditionally there was the influence of the piano, but also, to an ever increasing extent, the orchestra. Beginning in the mid-1700s, the Mannheim School’s introduction of variable dynamics led to a paradigm shift, and the attitudes this represented were also evident in organ music. In his book of study for the organ from 1795–98, Justin Heinrich Knecht (1752–1817) described how one could achieve a crescendo on the organ from pianissimo to fortissimo, and he indicated the specific sequence of stops to be used. Nonetheless, most organs of the time were distinguished by the ideals of the past and were not always well suited for a new registration practice. The norm, as documented in published organ music in the first decades of the nineteenth century, implied that the registration was not changed while playing, thus limiting one to terraced dynamics by the dynamics that the number of manuals permitted. This album’s intention is to present examples of developments characterizing German organ music in the mid- 1800s.