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Two organs from GU in inte photo: © Cornell Univer sit y Photogr aphy
One of USA’s most recent organ competitions was held at the end of September: the Westfield Organ Competition. No Swedes participated, neither in the competition nor in the jury. Nevertheless, the University of Gothenburg was at the centre of events. Both organs that were used were built here, at the Göteborg Organ Art Centre. e st fi e ld C e n t r e at Cornell University regularly arranges competitions for different keyboard instruments. This year the Centre did it together with the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York. The competition had 12 participants from seven countries whose performance was judged by an international jury. The organs were the last two instruments constructed by GOArt’s organ workshop before it closed in 2009. “The organ in Christ Church close to the Eastman School is a copy of an instrument that stands in Dominican Church in Vilnius, built in 1776 by Adam Gottlob Casparini. And the organ at Cornell University is built in the famous organ builder Arp Schnitger’s style, just like the organ at Örgryte New Church,” Paul Peeters, assistant researcher at GOArt, explains.
Annette Richards, organist at Cornell University, has been the driving force in the organ construction there. are made here in Gothenburg, but much of the rest has been manufactured by an American organ builder. Annette also used an ordinary woodworker who built kitchen cupboards in her own kitchen and who thought it could be an interesting project. With the help of GOArt’s organ researcher and organ builder Munetaka Yokota, he did a fantastic job, in spite of the fact that he’d never done anything like it before. Thus Annette did the same thing that Arp Schnitger did 300 years before her – used local craftsmen. That’s one reason why organs are a little different depending on where they were built: the organ at Cornell University, which was built according
“ Pi pe s a n d k e y b oa r d
to the documented Schnitger organ in Charlottenburg’s palace in Berlin has a more mixed style than the purely northern German organ in Örgryte, which is in fact owned by the University of Gothenburg. It’s based on the Schnitger organs in Hamburg Jacobi Church and the cathedral in Lübeck. Neither of these two original organs still exist, however.” But why build an instrument according to methods that are several hundred years old?
“That’s a good question,” Paul Peeters admits. “Traditions from the late 1800s and early 1900s dominated music instruction for a long time. But the so called HIP movement, historically informed performance practice, started in the 1960s and also became popular in the USA. People began to realize that the instrument sets limits for what can be done, for example how quickly you can play or what fingering is most suitable. It isn’t wrong to play Bach on an instrument from the 21st century. But if you want to understand how Bach himself intended his work, you have to choose an instrument similar to the ones that existed