Crafting the Sound of Hildebrandt’s Organ Pipes

Colloquium Musicology
Dr. Peter Peters, Maastricht University

Thursday 24 May 2018, 15:30 - 17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

As ‘mirrors of their time’ (Snyder, 2000), pipe organs have always reflected the artisanal knowledge and skills of their makers. Given their complexity as technological artefacts that are endowed with artistic qualities, these musical instruments offer a valuable contribution to an epistemic history of art that focuses on the travelling of facts and insights through technologies and materials. Since the 1990s, replicating instruments from the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century has opened new ways of studying knowledge practices that revolve around historical organs. The actual building of these replica’s not only required a close reading and interpretation of sources, both archival and material, but also a relearning of historical organ building skills. In my presentation, I will present ethnographic fieldwork on the design and building of a new baroque organ at the Orgelpark, a concert venue in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This recently inaugurated instrument takes the sound of historical Hildebrandt organs as a reference, and provides access to this baroque sound material through both a mechanical action and a digital console. Drawing on the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold, I focus on the way the pipes for the new organ were crafted to trace the relations between knowledge, skills and aesthetics.

Dr. Peter Peters is assistant professor at the department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University. He has published on music, time, and travel in technological cultures. His current research is concerned with (1) the production of knowledge in artistic practices, and (2) the innovation of musical cultures. In the past five years, followed the design and construction of a new baroque organ at the concert venue the Orgelpark in Amsterdam. He recently acquired a NWO Smart Culture grant to study and experiment with audience participation in symphonic music concerts, in collaboration with Zuyd University (Maastricht Conservatory and research centre Art, Autonomy and the Public Sphere) and the South Netherlands Philharmonic.

Chiasmus and Reversal in the Works of Henry Purcell

Presentation Musicology

Dr. Alon Schab, University of Haifa

Monday 23 April 2018, 15:30 - 17:00

Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 1.01

The concept of temporal reversal seems to have occupied English composers throughout the seventeenth century. In some cases reversal is applied to general structural elements (like scoring and musical form, creating overarching structures that somewhat resemble later 'arch' forms). In other cases, however, as in Purcell's trio sonatas, reversal permeates the very foundation of contrapuntal technique. Thus, the allocation of imitative material to the various parts, as well as the disposition of imitative material along time, are directly dictated by a small number of palindrome-like patterns. In my lecture I will analyse some of Purcell's fugue movements, and discuss the various ways in which identifying temporal reversal challenges our understanding of Purcell's rhetoric, his compositional process, and the identity of those who influenced his technique.

Dr. Alon Schab is a musicologist, a composer and an early music performer. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in Trinity College Dublin on the subject of 'Compositional Technique in Purcell’s Early Instrumental Works'. Since 2012 he is a faculty member in the Department of Music at the University of Haifa. He is a committee member of the Purcell Society, and the secretary of the Israeli Musicological Society. His forthcoming book The Sonatas of Henry Purcell: Rhetoric and Reversal will be published (University of Rochester Press) in June. His recent rediscovery of the 1832 ‘Israeliten’ manuscript (together with his research partner David Rees), brought to light the earliest known source of Schubert’s Psalm 92 D.953.