When the Industrial Revolution eventually reached the centuries-old and virtually unchanged craft of organ building, something terrible happened. The majority of new organs created in industrially advanced European countries turned out to be basically little more than an assemblage of prefabricated parts. Organ builders had become organ assemblers. The individual attention once given to each new organ disappeared, and in time the beautiful organ cases that used to surround new instruments were to disappear as well.
In reaction to these new "assembled" instruments, an organ reform movement emerged immediately after World War I. Albert Schweitzer was one of this movement's most memorable advocates. The reform movement took hold only gradually, however, and was virtually halted during World War II. But in the 1950s the movement took off like a rocket, becoming very widespread in the 1960s and early 1970s. Its purpose was quite simple: to promote a return to the ancient craft of organ building as practiced before the introduction of electronic action and prefabricated elements. These elements had been intended to aid the organist, but the reformers felt the innovations had brought, in actual practice, a distancing of organ from player. They advocated a return to traditional mechanical action, and viewed organs of the Baroque period (broadly, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) as perfect examples of what was to be achieved.
Before long, many builders turned to making organs the old-fashioned way, that is, mostly by hand but aided by modern power tools. Since the reformers saw the Baroque period as providing the ideal tonal and mechanical approach, new organs they constructed during this period were labeled "Neo-Baroque."
Scholarship since the mid-1970s has shown that the reformers made many mistakes in their attempts to return to the Baroque. This was principally because knowledge of the Baroque period and true understanding of the construction and use of Baroque organs was very limited. Not even one Baroque organ had survived in its original state. Unlike other instruments, organs were often renovated according to the prevailing musical tastes and technical demands of later ages. Whereas early music enthusiasts who wanted to make an authentic-style viola da gamba, for instance, had original instruments upon which to model their modern prototypes, the Neo-Baroque organ makers had no such unadulterated examples.
Far from Authentic
As a result, the organs constructed by the well-meaning Neo-Baroque builders were sometimes far from being authentically in the Baroque style. Reformers knew that Baroque organs had had a very clear, transparent sound, with many stops utilizing high pitches that reinforced the overtone series. In the late Romantic era, by contrast, emphasis was placed on producing a monumental sound with many tonal gradations, but most of the higher pitches were discarded. The result was a dark, heavy, somewhat muddy sound, like ten grand pianos thundering at once, with the crown of the sound--the high overtones--missing. It was a robust torso of sound with no head, reflecting, perhaps, the Romantics' preference for cataclysmic emotion over clear-minded intellect.
Twentieth-century reformers, despising what they perceived as the excesses of the Romantic aesthetic, went to the opposite extreme in their
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