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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents ethnographic fieldwork on the design and building of a new and hybrid baroque pipe organ at the Orgelpark in Amsterdam. It follows the organ builders in their attempt to turn the organ sound from the time of Bach into a starting point for new music in the era of digital performance.

Paper long abstract:

Of all musical instruments, the pipe organ has the longest history of innovation. Organ builders always incorporated new practices in music making, as well as new technologies. Organs are aesthetic and technological mirrors of their time. Recently, scholars from science and technology studies and sound studies have focused on innovations in musical technologies. Drawing on this work, the paper focuses on how new knowledge, techniques and craftsmanship are developed in the case of building a new baroque organ at the Orgelpark, a concert venue in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I present ethnographic fieldwork on the design and building of this organ that can be used for contemporary and historically informed ways of making music by providing both mechanical and digital access access to baroque sound material. The Amsterdam project dovetails with the international trend of research organs. These instruments of knowledge create experimental situations: they can be 'read' and queried with regard to a range of questions. In my ethnography of the Amsterdam baroque organ project, I hope to contribute to an exchange of insights between fields such as science and technology studies, sound studies, and artistic research. In the emerging field of artistic research, it has been argued that works of art not only have an aesthetic value, but also can be presented as knowledge claims. This paper investigates how artistic knowledge claims are constructed through creating material assemblages, of which the hybrid baroque organ is an example.