Development and Dissemination

The sources for late-medieval Austrian organs are sparse. Any survey of organs, organists, organ playing, and organ music in the region must therefore draw on the wider Central European context. Apart from regional studies — particularly on the history of organ building — musicology has so far barely developed an approach focused specifically on the Habsburg territory. [1] Recent years have brought new source finds — some within the region of Austria — and fresh research approaches. Together these have substantially altered our picture of the early history of organ music, and of keyboard music as a whole. The epochal transformations in organ building and organ music between the thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth century have, however, been recognized for many centuries. Michael Praetorius could therefore rightly claim in 1619 that no art of the past had “risen as high as the art of the organ.”[2]  Alongside the church organs — to which a positive organ set up in the choir could normally also belong (E. Music in the Church Service; Fig. Maria am Gestade) — keyboard music owed its rise in the fifteenth century above all to the small organs, the portative and the regal. Within a humanistic culture of private music-making, these occupied a central position beside the stringed keyboard instruments. As quiet instruments, these small organs belonged to a different conception of art, and they probably did much to stimulate and accelerate the rapprochement between the traditional, orally transmitted keyboard music and artful composition.[3]  Smaller organs were of course also used in church, and for sacred music performed in other contexts as well (Fig. Angel Zwickenberg portative organ). In the region of Austria, as elsewhere, the impulses for spreading and developing keyboard music probably came at first above all from the monasteries.[4] Only later did the nobility and the court follow, together with the towns, though to a lesser extent than in the German southwest.[5]