Organists

 Numerous organists identifiable by name from the fourteenth century onward complete the picture of the era.[22]  In social status as in musical ability, the spectrum was broad.[23] At one end stood the usual cleric or educated layman, who normally played several instruments and also had to maintain the instrument himself. At the other extreme, in individual cases, stood highly qualified, specialized organists in municipal or courtly service. A few of these, such as Conrad Paumann or Paul Hofhaimer, won European renown already in their lifetimes. They placed their widely admired art in the service of a prince’s self-representation. Organ playing was a craft-based art, transmitted by practice and akin to that of the minstrels; it was pursued above all by clerics, teachers, and scribes. For chapel service, “artful organists” were preferred: men who also worked as singers or, rarely, as composers.[24]  Through them the organists’ profession grew into the “paradigmatic mediator between orality and literacy.”[25]  The written testimonies to the art of the organ thus also reflect the appropriation of late-medieval intellectual culture.[26]  None of the organists known by name before Hofhaimer left an individual profile. Even so, in mid-fifteenth-century Vienna we find a “schoolmaster Chunradus der Weispacher,” in whose estate a portative and a positive were found.[27] And with Wolfgang Chranekker, a further organist active in the Austrian region can now be identified. He wrote down the final part of the St Emmeram Codex (D-Mbs Clm 14274). In his work he may have built some kind of bridge between the artful vocal polyphony of the day and organ playing (C. Organists and Copyists).[28]

With Paul Hofhaimer, around 1500 the “monarcha organistarum” appears, a player for whose virtuosity no epithet, no praise was too lofty.[29] Apart from his appearances a soloist, he was given fellow organists to assist him in the court chapel: Benedict Senflinger, Gregor Accot, Hans Sattler, Jakob Kellergraf, and Jörg Bamheck.l[30] Hofhaimer’s significance as a teacher is attested by his many, sometimes prominent, pupils, a number of whom worked in southwestern Germany. Of these, probably only Hans Buchner stood briefly in Habsburg court service; his Fundamentum preserves Hofhaimer’s teaching. Wolfgang Grefinger, by contrast, did not serve the court. He appears in the Vienna university registers in 1509, frequented the city’s humanist circles, and served as cathedral organist at St Stephen’s. His Passau pupil Schachinger we find in Schwaz, Tyrol, from 1506 to 1508. Hofhaimer’s later Salzburg colleagues Gregor Peschin and Caspar Glanner, too, probably studied under him.[31]