Electronic Baroque

A fascinating, real-time ethnography of the building of a unique musical instrument with both mechanical and electronic components.

Electronic Baroque tells the story of how a baroque pipe organ with both a mechanical and an electronic interface was built. The book also explores how, in musical practices, the new comes into being.

In 2013, the Orgelpark in Amsterdam, a concert venue dedicated to organists who want to give their instrument a new role in musical life, embarked on a project to make a unique instrument. This new baroque organ project combined principles and practices from historically informed organ building with the design and application of new computer hardware and software. Drawing on hermeneutic, pragmatist, and post-actor network theoretical approaches to history and music, Peter Peters describes and analyzes how the dual design of the organ, facing both past and present, reiterates the long history of these instruments.Preface
Introduction
1 A New Baroque Organ
2 Travelling to the Organ Worlds of Bach
3 Designing an Archaic Technology
4 Making Things Fit Together
5 Crafting the Sound of Hildebrandt’s Pipes
6 Imagining an Organ We Do Not Know
7 Playing Bach
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index“This lovely book’s light and fluid style will appeal to instrumentalists and musicians while its theoretically informed analysis of the step-by-step making of a highly technical object will fascinate researchers and students in science and technology studies (STS).”
—Antoine Hennion, Centre for the Sociology of Innovation, Mines Paris

“Peter Peters succeeds in describing an extremely complex undertaking in a way that invites everyone into the heart of the artistic process. The Utopa Baroque Organ is both a cutting-edge reconstruction of a historical sound world and a hyperorgan that is an unlimited tonal resource for contemporary composers and performers alike. Let Electronic Baroque be your guide to this fascinating new world.”
—Joel Speerstra, Academy of Music and Drama, University of GothenburgPeter F. Peters is Associate Professor and Endowed Professor in the Innovation of Classical Music at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, and Director of the Maastricht Centre for the Innovation of Classical Music (MCICM). He coedited Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies and Classical Music Futures.