The Great Musical Machine: Origins of the Pipe Organ
Overview
The early history of European music is well entwined with the history of Christianity. At the very center of their mutual development stands the pipe organ. The organ and the music written for it reached a pinnacle of importance during the seventeenth century, but one must look to developments during the Middle Ages to understand how the organ came to be a part of the structure—literally—of the major Christian churches, and to appreciate its extraordinary mechanical complexity. The pipe organ was both the most important musical instrument and, along with the clock, the most complicated machine of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Background
The very name "organ" reveals the dual place of that instrument in the history of music and the history of technology. The term "organon" was first used by Plato (427?-347 B.C.) and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) to denote any kind of tool; only later did it come to refer specifically to the well-engineered assembly of pipes and bellows that make up the musical instrument known in English as the organ. The invention of the organ inantiquity is credited to Ctesibius, an Alexandrian engineer of the second century B.C.
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