Crafting Baroque Sound: How the Making of Organ Pipes Matters Artistically

This chapter shows how the making of pipes that sound as good as their historical examples involved learning from historical treatises, practising the casting of organ metal in historical ways, and voicing newly made organ pipes in such a way that their sound character approximates that of eighteenth-century pipes. It aims to follow Munetaka Yokota, a specialist in historically informed organ building, and the workers at Hermann Eule Orgelbau in Bautzen, Germany, in their attempts to craft the sound of Hildebrandt’s pipes. The chapter focuses on the problem of judging the quality of organ pipes and their sounds. It looks at the role of materials such as alloys, wood, and cloth, as well as the use of machines and tools in manipulating these materials. The academic study of musical practices has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Musical practices and their technologies have become a research subject in science and technology studies as well as in the related field of sound studies.