Improvisation

From 2008 until 2011, the Orgelpark Research Program included a three-year project on Improvisation. The specific sound character of each organ flourishes optimally in music that is specifically made for it - which is one of the reasons that organists never have stopped improvising. How did the art of improvisation develop through the centuries, what relevance was ascribed to it by, say, musicians such as Johann Sebastian Bach, and how to analyse improvisations? Answers to these and other questions are documented in Orgelpark Research Report #3. This Report contains dozens of music examples, functioning as ever so many "artistic arguments" in the texts.

 

The three possibilities for reading this Report can be found at the right of this page. These include: online (with audio), offline (without audio) and on papier. To receive the paper version, you will be asked to fill in a form.

 

Contents

 

Bruce Ellis Benson

In The Beginning, There Was Improvisation

 

Peter Planyavsky

Organ Improvisation in the Past Five Decades

European Improvisation History: Anton Heiller

 

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra

Bach and the Art of Improvisation

 

Sietze de Vries

The Craft of Organ Improvisation

 

Bernhard Haas

Improvisation, C.Ph.E. Bach, César Franck and Albert Simon

 

Mary Oliver

Analyzing Improvisations: The Constellation Model

 

Hans Fidom

Listening as a Musicological Tool: Real Time Analysis

 

Béatrice Piertot

Treatises about Improvisation on the Organ in France from 1900 to 2009

 

Columba McCann

Marcel Dupré

 

Gary Verkade

Teaching Free Improvisation

 

Vincent Thévenaz

A Contemporary Improvisation on a Baroque Theme and a Romantic Organ

 

Jacob Lekkerkerker

To be a Dancer at the Organ

 

Giampaolo Di Rosa

The Improvisation Process

 

Ronny Krippner

English Organ Improvisation in the 20th and 21st Centuries