21 april 2011

The Problem of Improvisation: An Introduction to the Renewed Special Chair 'Orgelkunde' at the VU University

Using the organ to think about making music may force some interesting conceptual reappraisals regarding what making music actually is. In line with an idea from Bruce Ellis Benson, it seems worthwhile to recognize improvisation in any aspect of music-making. Yet doing so demands a reevaluation of what we then mean by the term in accordance with its enlarged extension. Not that including the perspective of organ music makes this task easier; but it does help, for example, by taking improvisation in early styles into account, which is one of the many ways organists improvise today. Introducing and integrating organ music related musicology and general musicology through a host of such interfaces is the aim of the renewed special chair 'Orgelkunde' (organ music related musicology) at the VU University. The chair is founded by the Orgelpark and will be presented officially on 24-27 May (Oratio at the VU and International Improvisation Symposium at the Orgelpark).

Hans Fidom is professor of Organ Musicology at the VU University in Amsterdam and director of the Orgelpark Research Program. The focus of both activities is on contemporary organ art. He graduated with degrees in musicology from the UvA, the VU and Groningen University (1993, cum laude). And in 2002, he was awarded his PhD with a dissertation entitled, Diversity in Unity. Here his purpose was to explore one of the major paradigm shifts in organ music history – the introduction of the 'modern' organ and the music it inspired in the late 19th century – through the lens of contemporary public debates, debates that he argues were the agents of a directed divergence from the Baroque and Classical organ cultures that came before.