BIOS Reporter – Volume 20, No.2 – April 1996

As we contemplate the year 2000, it is an instructive and perhaps cautionary exercise to try to place oneself in the position of organists and organ-builders of the 1890s and to try to imagine their thoughts and expectations as the year 1900 drew closer. In particular, one wonders what sort of view they took of the instruments of one hundred years or so before their own times, the organs of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. It is probably fair to say that, on the whole, builders and players of 1896 had little time for such instruments, regarding them as hopelessly antiquated, catering for a repertoire that was obscure and outmoded, and quite useless for the performance of modem works…