ABSTRACT
The pipe organ's association with ecclesiastical music bears witness to a longstanding relationship, the origins of which are only imperfectly understood. However much an accident of history that association might be, the organ has been inexorably linked to liturgical use for a sizeable part of Christian history. 1 Extra-liturgical composition, one may dare posit, is the exception rather than the rule through the centuries, with the concert hall instrument emerging as a viable venue for secular organ music only in the later nineteenth century. The celebrated organs at Birmingham Town Hall, Royal Albert Hall, and Boston Music Hall, all originating in the 1840s through the 1870s, are exceptional because of their secular application, well removed from the normative liturgical use. Even so, not until the advent of the twentieth century did the secular organ foster a legitimate compositional tradition in the organ works of Dupré, Hindemith, Karg-Elert, and others. Further, Robert Hope-Jones developed technology which promoted the organ's use in vaudevillian venues. The twentieth century, then, witnessed the evolution of the organ, both as machine and musical instrument, in directions not experienced in previous centuries. The organ was able to break the sometimes confining strictures of the nave to find its own voice in music written solely to exploit its compositional and coloristic potential. But this multiplicity of timbral possibilities enjoyed by twentieth-century composers perhaps obfuscated the fact that the organ remained an instrument primarily for liturgical use, inspiring new music from composers of all aptitudes and motivations.
