Visiionary Organ Music through Time

Afternoon seminar

Annette Richards and David Yearsley, moderators and presenters
Isabelle Demers, Kimberly Marshall, William Porter, presenters

Across its long history, the organ has been a vehicle for visionary music and ideas. A musical, visual, technological, wonder, the organ invites experiment, imagination, and radical daring. In this seminar Isabelle Demers, Kimberly Marshall, William Porter, Annette Richards, and David Yearsley take us from the theories of 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher to the music of contemporary absurdist composer Mauricio Kagel, from the extravagant American Wanamaker organ of the early 20th-century to the experimental, global, hyperorgan of today; how might Bach’s music accompany visions of ecological crisis? What is the relation between the “Visionary” and the “Innovative,” and what might “clarity of vision” mean in today’s organ culture?