Italian organ music course

July 26–September 27, 2003

The Biella festival was established to promote the heritage of historic organs in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy.

The sights and sounds of Italy offer more inspiration than any score or treatise—they provide clues about the spirit of the music, where words and musical notation fall miserably short

What if I told you that there is surviving Italian organ music as splendid as Giovanni Gabrieli’s In Ecclesiis and as ethereal as Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere? A few months ago, I would not have believed it either. In fact, I was under the impression that compared to Italy’s glorious tradition of ensemble music, its organ music was of lesser importance, and its historical organs were pretty but small.

Tradition and Development

A concert by Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini and Gustav Leonhardt at the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, held on October 27, 2000, provided the inspiration for writing an article on the historical Italian organ, its tradition and development. My goal is to give a panoramic view of the subject, and anyone knows that when looking at a panoramic view much of the detail is lost. Still, such an attempt is worth carrying out because some general guidelines can in any case be drawn. To do so, it is necessary to go back a number of centuries and try to understand the original role of the organ in the musical world of Italian churches.

In Israel and Palestine, November 5–28