Christian Rejection
The slow and circuitous route of the organ’s return to the West is explained by early Roman church leaders’ antipathy to an instrument associated with pagan religion, public spectacle, and (at the time) less than angelic tonal qualities. Much discussion has revolved around Psalm 150, particularly verse 5 (King James Version): “Praise him with the timbrel and dance; praise him with stringed instruments and organs.” (“Organs” attempts to translate the Hebrew `ughâbh, “syrinx” or “pipe,” or the Greek orgáno.) Such references were interpreted metaphorically by early Christian writers, who felt the human voice was the appropriate means of religious expression: Clement of Alexandria (d. ca. 215), St. John Chrysostom (ca. 342-407), St. Augustine (354-430), and St. Jerome (ca. 342-420), who, when advising a woman how to raise her young daughter as a virtuous woman, suggested, “Let her be deaf to the sound of the organ.” Instrumental music risked the kind of sensual beauty that could spur one into committing every conceivable sin. More inflammatory commentators falsely associated the use of instruments with Jewish as well as pagan practices (all instruments had been banned from Jewish worship since the days of the Old Testament prophets.) In the first century CE, musicians had the choice of giving up their profession in order to become Christians; by the fourth century, they were being excommunicated outright.
The Early Cathedral Organ
The slow and circuitous route of the organ’s return to the West is explained by early Roman church leaders’ antipathy to an instrument associated with pagan religion, public spectacle, and (at the time) less than angelic tonal qualities. Much discussion has revolved around Psalm 150, particularly verse 5 (King James Version): “Praise him with the timbrel and dance; praise him with stringed instruments and organs.” (“Organs” attempts to translate the Hebrew `ughâbh, “syrinx” or “pipe,” or the Greek orgáno.) Such references were interpreted metaphorically by early Christian writers, who felt the human voice was the appropriate means of religious expression: Clement of Alexandria (d. ca. 215), St. John Chrysostom (ca. 342-407), St. Augustine (354-430), and St. Jerome (ca. 342-420), who, when advising a woman how to raise her young daughter as a virtuous woman, suggested, “Let her be deaf to the sound of the organ.” Instrumental music risked the kind of sensual beauty that could spur one into committing every conceivable sin. More inflammatory commentators falsely associated the use of instruments with Jewish as well as pagan practices (all instruments had been banned from Jewish worship since the days of the Old Testament prophets.) In the first century CE, musicians had the choice of giving up their profession in order to become Christians; by the fourth century, they were being excommunicated outright.
The Early Cathedral Organ
In European politics of the eighth century and beyond, the organ was sufficiently prestigious so that, when the Byzantine emperor Constantine V (Copronymus) sent gifts to Pepin III (the Short), king of the Franks in 757, he included an organ “with great leaden pipes” (more likely a hydraulis than a bellows organ). The instrument, apparently moved to St.-Corneille in Compiègne (Picardy), may have been requested by Pepin some years earlier. The organ was so impressive that Pepin’s son, Charlemagne, supposedly requested a similar instrument from either a Byzantine leader or the caliph of Baghdad; it arrived in 812 and was placed in a church at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen). In 826, Georgius, a Venetian cleric who may have spent time in the East, erected either a bellows organ or a hydraulis for the palace of Louis I (the Pious) at Aix-la-Chapelle－the moment of rebirth for the Western organ.
…brothers in Christian monasteries began to build organs; many of these were hydraulic with a rough and loud tone, and initially functioned as signal organs rather than as liturgical participants. They were used to teach chant to monasterial choirs. References to organs began to crop up regularly, starting with Pope John VIII’s request, to Bishop Anno of Freising (Bavaria), for an organ to be sent to Rome, along with an organist (873). References to ninth-century Continental instruments include the Benedictine abbey in Bages (Catalonia) and the cathedrals of Cologne, Rheims, and Halberstadt (Saxony, predecessor to the well-known 1361 organ).
Douglas Bush and Richard Kassel eds., “The Organ, Encyclopedia.” Routledge. 2006. p. 327.
