Recent Organ Design Innovations and the 21st-century - Stichting ...

have continued the tradition of the Teyler’s Museum performances but have also incorporated parts of
Fokker’s multicultural vision and pursued avenues of performance unimagined by Fokker at the time of
the organ’s invention. For example, one concert in March, 2011, featured the organ alongside a
Balinese Gamelan. According to Germanus, the thirty-one-tone equal temperament allows the division
of the fifth into three in a manner similar to both the pelog and slendro scales of the Gamelan. 11 Thus,
in contrast to the collision of cultures and temperaments evident in Richard Felciano’s seminal 1977
organ-gamelan composition, In Celebration of Golden Rain, the organ is featured more at home among
an ensemble foreign to conventional Western tuning systems. In 2010 jazz pianist Guus Janssen
improvised on the organ, experimenting with microtonality in the jazz idiom, whereas in 2009 a program
titled “Pimp My Organ” started an annual tradition of inviting composers to play the instrument directly
from a computer, achieving sounds from the organ scarcely dreamed of before, such as ultra-fast
glissandi and walls of sound similar to the filtering techniques of electronic synthesized composition. 12
The Fokker organ, particularly in its new home in Amsterdam, has fulfilled a niche left wanting in
the rest of the organ world. The fixed twelve-note tuning of traditional pipe organs has precluded their
use in the microtonal music of mid-20th century composers. However, while the Fokker organ creates a
role for the instrument in this body of repertoire, the concept has never caught on for a variety of
reasons. Innovative as it is, and successful as it may be among the Amsterdam arts community, it is hard
to predict what the instrument’s future will be among the wider organ community. Since its creation
sixty years ago, no other thirty-one-tone organs have been built. As a consequence, the impressive
body of repertoire written for the Fokker organ remains relatively unknown and may forever be
regarded as novelties of history unless other thirty-one-tone organs are built. Due to extreme tuning
difficulties and unsuitability for the vast majority of organ repertoire, I do not see much promise for the
11 “Concerts,” Huygens-Fokker Foundation Centre for Microtonal Research, accessed March 26, 2011,
http://www.huygens-fokker.org/activities/concerts/fokkerorganconcerts.html.
12 Ibid.
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