This special Fokker organ concert is part of the Sweelinck Festival, which takes place between 16 and 25 October 2021 at various locations in Amsterdam in honour of the 400th anniversary of the death of the great Dutch composer who lived in the Koestraat in Amsterdam. Through concerts, a symposium and all kinds of other activities, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621) is commemorated and his significance for Dutch culture is brought to life once more.
The Fokker organ in the Kleine Zaal of the Muziekgebouw does not have 12 but 31 keys per octave, making it possible to play tones that actually lie between the keys of a piano. This enables the organist to perform microtonal music but also to imitate the old tuning from Sweelinck’s time. For the Fokker organ is in fact tuned in meantone tuning, with which Sweelinck composed and which was common in the Renaissance. Sweelinck was not only a composer, but also an organist and harpsichordist. At a young age he became the permanent organist of the Oude Kerk. The small organ on which he played also had a meantone tuning (the Vater-Müller organ was only built after 1724).
Organist Laurens de Man (1993) takes the listener in this programme on a 45-minute journey, from Sweelinck via Bach back in time to Nicola Vicentino, the founder of the 31-tone system.
The ‘new’ online archive
In addition to our new website, the Huygens-Fokker Foundation has an extensive online archive, which largely consists of the contents of the former website that had been online since 2008. Although the design of this old website is now somewhat dated, it contains a...
