During this Fokker organ concert at the Ongehoord Bruckner festival at the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, the romantic works of the renowned composer Anton Bruckner (1824–1896) are performed in meantone tuning – a feat that is only possible on the 31-tone organ. Enhanced with extra stops from the virtual 31-tone organ, this results in a fascinating experiment. During his lifetime, Bruckner was primarily celebrated as the phenomenal organist of, among other places, Sankt Florian in Linz. He was also invited abroad to perform concerts at venues including Notre Dame in Paris and the Royal Albert Hall in London. However, aside from some early works, he composed few organ pieces. Fortunately, the composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert created organ arrangements of Bruckner’s symphonies and composed a Brucknerian Adagio. In 1943, the physicist Adriaan Fokker, inspired by the 31-tone system described by Christiaan Huygens in the seventeenth century, designed a small organ with 31 tones per octave. This allows the performer to play in various tunings. The Finnish-Dutch organist Ere Lievonen knows the Fokker organ better than anyone and now brings Bruckner’s organ works the attention and tuning they deserve. Read more.
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...
