When you think of a piano, you think of it closed – a big black box. Sits in the corner. Its colour is only revealed when you uncover the keyboard, and the contrast of the white and black keys is

Master Organ builder Wolfgang Rehn, (who, incidentally, happens to be my very own brother) formerly director of organ restoration at Kuhn Organ Builders, of Männedorf, Switzerland (www. orgelbau.ch) had started his career as a designer and builder of new organs.

The ancients described the sound of the Aeolian harp as “music played without human hands.” As such, Romantic poets considered the instrument a source of natural and divine inspiration. Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes in his The Eolian Harp, of 1795:

Some musical instruments, once constructed, no longer need additional human intervention to become musically active. One such instrument is the spectacular Blackpool High Tide Organ. Designed by Liam Curtin and John Gooding in 2002, the musical sculpture, described as “a

All art, according to Walter Pater’s famous words “constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” Since architecture and music are based on rhythm, proportion and harmony, they do share a clear cultural lineage. The search for the visual equivalent of

Liszt : Prélude and Fugue on the Name of B.A.C.H Schumann : Six Fugues B-A-C-H, op. 60 During the Classical period of the 18th century, organ music was seldom written, since most composers started to write for the newly invented

The Reformation and Counterreformation of the 16th and 17th centuries had a decisive impact not only on the architecture of the time, moving from the harmony and balance of the Renaissance to the painted heavens, extreme ornamentation and disturbance captured

On my recent European lecture tour, I was fortunate to hear several concerts in magnificent Baroque churches on Baroque organs, including one in the church of the former Cistercian monastery of St. Urban, Switzerland and one in the St. Francis