Santanyi demos - a musical purist criticism

(submitted by e-mail by a musicology expert, Dr. Stuart Frankel)

You write that "musical purists" will object to playing foreign repertoire on the Santayi. This is not true. I am a musical purist, with a doctorate in musical purism (well, in musicology, which is pretty much the same thing).

Speaking as a purist, I am quite comfortable with playing foreign repertoire on Spanish organs. Playing "foreign" music was a common practice in the 18th century. We don't know very much about the habits of Spanish keyboard players because modern researchers have not studied this aspect of Spanish archives, but certainly Italian keyboard music was played in Spain (via Scarlatti and Farinelli; also Spain maintained important connections with Naples, one of the great centers of European music). Similarly, Scarlatti sonatas were published in England and played there on English instruments. Bach himself played French organ music (Grigny) on Thuringian instruments. In fact, there are whole repertoires which survive only in foreign sources; for example, Buxtehude's organ works (which survive only in Scandinavian or central German sources, and mostly about a generation after they were composed).  Furthermore, it was expected that a player would adapt music to fit his particular instrument (modern harpsichordists are familiar with some of these adaptations, for example to fit different keyboard ranges). How would a Spanish organ player have played a complicated pedal part? Some clues might be found in Marpurg's afterword to his "Versuch in figurirten Chorälen sowohl für Orgel, als für das Clavichord." (In both Germany and the Iberian Peninsula, the clavichord was the standard household keyboard instrument of professional musicians.)  Marpurg writes that those who want to play his pieces (what we now call "chorale preludes") on clavichord can play the pedal part with the hands if it will fit; otherwise, they can use a third hand, presumably belonging to another person. (Baroque houses were crowded, more like modern Asian houses than modern North American or European ones.) A Spanish organist, confronted with a complicated pedal part, could also use a third hand. We can rarely say what individual composers would have personally wanted, but these kinds of adaptations were an important part of Baroque musical context and were familiar to every Baroque musician.