Bach and the Pedal Clavichord: An Organist’s Guide is the first serious, many-faceted study ever published of the pedal clavichord. How Joel Speerstra’s book came to be is a tale worth briefly telling and also helps explain why the instrument was so crucial to the organist’s art in past centuries and is becoming so again today.

Exactly a decade has passed since the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation accepted a proposal to allow an international group of researchers to begin a new kind of work in the musical arts in Göteborg. Their belief in supporting truly interdisciplinary research between the sciences and humanities made this network of projects possible. The proposal was for a six-year research program to lead us to a better understanding of four hundred years of what we chose to call the “organ art” of Northern Europe. In the early days of the project we struggled to find a better translation for the term “organ art.” In Swedish, Orgelkonst, and in German, Orgelkunst, is a powerful shorthand symbol for the matrix of disparate things that organs are (architecture, musical instrument, historical craft process, science experiments, sounding documents of the past) and what they generate around them (musical literature; connections and communities between artists, composers, architects, musicians, scientists, and handcraft persons; and bridges between high and low culture in many ages and contexts). So “organ art” it is, and it has been a special kind of pleasure to begin to hear that term used in wider contexts in English to define this new, broader, and more interdisciplinary view of all that fascinates us about the organ tradition.

The largest case study within this program is introduced at the end of this book: the reconstruction of a monumental Hanseatic City church organ from the mid- to late-seventeenth century. None of these organs survive in their original state, and the challenge to reconstruct not only the building methods, but the sound-world of the originals involved legions of instrument builders and dozens of scientific studies: everything from analyzing seventeenth- century metal to constructing new computer-modeling techniques in order to understand a wind system with three or four times as many giant wedge bellows as modern organs tend to have.