Review: The Organs of J. S. Bach: A Handbook
The Organs of J. S. Bach: A Handbook , by Christoph Wolff and Markus Zepf. Translation by Lynn Edwards Butler. Introduction by Christoph Wolff. Published in cooperation with the American Bach Society. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012. xxv, 208 pp.

 J. S. Bach at His Royal Instrument: Essays on His Organ Works , by Russell Stinson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xi, 203 pp.

 Bach's Feet: The Organ Pedals in European Culture , by David Yearsley. Musical Performance and Reception. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xiv, 298 pp.

Ever since the ancient Greeks, technological innovation has been a driving force in Western civilization. Inventions such as the repeating rifle, the battleship, nuclear weapons, and drones have revolutionized relationships and interactions among peoples, nations, empires, and alliances. Notation, the printing press, the invention and improvement of instruments, electronic synthesis, the computer, sampling, and the internet have successively disrupted and revolutionized the fields of music and musicology. Among musical instruments, the organ has been especially susceptible to technological changes—from the water organs of Egypt, to the powerful mechanical-action instruments of J. S. Bach's day, to the electro-pneumatic action pipe organs of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to analog, digitized, and sampled electronic instruments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Three recent publications focused on one of the oldest topics in music scholarship—J. S. Bach as organist, organ composer, organ expert, and canonic culture-hero—offer new perspectives and insights. The Handbook by Christoph Wolff and Markus Zepf leads us into experiential engagement with Bach's instruments—a scholarly guidebook to the organological landscape. Russell Stinson's collection of essays provides new studies concerning the historical construction of Bach the Organist. And David Yearsley's Bach's Feet shows us how knowledge of Bach research of the past sixty-five years can be blended with insights derived from new ways of musicological thinking—such as compositional procedure, carnal musicology, disability studies, memory studies, politics, and others—to produce thematically based narratives which, at times, have the page-turning qualities of a Dan Brown novel.

“Historically informed performance” is a widely (though not universally) endorsed musicological aspiration, and nowhere is it more relevant than with respect to music for the organ, of which Bach's compositions comprise a substantial percentage of the repertory. Understanding how an organ work was originally created for a vast cathedral, a city church, a castle chapel, or a …