Pipe organs that are tuned in meantone temperament are very rare in North America. They are listed here, by type of temperament and sorted by date of construction. North America is defined here as Canada, the United States of America and Mexico. All instruments listed are playable but unplayable instruments may be added with a note.
In music, there are two common meanings for tuning:
Meantone temperaments are musical temperaments; that is, a variety of tuning systems constructed, similarly to Pythagorean tuning, as a sequence of equal fifths, both rising and descending, scaled to remain within the same octave. But rather than using perfect fifths, consisting of frequency ratios of value , these are tempered by a suitable factor that narrows them to ratios that are slightly less than , in order to bring the major or minor thirds closer to the just intonation ratio of or , respectively. A regular temperament is one in which all the fifths are chosen to be of the same size.
Well temperament is a type of tempered tuning described in 20th-century music theory. The term is modeled on the German word wohltemperiert. This word also appears in the title of J. S. Bach's famous composition "Das wohltemperierte Klavier", The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Ernest Martin Skinner was an American pipe organ builder. His electro-pneumatic switching systems advanced the technology of organ building in the first part of the 20th century.
Knox College is a postgraduate theological college of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in 1844 as part of a schism movement in the Church of Scotland following the Disruption of 1843. Knox is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in Canada and confers doctoral degrees as a member school of the Toronto School of Theology.
John Burlin Brombaugh is an American pipe organ builder known for his historically oriented tracker action pipe organs.
The archicembalo was a musical instrument described by Nicola Vicentino in 1555. This was a harpsichord built with many extra keys and strings, enabling experimentation in microtonality and just intonation.
12 equal temperament (12-ET) is the musical system that divides the octave into 12 parts, all of which are equally tempered on a logarithmic scale, with a ratio equal to the 12th root of 2. That resulting smallest interval, 1⁄12 the width of an octave, is called a semitone or half step.
Francisco de Salinas was a Spanish music theorist and organist, noted as among the first to describe meantone temperament in mathematically precise terms, and one of the first to describe, in effect, 19 equal temperament. In his De musica libri septem of 1577 he discusses 1/3-, 1/4- and 2/7-comma meantone tunings. Of 1/3-comma meantone, which is essentially identical to the meantone of 19-et, he remarks that it is "languid" but not "offensive to the ear", and he notes that a keyboard of 19 tones to the octave suffices to give a circulating version of meantone.
David Stephen Boe was an American organist and head of the organ department of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he taught from 1962 to 2008. He was most notable for his work as a pedagogue, having trained a large number of organists during his time at the conservatory.
Pasi Organ Builders, based in Roy, WA, manufactures mechanical action organs and restores historic instruments. Martin Pasi received his first formal experience in organ building during a four-year apprenticeship with the Rieger Company in his native Austria. After working in Austria and in the United States, Pasi set up his own studio, Pasi Organ Builders, in 1990 in a former school building in Roy, Wash.
Duke University Chapel is a chapel located at the center of the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, United States. It is an ecumenical Christian or all-faith chapel and the center of religion at Duke, and has connections to the United Methodist Church. Finished in 1935, the chapel seats about 1,800 people and stands 210 feet tall, making it one of the tallest buildings in Durham County. It is built in the Collegiate Gothic style, characterized by its large stones, pointed arches, and ribbed vaults. It has a 50-bell carillon and three pipe organs, one with 5,033 pipes and another with 6,900 pipes.
In musical tuning, a temperament is a tuning system that slightly compromises the pure intervals of just intonation to meet other requirements. Most modern Western musical instruments are tuned in the equal temperament system. Tempering is the process of altering the size of an interval by making it narrower or wider than pure. "Any plan that describes the adjustments to the sizes of some or all of the twelve fifth intervals in the circle of fifths so that they accommodate pure octaves and produce certain sizes of major thirds is called a temperament." Temperament is especially important for keyboard instruments, which typically allow a player to play only the pitches assigned to the various keys, and lack any way to alter pitch of a note in performance. Historically, the use of just intonation, Pythagorean tuning and meantone temperament meant that such instruments could sound "in tune" in one key, or some keys, but would then have more dissonance in other keys.
Paul Fritts is an American organ builder based in Tacoma, Washington, who, following historical models, has created over thirty mechanical action instruments that have contributed to the revival of historically informed organ music. The Murdy organ at Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Notre Dame, Indiana is his largest Fritts instrument to date, with four manuals (keyboards) and 70 stops. Other recent Fritts instruments of note are located at the University of Notre Dame, Princeton Theological Seminary, Hillsdale College, and Pacific Lutheran University. The organ at PLU was the largest Fritts organ built before the organ in Columbus.
The harmonic seventh interval, also known as the septimal minor seventh, or subminor seventh, is one with an exact 7:4 ratio (about 969 cents). This is somewhat narrower than and is, "particularly sweet", "sweeter in quality" than an "ordinary" just minor seventh, which has an intonation ratio of 9:5 (about 1018 cents).
The North German baroque organ in Örgryte Nya Kyrka is a pipe organ in Gothenburg. It was built within a research project at GOArt, University of Gothenburg and dedicated on August 12, 2000. The goal of the project was to recreate the construction techniques and design philosophies of 17th-century German organbuilder Arp Schnitger. Even though the instrument was built in the style of this single builder it was not modeled after a single instrument. No single model could be used since no large Schnitger organ has been preserved in original condition. The construction of the organ was carried out by an international team of organ builders. Henk van Eeken was responsible for the design and the technical drawings, Munetaka Yokota for the pipe work and Mats Arvidsson oversaw the building process. The instrument contains almost 4000 pipes and is the largest existing organ tuned in quarter-comma meantone.
Georg Andreas Sorge was an organist, composer, and, most notably, theorist. His references to Johann Sebastian Bach show that they were friends, and he composed three fugues for organ on the name BACH. He joined Lorenz Christoph Mizler's Corresponding Society of Musical Sciences in 1747, just a month after Bach himself.
Dirk Andries Flentrop was a Dutch organ builder. He built or restored many major organs in the United States and in Europe. He was noted for his 1977 restoration of two organs from the 17th and 18th centuries in the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral.
Richards, Fowkes & Co. is an American organ-builder. They make historical-style mechanical-action pipe organs. The firm is located in rural Ooltewah, Tennessee, just outside Chattanooga and was founded in 1988 by Bruce Fowkes and Ralph Richards.
Charles Brenton Fisk was an American pipe organ builder who was one of the first to reintroduce mechanical tracker actions in modern organ building over electro-pneumatic actions.