Ph.D. candidate Anna Steppler gives a dissertation talk entitled "When is a machine not a machine? Michael Praetorius, the Organ, and the Possibilities of Instrumental Music"

For Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) and his contemporaries, the organ provided a meeting place for the technological, the human, and the divine. Incontrovertible proof of the inherent value of instrumental music, and the skill of its practitioners and builders, the organ provided ways for conceptualizing music, its history, and its potential for meaning. In Praetorius's lifetime, fascination for the mechanical flourished; this saw the ecclesiastical organ, wind-instrument par excellence, juxtaposed with the hydraulis, the automated water-organ beloved of humanists and found in fashionable courts across Europe. Exploring the nuanced responses of practical musicians and machinists to the organ, I show how the varied early modern attitudes towards the organ as mechanical, technological and musical, propose answers to questions of (musical) technology and the sacred, the relationship between keyboard and practitioner, and the nuanced differences between instrument and machine. 

This paper forms an extract of my PhD dissertation, "Michael Praetorius, the Organ, and the Possibilities of Instrumental Music," which argues for the organ's central importance for modes of thinking about instrumental music circulating in Lutheran courtly culture of the early seventeenth century.