Anglo-america

In the North American colonies organs were erected only in a small number of church buildings, initially mainly in Lutheran, Herrnhuter and Hussite religious communities ("Moravian Brothers"), which had already cultivated organ music in their liturgies in Europe. Their settlements were often not very large, but their inhabitants often arrived not as individual emigrants, but as a closed group, and so the construction of a church organ not only formed a symbol of the old traditions of the homeland, but also as evidence of the prosperity of the new communities. However, their religious and social homogeneity often led to a long-term stagnation in the population and economic power, which helped to preserve the church buildings and organs of the founding phase of such congregations for a long time.

These were mostly relatively small instruments, since in those times the churches in which they stood were also not very large; both these and the organs often had something provisional about them, and so the number of preserved monuments of that time is very small.

The North American organ builders in the 18th century were members of the mentioned congregations in the American Eastern States, but especially in Pennsylvania. The first well-known organ builders, such as Johann Gottlob Clemm, David Tannenberg and Johann Philipp Bachmann, also came from Saxony and Thuringia, thus early American organs also show the influences of Central German models, but already by the time of the War of Independence and afterwards the English style influence became more prominent, which is shown by the reduction of compound stops or the enlarged manual compasses.

 
 
 

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