This dissertation provides comprehensive performance perspectives for the interpretation of the published keyboard toccatas by Michelangelo Rossi (ca.1602-1656) in his collection, Toccate e Correnti d'Intavolatura d'Organo e Cimbalo (c. 1634). This document consults the following sources on keyboard practice in the early-Baroque period: Girolamo Diruta's Il Transilvano Dialogo Sopra Il Vero Modo Di Sonar Organi, & Istromenti da penna (1593); Adriano Banchieri's Conclusioni nel Suono dell'Organo (1609); Costanzo Antegnati's L'Arte Organica (1608); and the prefaces to Girolamo Frescobaldi's publications Toccate e Partite d'Intavolature di Cembalo, Libro Primo (first version 1615; second version 1615, 1616, 1628; and third version 1637), and Fiori Musicali (1635). These sources provide information on most aspects of keyboard—and specifically organ—playing in the decades leading up to, and at the time of, the initial publication of Rossi's toccatas: including the toccata as genre, Italian organs from the late-Renaissance/early-Baroque, registration, tempo, pedaling, fingering, articulation, and ornamentation. In addition to the performance perspectives, this dissertation also provides a new modern edition of the ten toccatas by Michelangelo Rossi. This edition is based on the 1657 Bologna facsimile. The goal of this edition is two-fold. First to present an accurate text of the facsimile and second to adjust certain beam-groupings, spacing on the staves, and the use of accidentals in a more modern sense.

This dissertation presents a historical and analytical study of the organ works of Anthoni van Noordt. Van Noordt's Tabulatuurboeck is one of the most important music publications in mid-seventeenth-century Netherlands. It gives unique, valuable information on organ playing of its time. The process of discrete analysis has led to the identification and exploration of many details, such as extensive use of pedal, the reliance of the composer on rhetorical principals of composition, and his integration of the Italian and German principals of ensemble techniques. The dissertation is divided into three major parts. The first part contains chapters on van Noordt's biography based on available archival documents as well as a chapter on the organ and its role in seventeenth -century Amsterdam. The second part is solely dedicated to the Tabulatuurboeck examining the physical and technical features of the publication including the style of the publication, the letter and staff notation, hand positions, and rhetorical components. Finally, the third part studies the music and its peculiar characteristics with separate chapters on the variations and fantasias.

Founded in 1879 by John L. Hinners, the Hinners Organ Company developed a number of stock models of small mechanical-action instruments that were advertised throughout the Midwest. Operating without outside salesmen, the company was one of the first to conduct all of its affairs by mail, including the financial arrangements, selection of the basic design, and custom alterations where required. Buyers first met a company representative when he arrived by train to set up the crated instrument that had been shipped ahead of him. Tracker organs with hand-operated bellows were easily repaired by local craftsmen, and were suited to an area that, for the most part, lacked electricity. In all, the company constructed nearly three thousand pipe organs during its sixty years of operation. Rapid decline of the firm began in the decade prior to 1936 during which the company sold fewer than one hundred instruments, and closed in that year when John's son Arthur found himself without sufficient financial resources to weather the lengthy depression. The studies of the original-condition Hinners organs in the Dakotas include extensive photographs and measurements, and provide an excellent cross section of the smaller instruments produced by the company. They are loud, excellently crafted, functionally attractive, tonally typical of the early twentieth-century American Romantic organ, and utilize designs and materials typical of this era. Only recently has it been acknowledged that these Hinners organs represent a "meat and potatoes" class of instrument, as it were, an honest meal without the pretense of delicate appetizers, vintage wine, and gourmet dessert. In this way the company offered churches a serviceable and respectable musical alternative to grandeur, and was able to fulfill the needs and meet the budget of a small congregation without the expense of a custom instrument.