Silbermann Reloaded @chronohh

Coding Da Vinci Ost³ Award for»Focus Sustainability«

History of the Silbermann-Organ in Hilbersdorf

1723-24: Gottfried Silbermann and Zacharias Hildebrandt build a new organ for the church in Hilbersdorf near Freiberg in Saxony, Germany. The instrument is inaugurated on Whit Monday, May 30, 1724.

Hilbersdorf (1926) /via

1762: Map of the Kurfürstentum Saxony with towns, rivers and forrests: ChronoLink
2022: drone flight: Hilbersdorf 360°

1907:Since the congregation desired a larger organ, the organ was sold to the Museum of Music History in Cologne in 1907. /via

Interior of the church with the new organ; also a second restauration

Between 1922 and 1926: Acquisition of the Silbermann organ for the Museum of Musical Instruments in the Grassi of the city of Leipzig

4th of December, 1943: The museum was hit by a bomb in WWII – Significant damage to the organ, as the protective wall had just been removed for a filming project. /via: The wind channel, the action and stop mechanism, the pipe racks, the keyboard, and the wooden and metal pipes were lost. Only parts of the case, the bellows, the windchest, the music stand, and 32 pipes from different stops survived.; ChronoLink 1944

Fragment of an organ pipe (c) Landessammlungen Niederösterreich /via

1952/53: Reconstruction of the organ

Work on a different organ CC BY-SA Gemeentearchief Ede /via

2005: Restauration

Properties of the Organ

The Silbermann organ is well-tempered tuned to 465 Hz.
It has one manual and five stops.

Cymbel
Quint 1 1/2 Fuß – a quint above Octav; hence an important overtone to the Principal
Octav 2 Fuß – an octave above Principal
Principal 4 Fuß
Gedackt 8 Fuß

But the best part: The organ can be played here!! however, the cymbal has been replaced by a piano carillon built by Julius Heinrich Zimmermann in the 1910s.

PLay SilbermanN

Use your computer keyboard as an organ manual. Key A plays tone A. To the right, all the white and black keys follow in the arrangement of a piano keyboard.
Key D is mapped to tone C.
Key [ is the C an octave higher.
Q maps to G sharp / A flat. W maps to B.

Don’t try to memorize the mappings. Instead, memorize the pattern.

Pull a stop and play…

Orgelprospekt. Accurater Entwurff gantz neu inventirter und noch nie an das Tagesliecht gekommener Orgelkästen“ von Antonio Berger

Oktave Shift

⇧ ⇧

You don’t hear anything?

Did you pump of the volume?
Did you pull the stops?

Why does the sound come too late or sometimes not at all?

There is a slight delay when a note is first played, as the sample needs to be loaded.
The microtiming of the sound generation is incorrect in Safari. However, everything should be fine in Firefox, Brave, and Chrome.

Note, that not all stops exist for all octave shifts.

You want to control the organ with keyboard?

Use key 1 to 5 to pull the stops.
You can shift the octave with the left and right SHIFT key

You don’t have a keyboard?

Sorry. No keyboard – no organ

Demo und weitere Beispiele im ChronoTV