Very interesting. I am not convinced "modern" scholarship is any more accurate than what was handed down to performers from a long line of teachers. Those teachers representing a line that goes all the way back to the original composers. It is sometimes difficult to accept the theories of a "modern" scholar who wasn't there and never heard the composers - as none of us did. Some of that scholarship can be based on the thinnest of speculations.

Back in the day, many of those Kraft recordings were available for little more than a song. I know I have some but am not even sure what lurks in my collection.

I am leery of comparisons using Fox as an example. A great organist, no doubt, but definitely given to extremes. One can find some romanticism in Bach and others of his time and some of that music can be quite lyrical. An extreme that did appear with those "reformers" was to almost reduce that music to a lifeless, sterile, nearly mathematical formula. That would have been foreign to the composers. I am still waiting to hear from someone who actually heard Bach although I realize that is impossible. What little we do know from his contemporaries doesn't always jive with what some maintain as truth today.

Pierre Cochereau had his admirers and detractors. I never cared much for his tampering with the ND organ. Listen to earlier recordings and it is easy to conclude it isn't the same instrument Vierne played.

There could be some merit to criticisms of current organists playing some early works entirely too fast. I can't quote the article these days, but I remember reading comments by one of Bach's sons on his father's slow and majestic organ playing. You would never know that based on some contemporary organists racing through those works. That same son indicated his father's harpsichord playing was quite lively. All the old organs were not masterpieces of design with some being quite clunky and unresponsive.

"Fast" and "slow" are relative terms especially from the days when no devices existed to measure speed, as in pre-metronome days. Taking the acoustics of the building into account is equally important. I hear many pieces played in acoustically dead American churches with little accommodation given for the building. With some of the earlier music, clarity might be more important than speed.

Timing is much more precise with the electronic gadgets available. I remember those old pendulum metronomes that would get slower as the spring wound down. I tend to work on the principle that if it sounds too fast, it probably is.

That really is before my time.

That really is before my time.

That makes you younger than some of my choir members--to say nothing of the Pierogi Babcie--you are but a mere youth!

...sound differently on the same...

Indeed, I have been told by organ builders that the tone and speach on some ancient European instruments as we hear them today is influenced by something so innocent as the build up of dust on their languids and mouths.