Andreas Werckmeister

Andreas Werckmeister (Benneckenstein, Thuringia, 1645 – Halberstadt, 1706) was a German theorist, organist and composer whose written output is an important source for our knowledge of organs, their tuning and the musical thought of seventeenth-century Germany. He belonged to a type very common at the time: the Protestant organist who served in small towns and, at the same time, wrote treatises.

Most of what is known about his life comes from a funeral oration written by Götzen. He never left a relatively small area of Thuringia, on the north-eastern slopes of the Harz mountains. His parents soon recognised his talent and sent him to an uncle, an organist in Bennungen, who taught him the organ and gave him his first general education. He then studied at the grammar schools of Nordhausen and Quedlinburg, where another uncle was cantor. In 1664 he was appointed organist at Hasselfelde; he remained there for ten years, with a brief later spell at Elbingerode. In 1675 he returned to Quedlinburg, where he obtained posts at the collegiate church of St Servatius and at the court of the abbess Anna Sophia I, and from 1677 also at St Wiperti. His last post was the organ of St Martin's in Halberstadt, which he took up in 1696.

Although he did not attend university, he was a wide-ranging reader in theology, mathematics, philosophy and music. He cited numerous German theorists and Italian authors such as Artusi, Galilei and Zarlino, and he acknowledged a particular debt to Michael Praetorius. He published six major treatises and several shorter studies, as well as a posthumous work, the Musicalische Paradoxal-Discourse. His influence was felt in the eighteenth century, when authors such as Adlung, Mattheson and Walther cited and debated his writings; Walther, in fact, travelled to Halberstadt in 1704 to visit him.

His technical importance lies above all in the tuning of keyboards. His proposals, which have been mistakenly credited with the introduction of equal temperament, made it possible to play in all twelve keys with musically acceptable results, serving as a preliminary, though incomplete, step towards that system. His Orgel-Probe also describes in detail how to examine new or restored instruments. As a thinker, he conceived of music as a speculative science linked to theology and mathematics, and as an expression of divine order. His legacy, therefore, combines a practical contribution to organ technique with a deeply religious and, in many respects, medieval view of music.