Since the beginning of time, German music and craftsmanship have shaped its musical instruments as well as its musical landscape. Organ craftsmanship is closely related to the music of the country since each instrument is crafted specifically for the architectural space in which it will be played.
In Germany, there is an abundance of historic organs. Just walk into the door of any village church or city cathedral and you'll probably find an organ in beautiful casework. In Saxony, a province in southeast Germany, no less than 31 instruments by Gottfried Silbermann are found, most of them in excellent condition.
Once organ building reached the point of creating instruments whose stops could be selected individually for designing a specification, there were first varieties based on different countries and regions such as the Baroque Organ Building in Southern Germany.
Through time, craftspeople, composers, and musicians have developed skills and knowledge that have been specialized and mostly informally transmitted. These skills and knowledge have been significant markers of group identity. Organist music is transcultural by its very nature, fostering interreligious understanding. Although mostly associated with church services and concerts today, it is also performed during important community events.
The element is transmitted through direct teacher-pupil experience, which is complemented by training in vocational schools and universities. In Germany, there are hundreds of medium-sized craftspeople workshops guaranteeing its viability and transmission, as well as some larger family-owned workshops. Organ construction workshops offer both practical and theoretical training to apprentices, and efforts to protect the element involve teaching at universities and music academies, conferences, and media presentations.
A large number of large-scale works require considerable pedal skills, and the majority of these works benefit from larger, more versatile instruments. The quality of German organs improved immensely during the 17th and early 18th centuries. Many of the instruments would have more than one manual, a pedalboard, and a variety of stops.
In Germany, over 400 organ building companies with about 2,800 employees, 180 apprentices, and 3500 full-time and tens of thousands of honorary organists, are involved in the craft and art of organ building. There are over 50,000 organs in use in Germany. Due to this, virtually every European country had its own ideal of how an organ should sound, and a number of pioneering schools developed particularly in England, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands.