In music, a chorale prelude or chorale setting is a short liturgical composition for organ using a chorale tune as its basis. It was a predominant style of the German Baroque era and reached its culmination in the works of J.S. Bach, who wrote 46 examples of the form in his Orgelbüchlein, along with multiple other works of the type in other collections.
Title page of Scheidt's Tabulatura Nova
The only known painting of Buxtehude (detail, Johannes Voorhout, 1674)
The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by driving pressurised air through the organ pipes selected from a keyboard. Because each pipe produces a single pitch, the pipes are provided in sets called ranks, each of which has a common timbre, volume, and construction throughout the keyboard compass. Most organs have many ranks of pipes of differing pitch, timbre, and volume that the player can employ singly or in combination through the use of controls called stops.
Pipe organ in the collegiate church of St. Michael in Neunkirchen am Brand
Hydraulis from the 1st century BC, oldest organ found to date, Museum of Dion, Greece
4th century AD "Mosaic of the Female Musicians" from a Byzantine villa in Maryamin, Syria.
9th century image of an organ, from the Utrecht Psalter.
