De invloed van kerkhistoricus Nicolaas Christiaan Kist op de muziekhistoriografie en zijn archief als venster op een orgelproject in Zoelen (1747)

Some of the earliest contributors to the historiography of music in The Netherlands were professional church historians. A publication on the history of the organ in The Netherlands (Het Kerkelijke Orgel-Gebruik, bijzonder in Nederland, 1840) by the Leiden professor of church history, Nicolaas Christiaan Kist (1793-1859), seems to have been particularly influential. Some of the common misconceptions in later studies are already encountered in his work. Examples include the conviction that the organ accompaniment in psalm singing were introduced as a result of the government’s intervention in ecclesiastical matters, Kist’s positioning of the Utrecht professor of theology Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) as a cultural barbarian and a provoking troublemaker, and the idea that Calvinism in The Netherlands was in general unfriendly with regard to the musical arts – with organ playing as the most important exception.

Such claims are historically inaccurate and they rather reflect discussions on the relationship between church and state in Kist’s own time. However, Kist’s personal archive surprisingly also contains information on the building of an organ in the small village of Zoelen in 1747. Since organological literature dates this instrument on the year 1768, the aim of this research was to scrutinize the historical reliability of the found document and to try to draw some organological conclusions from the new information. In doing so, the study offers information on musical projects in connection with the organ in the years 1766-1768.

It turns out that the church of Zoelen indeed received an organ in 1747, and that its maker was most likely Diedrich Martens from Vreden (NRW). This result does not only have implications for local music history and the associated organ builders, but most importantly, it shows that the seemingly reliable source Boekzaal der Geleerde Wereld has hitherto misled most of the organological researchers.