In Europe and America alike, nineteenth-century French organ music continues to attract performers and devotees. Scholars and critics are examining, often in innovative ways and with reference to previously uptapped sources, the organ music of Cesar Franck and other distinguished composers - Boely, Guilmant, Widor - and are exploring the impact upon this repertoire of the organ-building achievements of Aristide Cavaille-Coll.

This volume contains contributions by many of the most prominent scholars and performer-scholars currently dealing with this fascinating repertoire, including the noted French organists Daniel Roth and Marie-Louise Jaquet-Langlais. The essays examine selected parts of this varied repertoire through stylistic analysis, the study of compositional process, and the exploration of how ideas about organ technique and performance-practice traditions developed and became codified.

New consideration is also given to the political and cultural contexts within which French organist-composers worked. This volume of scholarly and readable essays, nearly all of them previously unpublished or unavailable in English translation, provides convincing evidence that the field of nineteenth-century French organ music has now emerged as an important arena of musical and cultural studies.