Abraham van den Kerckhoven

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Abraham van den Kerckhoven (* around 1618 in Mechelen ; † end of December 1701 , buried January 9, 1702 in Brussels ) was a Belgian organist and composer.

life and work

Abraham van den Kerckhoven came from a Belgian family of musicians from the 16th to 18th centuries. Other musically active members of the family were Antoine, Jean, Pierre, Philipp and Melchior van den Kerckhoven. The family relationships are still unclear. According to the older view, Abraham van den Kerckhoven himself should have been baptized on May 2, 1627 in Brussels, but today it is assumed that this baptism entry refers to a namesake and that Kerckhoven was almost a decade older.

In 1633 Abraham van den Kerckhoven became organist at the Sainte Catherine church (Sint-Katharinakerk) in Brussels. In 1647 he succeeded Johann Caspar von Kerll as court musician and organist to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria . From 1656 he was the first organist of the Royal Chapel for at least 14 years.

Kerckoven's organ works are mainly preserved in a manuscript (Ms. II 3326) in the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels . It is a handwritten collection of organ sheet music compiled by JIJ Cocquiel, organist and priest of the Sint-Vincentiuskerk in Soignies , in 1741. The manuscript, also known as the Cocquiel Manuscript, contains 365 pieces, but only a small part of them are expressly marked with Kerckoven's name. Most of them are short verses for liturgical use, but the manuscript also contains eight fantasies, a fugue and three preludes and fugues. The Cocquiel manuscript was first edited in 1933 by Joseph Watelet as the second volume of the Monumenta musicae Belgicae ; In 1982 a facsimile by Godelieve Spiessens was published. How many of the unnamed pieces in the Cocquiel manuscript originate from Kerckhoven is unclear; some pieces in the collection are by other composers ( Christian Erbach , Petrus Papen and others).

In terms of composition, Kerckhoven was based on his predecessor at the Sainte Catherine Church , Pieter Cornet , as well as Girolamo Frescobaldi , Johann Jakob Froberger and the figurative art of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck . Some pieces contain typically French register names, while the alternating free or imitative counterpoint of some preludes is reminiscent of the north German organ school .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jean Ferrard :  Kerckhoven, Abraham van den. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Second edition, personal section, volume 10 (Kemp - Lert). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 2003, ISBN 3-7618-1120-9  ( online edition , subscription required for full access)
personal data
SURNAME Kerckhoven, Abraham van den
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Belgian composer and organist
DATE OF BIRTH around 1618
PLACE OF BIRTH Mechelen
DATE OF DEATH buried January 9, 1702
Place of death Brussels