Ewald Kienle

Ewald Kienle, 2008

Ewald Kienle (born December 21, 1928 in Nussdorf near Ludwigsburg, today part of Eberdingen ) is a German inventor and entrepreneur. He developed and produced electronic church organs .

life and work

Kienle was born the son of a village blacksmith and his Sicilian wife. At the age of 15 he was from school off the aircraft manufacturer Messerschmitt ordered to there airplane to learn. After the end of the war in 1945, he worked on improving and repairing radio sets and the first television sets and finally began developing his own organs .

From 1970 Ewald Kienle in Heimerdingen (now part of the city of Ditzingen ) produced his own analog sacral organs (Kienle T-model), which in 1971 were certified by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt to have a lively sound. To this end, Ewald Kienle began to experiment with resonator tubes in order to improve the loudspeaker sound and finally set up the first analog sacral organ with resonators in 1980 in the Catholic Church of St. Rochus in Bonn-Duisdorf .

From 1980, Ewald Kienle worked on the development of digital sacred organs. In 1985, Europe's first digital church organ (model Kienle PK II) in the form of a raised hand was set up in the European Parliament in Strasbourg and inaugurated with a Bach concert.

In 1990 Ewald Kienle began researching the use of original organ pipes without a core as resonators ("pipe resonators"). Since then, they have been used, partly supplemented by resonator tubes, for the Kienle sound radiation named after him in digital organs of all kinds.

Kienle organ in the Center for Music and Culture in Georgia

From 1970 on, Ewald Kienle had acquired several patents , first in the field of analog organs. Further of his inventions led to the fact that the technically complex airflow sound excitation of organ pipes could be replaced by a more easily executed, but at the same time more frequent loudspeaker sound excitation. In addition to sound innovations, this led to a reduction in production costs to around a third of the costs of a comparable traditionally built pipe organ. In addition, since the high maintenance costs, which occur with conventional pipe organs mainly due to their susceptibility to temperature and humidity fluctuations, were eliminated, the acquisition and maintenance of an organ became affordable for smaller parishes.

Ewald Kienle has installed more than 3,000 organs worldwide in around 50 years. The instruments are in Europe as well as in South Africa, Peru and Russia. In 2010 the largest organ with the Kienle sound radiation was built in the concert hall of the newly designed Tbilisi Center in Tbilisi / Georgia.

In 2011, Ewald Kienle gave up his sole proprietorship , which was run as Ewald Kienle eK , for reasons of age. His life's work was immediately continued by the newly founded company Kienle Orgeln GmbH, based in Heimerdingen.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Test report of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt: Acoustic investigations of an electronic organ. Business no. 5.23-22105 / 71, Braunschweig, 1971.
2. ↑ Christoph Klüh: Swabian vibrations . In: Okey! Magazine for organ, keyboard and digital piano, issue No. 53, July / August 2003.
3. ↑ Patents: http://www.dpma.de/ (via DEPATISnet)
4. ↑ Hans Dieter Karras: First performance in Tbilisi . Okey! Magazine for organ, keyboard and digital piano, special edition, issue No. 103, November / December 2011.
5. ↑ Company history ( Memento of the original dated November 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , kienle-orgeln.de, accessed on March 16, 2017.