About GOArt

GOArt is about to celebrate its fifteenth birthday, so stating “The New GOArt!”– attention-grabbing as it is – is really only true in the sense that we have constantly reinvented ourselves over the last decade and a half and we are about to do it again. GOArt has been chosen as one of three pilot projects in a restructuring of the web design for the entire University of Gothenburg, so the first obvious change is this new webpage. GOArt used to publish a Newsletter to communicate externally with financiers, research partners and supporters.

Alongside, we had a webpage, including more static information about publications and some information about completed projects. Both the Newsletter and the webpage were due for an update, but we also saw the need for a strategic discussion about GOArt’s external communication. The result of this discussion turned towards the webpage. The web has grown to be the most important medium for communication in our daily lives and when more and more of our readers wanted to have the newsletter e-mailed as a PDF we saw that digital media has clearly become the only method for this kind of communication.

We have also tried to find a good “voice” for the material we want to communicate. The GOArt Research Reports series is well known, and GOArt will continue to publish these reports in a traditional academic form, but these web-based GOArt Reports will land somewhere in between academic articles in the published Research Reports and the more abbreviated reports that made up the newsletter. These reports will only be found on the web, and will be more like a short paper, published electronically They will be archived here and searchable. We envisage reports from conferences, research projects, both finished and in process, a series of portraits of important organs, as well as other events and news important to the GOArt community. Welcome to GOArt Reports!

When the North German Organ Research Project started, three organ builders joined the project: Mats Arvidsson, Henk van Eeken and Munetaka Yokota. A research workshop was established, and everything was done within this structure. With GOArt’s fifth organ on its way, and several more clavichords, we are in a more mature position than we were institutionally as well in terms of how our research field has developed. Furthermore, our University has developed a more appropriate way of calculating the real cost for each of its activities, including building organs We have to adjust to these conditions, and look for new ways to meet future research building goals.

The most dramatic consequence of these changes is that the research workshop, founded temporarily within the University to build the North German Organ and continued through the next four organ projects, will be closed as an externally funded unit. This will be done in several steps, starting 31 December 2009. We have plans for continuing building research in two different ways. The first is the obvious, and that is working with commercial organ builders, among whom we see many of our former employees establishing themselves in in northern Europe. The second form will be as it is currently envisioned, as part of an organ building education on the master’s level. We have had very good discussions with the department of conservation, in the faculty of sciences, and their unit in Mariestad. Mariestad is beautifully situated at lake Vänern, North of Gothenburg. The department of conservation has recently been granted national and regional funding for a workshop focusing on handcraft, that will serve as a handcraft laboratory. The ideology fits perfectly with what has been the aim of GOArt’s organ building projects from the outset. Funding for such an organ building education has currently not yet been granted, but that is our current goal. The important material to be able to continue to further integrate research and education in this field, such as the casting benches etc., will be moved to Mariestad for this purpose.

 
The best news is that the research and administration part of GOArt will be able to move into new premises in September! We will move close to the villa GOArt occupied for the early years, at Lyckans väg 2. The new address is Viktor Rydbergsgatan 24. The district with the beautifully situated villas from the beginning of the twentieth century is strategically located close to the centre of Gothenburg and also to the Academy of Music and Drama. The villa was built 1931, the last to be built in the district. The vicinity to the Academy of Music and Drama is important with respect to the collaboration in organ and keyboard education as well as in research matters. The GOArt library, as well as the GOArt staff, will become a real asset for the students at he Academy of Music and Drama as we seek to fulfill our brief to create the first complete learning environment at the Academy of Music and Drama from undergraduate to doctoral level programs in organ performance and research and the largest organ research library in the nordic countries at the heart of this activity. We will return with an invitation to a house-warming party when we have settled into our new home.

Finally we would like to thank you all for your support and collaboration. We wish you a refreshing summer vacation!

Johan Norrback
Director