The Cambridge Companion to the Organ

The Cambridge Companion to the Organ, edited by Nicholas Thistlethwaite and Geoffrey Webber, is a standard academic reference gathering specialist chapters on the pipe organ's history, construction and repertoire, published in Cambridge University Press's well-established Companion series aimed at students and informed general readers. Its authority is the ordinary strength of a multi-author edited reference volume, each chapter written by a recognized specialist in that sub-area and subject to the series' editorial standard. Its limit is genre: as a companion volume it surveys and synthesizes existing scholarship for accessibility rather than advancing new archival research of its own, and any single chapter's claims are best weighed against that chapter's own contributor and their more detailed specialist publications where finer questions are at stake.