The planned move:

A view of our future location currently under construction. We will open the first part of the museum in Vignols in the middle of this year.

A total of three rooms will be built where our organs will be housed.

This little museum is a tribute to engineer Jean Adolphe Dereux, the inventor of the electrostatic organ in the middle of the last century. Dereux made the pipe organ available to less well-off municipalities and churches, or even for use at home.

For many years Dereux pursued his plan to develop an instrument that would be cheaper to produce and easier to set up than a conventional pipe organ, but not inferior to the traditional instrument of church music in terms of sonority...

That was more than 70 years ago...

Now we bring new life to these beautiful organs. Dereux is a brand with very special and unique characteristics. Not as well known as Hammond or Viscount, but for that reason so much more valuable ...

In the 1950s and 1960s, ir. Dereux designed organs with the sampled sound of real organ pipes, mainly French romantic church organs, built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. 

The organs have two manuals with 60 keys and a pedal with 32 keys. They contain 31 Voices of French baroque organs and are equipped with an analog reverb and tremolo.

Perhaps 7 exhibits are not yet a real museum, but it is a start. We are confident that this initiative will grow. So far we have had many helpful and positive responses, for which we are grateful and encourage us to build on this humble beginning. 

Ton Kersten, organ restorer and initiator of The Musée de l'Orgue Annahütte.

The name:

The low C of the Soubasse 32' stop (also known as Contra-Bourdon) gives the lowest note that a church-organ can reproduce. At 16 Hz it is not so much audible, but tangible. An infra-subwoofer is needed to reproduce this. We're working on it :)

Anyway, a good base to build on with octaves and harmonics. That is why we chose this phenomenon as the name for our museum.

The logo:

The core elements of the Dereux organ are the stators in the tone generator on which the waveforms of  organ pipes are recorded. A spinning rotor undergoes a change in capacitance according to these waveforms when they are under high voltage by pressing a key. A visualisation of this principle deserves a place on the front page!

The Musée de l'Orgue has found its place in the Heyevilla. The Heyevilla is located on the outskirts of the village of Annahütte and used to be the administration building of the Heyeschen brown coal works.  It is a worthy building to the heritage of Dereux to accommodate.