The first Germans to develop the art were Conrad Paumann of Nuremberg, Paulus Hofhaimer of Vienna, and Arnold Schlick of Heidelberg, all South Germans. The circumstances surrounding the life of the first representative of German organ music, Conrad Paumann, were strangely similar to those of the first great Italian organist, Landino. Both were blind (Paumann was born blind), both were of noble family, and both mastered nearly every known instrument. Paumann (1410-1473) aroused great enthusiasm by his playing, he travelled much, and his fame spread to other countries. For many years he was organist at St. Sebald’s Church in Nuremberg, but spent his last years in Munich. He was the author of _Fundamentum Organizandi_, the oldest extant work on the art of extempore organ-playing; for ‘organizing’ at that period still meant adding a counterpoint or organum to a given subject. Paulus Hofhaimer (1459-1537), born at Radstadt, was court organist to Emperor Maximilian I at Vienna. So famous was he that he was knighted by both the Emperor and the King of Hungary; poets praised him and Lucas Cranach painted his portrait. His contemporary, the organist Luscinius, described his playing as being ‘full of angelic warmth and power ... no one has surpassed, no one has even equalled him.’ Only the important churches in the larger towns possessed organs in the fifteenth century. In the following century, however, interest in organ-playing and especially in organ-building increased greatly and organists multiplied rapidly. Among the first of them to gain eminence was another famous blind organist, Arnold Schlick, born in Bohemia about 1460 and organist to the Elector Palatine at Heidelberg. He was the author of the oldest printed German tablature book (1512); in this independent pedal parts were used throughout, a great advance over previous organ composers. In some of the compositions of Leonhard Kleber (1490-1556) there appeared the first signs of what later became known as the German school of Colorists. This school made its appearance shortly before the middle of the sixteenth century and took its name from the effort of composers to overload their compositions with ornamental rapid passages (_coloratura_). Many of Kleber’s compositions display all the stability and earnestness of the Bach period, but the habit of ‘coloring’ the parts with meaningless ornaments soon took possession of organists and for a period in the latter part of the century the misuse and abuse of the art of _coloratura_ caused German organ music to become utterly mechanical and conventional. The greatest of the colorists were Ammerbach, organist at St. Thomas’ Church, Leipzig (1560-1571), the famous Strasburg organists, Bernard Schmid (father and son), Jacob Paix (1550-1590), and Johann Woltz.