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Many of us love the religious folk tunes that have been passed down through generations of oral tradition in the form of simple melody lines without accompaniment or written notation. These folk tunes are closely related to spoken language, and bring to mind the Gregorian chants of the Roman Catholic Church as they reflect the intonation and sentence structure of the language. They are thus connected with the rich poetry found in hymn lyrics, which are often pietistic and focus on heaven. It was not until the 1900s that folk tunes were authorised to be used in ecclesiastical settings. They had, from time immemorial, expressed the religious yearnings of the common man, providing a framework for an everyday life that was far from a bed of roses. The idea behind these 12 folk tune preludes has been to illustrate the greatness of this tradition, as “hymns without words”, through the multitude of nuances and playing methods that a large church organ permits. Not least, the magnificent sound of the main organ in the Oslo Cathedral has served as an inspiration to form a new alliance of folk tunes and the organ-playing tradition. The organ in the Oslo Cathedral, voiced by Jan Ryde in 1997-98, has a vocal, flexible and even human sound, with a sensitivity that can be reminiscent of folk tunes. There are still passages in the preludes that I cannot play without hearing my father’s voice. He was a sexton and cantor at Heddal Stave Church when I was growing up, and often sang these hymns when at church and as a schoolteacher. The Oslo Cathedral’s organ often evokes such associations, not because it sounds like singing, but because the sound is experienced as sharing qualities with the human voice and articulation.