Abraham van den Kerckhoven

The van den Kerckhoven family, which was active in Brussels as early as the late 16th century, included many distinguished artists, singers, and organists.

The latter, at any rate, died around Christmas 1701, and was buried on 9 January 1702; the records of the funeral service only refer to him as the church's organist.

Most of his works were found in 1905 in a hand-written volume of organ pieces dated 1741 and compiled by Jacobus Ignatius Josephus Cocquiel, organist and priest of the Saint Vincentius Church in Soignies.

Van den Kerckhoven's surviving oeuvre consists mostly of organ pieces: fantasies, fugues, preludes, mass settings and other works.

Sectional preludes with alternating free and imitative counterpoint, harmonically rich and expansive, are reminiscent of the northern German organ tradition.