It has 9,999 pipes, it’s 155 years old and 21m high. You can see it, but not always hear it, at every single London prom. I’m talking of course about the Willis organ in the Royal Albert Hall, which takes centre stage this weekend on Sunday morning’s recital by French organist Olivier Latry.

With his mostly Bach programme, Latry’s recital represents the core of the organ’s repertoire, music that has been heard in cathedrals and on concert hall organs for centuries. It will be magnificent in the building-shaking flesh on Sunday morning, but my assurances might not be enough to convince non-organ fans that they should forgo a lazy Sunday morning and head to South Kensington.

There are many organ-sceptics among us – and there’s no judgment here! The world of organists can feel like a cloistered domain of inaccessible lofts, mysterious machinery and liturgical codification that resists innovation and audience connection. That’s changing for this generation, thanks to such players as Latry and to the globe-trotting advocacy of Anna Lapwood, and a generation of experimental musicians (of which more later) who are using the pipe organ as their medium of discovery and wonder.

The organ is a miraculous instrument with a millennia-long history – there were water-organs in ancient Greece, an ancestor of such behemoths as the seven-storey high and 28,762 pipes of the instrument in Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia – the world’s largest working organ.

Pipe organs can be ear-shatteringly loud but they are also capable of the greatest sonic variety. Buildings like the Royal Albert Hall were designed around their organs: the architecture was built to be their resonating chambers. Organs can sustain pitches far beyond the limits of human breaths or bowing arms; they can mimic and synthesise the sounds of the musical natural world, from abyssal rumbles that feel like glaciers calving, producing frequencies that are so low they are felt as vibration rather than heard, to the heights of birdsong and glittering sonic filigree.

In Halberstadt in Germany, John Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible) is still near the beginning of a performance that’s planned to last 639 years: it began in 2001 and is scheduled to finish in 2640, with another note change coming up on 5 August this year. Jonny Greenwood’s X Years of Reverb (where X = the number of years that an organ or performance space has been extant) is a mere eight hours, made for two organists at a single instrument, a piece written, he says, “to agitate and reanimate all the music, voices and sounds that have ever filled the air/soaked into the walls of the space where the music is played. To coax them out of the fabric of the building, so they can be distilled and concentrated into just eight hours”. James McVinnie and Eliza McCarthy next play Greenwood’s piece at Manchester Cathedral in January, celebrating that instrument’s 605 years of reverb.

And there are many composer-organists today who are pushing the experimental bounds of the instrument. Kali Malone’s obsession with it began when she was a pipe-organ tuner. The American musician has made albums that reclaim older tunings and still more ancient conceptions of cycles of musical time and turn them into breathtaking immersions of musical being.

Kali has been inspired by Ellen Arkbro, another Sweden-based pioneer who uses the organ as a portal to explore arcane and elemental musical regions; while Anna von Hausswolff has made the organ the foundation of a musical language that stretches from avant-pop to experimentalism.

One more example of today’s pipe-organ pioneers for you: Claire M Singer, whose albums and compositions, which are often titled after Scottish landscapes, places, and histories, are organ-scapes of slow drones and radiant horizons. Singer makes musical time move as an ecstatic, infinite moment, releasing “all the music and sounds that have ever filled the air”, as Greenwood puts it – but not only, you feel, in the buildings that accommodate these instruments, but across entire mountain ranges and cosmoses.

The organ can take you to wondrous musical places. Give it a try: start with Latry as your gateway drug. He’ll be delighted.

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In Germany, the pianist Igor Levit has teamed up with rapper Danger Dan on anti-fascist single Keine Angst (“No Fear”). Their scheduled performance on ZDF’s satirical news TV show Die Anstalt was cancelled at the last minute earlier this week. The broadcast instead featured a minute-long shot of an empty piano and mic stand [from 47 minutes in] at the point where the song should have been performed.

The hosts of Die Anstalt were just as sidelined by the decision as Danger Dan and Igor Levit themselves, and they appear to explain how the broadcast silence wasn’t a “technical problem, but a political one”. The German public broadcaster says that Keine Angst’s lyrics went against programme guidelines; and the hosts duly explain the arguments, but “we are in the ZDF, but against the ZDF”, they say; they tried to have Levit and Danger Dan reinstated, but lost; and they go on to discuss – and to read out – the controversial lyrics, putting them in the context of other protest songs that are not censored, and explaining that the plan had been to present the performance and then discuss its urgent provocations with Levit and Danger Dan afterwards.

The words of Keine Angst (approximate English translation) are, in part, a practical list of instructions about how to organise anti-fascist protests and – most controversially for the broadcaster – the song ends by expressing sympathy for left-wing activists convicted for violent actions against the far right. Levit and Danger Dan organised their own concert and livestream last night, Die Keine Angstalt, and the single has racked up a million views and counting on YouTube and Spotify.

Levit’s collaboration with Danger Dan is just the latest example of his activism and political and musical thinking, in which he refuses to separate music – from Beethoven, Shostakovich and Frederic Rzewski (his variations on the Chilean protest song, The People United Will Never Be Defeated) from its political contexts, and the role it has always played in movements for social change. In Germany, the debate about censorship, and about how culturally and politically to combat the rise of the right-wing, goes on.

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This week Tom has been listening to: Nicholas Collon’s debut album with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra as their chief conductor. It came out in 2022, and it starts with Sibelius’s seventh symphony. That’s as bold a statement as you could make, offering a new interpretation of one of the Finn’s finest pieces. Collon doesn’t do it by deliberate iconoclasm: he finds his own depths in the soundworld: the string polyphony near the start of the symphony, like Sibelius rewriting Palestrina, has a quality of time-suspending strangeness that’s breathtaking.