The political landscape was hardly the only thing on Straube's mind. Neither he nor his audiences had made peace with his abdication from organ playing. Despite the occasional flare-ups of false modesty and self-doubt, Straube was hypersensitive to the fact that he had stood for decades at the cutting edge of performance. Accordingly, when in 1921 Gurlitt engaged Oskar Walcker to build an organ based on a stoplist from Praetorius's 1619 Syntagma musicum, Straube's experimental spirit moved him to play the dedicatory recital at the University of Freiburg on December 4. In July 1922, on the heels of having renegotiated his professional situation in Leipzig, he returned to the University for a series of three recitals featuring the alte Meister, Titelouze and Boyvin to Sweelinck and Buxtehude. The Freiburg experiment would become a touchstone for the historicizing Orgelbewegung.

From Gurlitt's musicology department he proceeded across town to another, very different center of musical progress, the studios of the Welte firm, where he recorded a number of Bach's organ works on August 14. Having made no recordings of any kind until then, he was quick to offer a ringing endorsement. “Transience and time have been conquered by means of technology,” he declared, “and the moment of a spiritual experience has been captured for eternity.” That was far from his stance on the erosive effects of technology that he would direct at Ramin some six years later (“the world gets smaller, not larger”). Still, Straube's parallel associations with the “Praetorius organ” and Welte bespoke the same innate curiosity that had moved him to extract the expressive possibilities of Sauer's organs in decades past. Now, four years into his tenure as Thomaskantor, his presence as a soloist might have been marginal, but it was still a factor. In 1924 Straube remarked to Julius Levin that “back then, when I was really the top dog in organ playing, I was regarded just as problematically as I am now in my conducting”—an observation that betrayed a subversive spark of pride at having played the iconoclast. With the 1922 Welte rolls, he presumably intended to rescue something of his “problematic” artistry for the benefit of future generations.