VIRTUAL ITALIAN ORGANS
by Andrea Bonzi
"...PORNPHONE!". So, with this term born of the pungent and polemical sarcasm that was proper to him, an organologist of the caliber of Oscar Mischiati defined electronic instruments by contrasting them with the pipe organ. And, like any expression that stops - with an almost journalistic method - at the immediacy of a strongly evocative image with a certain emotional impact, the term is now "settled" becoming something that resembles what the old Enlightenment of the eighteenth century (à la Voltaire) defined "ipse dixit".
Thus, due to a sort of conceptual "inertia", in the very first days of 2021 the use of a Hauptwerk system in the performance of the prestigious New Year's Concert at the La Fenice theater in Venice caused discordant reactions - sometimes with expressions of vehement indignation: let's take a cue from this episode to express some considerations on this thorny (in Italy...) subject.
We believe that any organist with a minimum of experience has had to deal, sooner or later, with what is generically called "electronic organ": usually considered a sort of evil necessary for home study and ill-tolerated in ecclesiastical use. Before proceeding further we allow ourselves a short digression to try to distance ourselves from all that baggage of "already known" as inevitable as it is deleterious if it becomes a preconception. A preconception that precludes open-mindedness towards a reality that can also turn out to be very different from what you think you know.
So let's take a step back and take the issue further.
The history of electronic music and related instruments, although it spans only a little over a century, is already quite vast and this is not the place to retrace it in detail. But let's fix at least one fact: both in pop music and in "cultured" music, the twentieth century has never disdained the application of electricity, electronics and computer technology to music - as a function of "original" instruments and sounds which, however, were born out of necessity, little or a lot, from the emulation of traditional ones at least as a starting point. One of the most illustrious examples and certainly the closest to what we are talking about here is the Hammond organ: born looking to the pipe "cousin", it soon evolved into an original instrument with its own technique, its own aesthetics and its own musical genres.
The principle on which the Hammond is based is to model - with a purely electromechanical additive technique - the harmonic content of a static sound: hence the reference, more or less deliberate (and indeed sometimes proudly denied), to the pipe organ and to its static sound, to its stops with different timbres and to the possibility of synthesizing, through mutations, complex sounds with various harmonic content. The transition from electromechanics to electronics and, subsequently, the advent of the primordial sound sampling techniques made the similarity between the two categories of instruments more obvious: until they came, in fact, to put them on the same level by proposing models of electronic organs equipped with "consoles" increasingly similar to those of a pipe organ with electric transmission, with stops list similar to those of traditional organ stops.
It would be interesting to investigate the cultural, technical and not least commercial reasons that have led to what over time has been increasingly conceived as a "cheap alternative" to the expensive and demanding pipe organ; this is also an extremely vast and articulated investigation which we do not dwell on here. Once again, however, we keep in mind another fact that seems to be a good interpretation: "cheap alternative", that is, a criterion that places other reasons - practical or economic - before qualitative considerations - "being satisfied" of what is now conceived as a surrogate for the traditional instrument.
We note, en passant, that this discourse can be repeated identically also for the harmonium - an extremely original instrument, which in the nineteenth century reached high levels of construction technique and musical repertoire, which shares the use of the pipe organ with compressed air and stops with different sounds and which is also often treated as a "surrogate": demonstrating that the problem does not depend on the technology itself but on the criterion with which it is used (or judged).
This criterion of "cheap alternative" is, in short, what lies at the basis of the misunderstanding of the alleged competition between electronic organ and pipe organ: whereas the former, conceived as an "easy solution" for the replacement of the second, is equipped - as we will see shortly - with technology (and consequently aesthetic results that directly depend on it) largely insufficient not only to try to compete with the latter, but also only to give musically usable results.
This being the case - and having in mind the impersonal, amorphous and inconsistent sound of even the best sampled electronic organs - the term "pornophone" is more than justified if one pretends that this type of instrument can replace the pipe organ.
Summarizing briefly, we can highlight two kinds of problems: the misunderstanding about the nature of technically different instruments and the inadequacy of the electronic organ's resources(on this point there is an interesting contribution by Fabio Mancini that we invite you to read - only in Italian), which make it too low a level to aspire to be a musical instrument tout-court without disturbing imitation of the pipe organ.
Having established the difference in nature between the two instruments, the next step is to ask oneself if and how to bring the technical level of electronics to an acceptable quality for a musical instrument, freeing oneself from all the compromises inherent in the concept of "cheap alternative" seeking the highest level of quality - as it should be in the design, construction and use of any musical instrument.
Let's see why the normal sampled electronic organ sounds like a "pornophone".
1) The part related to sound generation, although subject to constant evolution, is still far from having reached standards worthy of a musical instrument. The biggest "stumbling block" is represented by the poor performance of the integrated hardware, not even remotely comparable to that of even a low-end personal computer (we are talking about orders of magnitude of difference). Nor is it conceivable that an industrial manufacturer of "all-inclusive" electronic instruments could afford to keep up with the exponential IT evolution we are constantly witnessing: the same production times of a given model make this almost impossible.
1) Thus the samples are always very short (with loops consisting of a few or even a single cycle) and each of them is "spread" on several notes to drastically reduce their number; they are also severely limited in frequency resolution and bit depth. Even the number of sounds that can be played at the same time (polyphony) is enormously more limited than that of a real pipe instrument. Let's think of a 4-6 note chord with a Tutti of 30-40 stops: we are in the order of hundreds of sounds emitted simultaneously (without counting the reciprocal interactions, whose modeling is simply unattainable), in the face of resources that limit the electronic to a maximum of a few dozen. This has obvious repercussions on the timbre and dynamic performance: the more the organist requires sound, the more inconsistent and amorphous the result will be.
2) The part of amplification and sound diffusion - in order to avoid disproportionate costs that would be added to those of a finished console - is placed at best at the level of a good home audio system and as such should be used - which excludes the use in large environments such as a church, concert hall or theater.
Also in this case we can rely on a comparison with the acoustic instrument to get a rough idea of the disparity of the resources deployed. The sound "generator" of a pipe organ is made up of the set of pipes themselves: whose length is inversely proportional to the frequency emitted and whose sections are a function of the characteristics of timbre and (roughly) amplitude of the sound. It is easy to realize, even only qualitatively, the power needed to equal the sound pressure of a large organ with three manuals and 50 registers without appreciable distortions and with a comparable frequency response. An empirical but indicative calculation of the radiant surface (overall area) of the pipes involved in a C major chord with 8 ft Principal and 4 ft Octave on the keyboard and 16 ft Principal on the pedal gives a value of about 835 square cm, comparable to the overall surface of about 950 square cm of a 10" subwoofer and two satellites with 4" mid and 1" tweeter. The addition of a single note of 16 ft Subbass increases the overall surface of the pipes to about 1200 square cm: the addition of a C1 of a 32 ft Principal brings it to almost 2500, practically doubling it. It is easy to imagine the increase due to the use of many 8 or 16 ft stops, even with stops list corresponding to medium-sized organs: and it's easy to imagine that the power of many speakers - suitable for their characteristics and positioning - is required to even attempt to approach the acoustic power of the pipe instrument, especially in the frequencies below 60 Hz.
A platform like Hauptwerk (or similar) allows, by relying on personal computers and dedicated software - without having to depend on the limited hardware resources of commercial models of electronic organs - to overcome their limits on several fronts:
1) the samples are high or very high fidelity, up to 48kHz and 24 bit, with the availability of multiple samples and of adequate length (on average 10-15 seconds or more) for each single note
2) the dedicated software (Hauptwerk, GrandOrgue or similar) allows the complete management both in terms of quality of the single sample (keeping the original recording format) and, above all, of polyphony amplitude: having a computer even if only of average power it's quite possible to make thousands of samples "play" at the same time, effectively equaling the number of sounds emitted by the acoustic instrument
3) last but not least, a platform such as Hauptwerk allows the loading of a virtually unlimited number of sample sets, each of which can be the precise replica of a particular instrument from time to time - including a photographic interface that reproduces each single command - or a ad hoc customization, performed with "dry" samples suitable to be inserted in resonant environments.
As for the diffusion of sound in large rooms, the criterion is as simple in theory as it is complex and expensive in its practical application: a system must be installed capable of reproducing the same sound power of the acoustic instrument, without distortion, in the entire very wide spectrum of frequencies (from 16 to 16000 Hz). This system must also be able to reproduce the stereophonic distribution of the sound front of the acoustic instrument.
Since these are sounds that will be diffused in a reverberant environment, it is also necessary to pay great attention to the type of samples used: it is intuitive that they must be absolutely devoid of any trace of their own environmental acoustics, which would inexorably overlap and be confused with that of the reproduction environment with all the consequences of the case in terms of clarity and definition of the sound - regardless of the quality of the diffusion system used. Nor is it sufficient, as many believe, to cut the reverb tails of the samples (option possible in Hauptwerk and GrandOrgue): the acoustic response is also well present in the steady sound, enriching and coloring it, and cutting the last portion of the sound does nothing but make it even more unnatural in the reproduction environment.
If you intend to "play" samples in a real environment, it is strictly necessary that these samples are designed specifically for this purpose, right from the beginning of the whole chain that includes the recording, audio processing, production of the set, finish with proper calibration in the playback environment.
A similar conception is evidently something very far from the "cheap alternative" stigmatized - not without reason - by most organists: and it is a guarantee of a minimum quality level to be able to talk about something suitable for making music. We hope definitively the idea of "competition" with the acoustic instrument should be set aside: we are talking about another musical instrument, made very similar to the first one but whose otherness cannot be eliminated. At this point, we can go as far as to hypothesize the coexistence of the two instruments rather than mutual exclusion: provided, however, that both are of at least comparable quality. We will soon give an account on these pages of a very particular realization, studied with the criteria we have tried to expose and which has proved to be very convincing even for rather demanding concert players.
Let's go back to the fact that moved us to write this article: the use of Hauptwerk in a prestigious theater and on a prestigious occasion, and let's try to read it in the light of all the considerations set out so far. By asking ourselves, in particular, if everything possible has been done to reach the qualitative level that the prestige of the occasion required.
From what little we can understand, a free sample set was used, namely the Eisenbarth of the church of Friesach, produced by Piotr Grabowski and judged among the best for free; for the moment, we know nothing about the amplification system and its calibration - elements of crucial importance, as we have said, at least as much as the quality of the samples used if you want to obtain something that not only can work from a musical point of view but that can also be credibly paired with other acoustic instruments.
With these minimal data it is already possible to draw some qualitative conclusions, at least regarding the sample set used. The Friesach is a "wet" type sample set: in which the whole instrument has been recorded including the ambient acoustics.
We have not listened to the concert and therefore we cannot make judgments; however, it is more than legitimate, even only for the "wet" characteristic of the sample set, to doubt the performance regarding the clarity of phrasing and articulation, however excellent the diffusion system may have been and how good the theater. We can certainly say that it would have been better to choose a strictly "dry" sample set, perhaps designed "ad hoc", to which an appropriate calibration should have been applied with respect to the acoustic response of the environment.
Returning to our "pornophone" there are two questions we must ask ourselves.
Is the electronic instrument always and in any case "pornophone", or is it not possible that, as for the pipe instrument, similar considerations can be made on the design, executive and sound performance level that allow high quality standard results?
And, if so, does it still make sense to contrast the electronic instrument and the pipe one? It makes sense that the electronic is treated only as a "draft" of the noblest pipe organ (and we cannot fail to notice how, according to the same logic, the Cecilian organ has been treated as a "draft" of the classical instrument; organ with electric transmission as a "draft" of the mechanical transmission organ; the Central European romantic organ as a "draft" of a certain ideal of a Baroque organ ...), or shouldn't it be treated as an autonomous instrument?
We deliberately leave these questions open, putting them at the end of this long reflection: we leave the task of drawing their conclusions to the openness and cultural maturity of the readers.