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Re-Creating Vanished Organs
by Colin Pykett
Posted: June 2005 Last revised: June 2008 Copyright © C E Pykett 2005-2008
Abstract Manufacturers of digital organs base their tonal effects on electronic copies of real organ pipe sounds. In this way it is possible to make a complete electronic copy of a particular instrument if desired, and some custom built digital organs are occasionally ordered by customers who want this. The method is also widely used by amateur organ enthusiasts.
It is possible in principle to take this approach a step further to re-create the sounds of organs which no longer exist, or which have been so altered that their original sounds have been lost. Moreover, the flexibility of a digital approach means that several instruments could be readily simulated at the one console. Although the results could only ever be an approximation to the real thing, it is interesting to consider using this technique for educational purposes as well as for its own sake. Sitting at a console which one moment would "sound like" a Silbermann organ, say, and the next one by Hope-Jones could be much more interesting for students than any amount of lectures. In the former case they would be able to discover for themselves why mixtures and mutations were more sensible in the days when unequal temperaments were the norm. In the latter they could experiment with H-J's ideas to augment incomplete choruses both with multiple couplers and his characteristic Quintadenas. The approach seems no more academically disreputable than the speculative attempts to re-create the past which are accepted in other fields, such as experimental archaeology.
However, achieving reasonable success means that one has to go much further than simply making digital copies of existing organs. For example, while the copyist approach will reproduce an existing mixture stop, it will do nothing to explain why the mixture is constructed in the way it is. Therefore a valid attempt to reproduce the mixture work on a long-vanished 18th century organ means that one has to develop an independent understanding of these issues, and then simulate carefully the mixtures rank by rank when building up a digital version of these old instruments.
This article first outlines a digital organ system which can be configured easily to represent virtually any organ, indeed the configuration process is so simple that many players would be able to select the sounds they need from a library merely by creating the appropriate text file which the system then reads and interprets. It then goes on to describe the results of investigating various European schools of organ building in this manner from the late 17th century to the mid-20th, which surprised me more than I had anticipated in terms of the richness of the experience which was achieved. Sound clips are included.
Contents (click on the titles below to access the desired section)
An article elsewhere on this website discusses how digital organs can be constructed around commercial hardware which is available off the shelf [1]. Using this approach I have “built” a number of instruments, the latest of which were experiments in re-creating a number of pipe organ simulations which can all be played from the same console. The idea is not of course new in itself because any electronic organ can be made to imitate any pipe instrument in principle, but in this case there are some novel aspects. One is that most of the simulated organs either no longer exist, or they have been so altered that much of their original characters can only be the subjects of speculation today. This might seem to present an immediate difficulty because it is obviously impossible to use the usual “copyist” approach, in which the sounds of the digital simulation are derived from recordings of the real thing. Some digital organ manufacturers seem to think that copying every note of every stop in a pipe organ is a worthy attribute, whereas I regard it as an indication that they have little independent understanding of how to voice an instrument. In particular, it should be noted that copying the sound of each note of a mixture is not the same thing as copying each of its individual pipes. Mixtures are widely misunderstood within the electronic organ community. Therefore it is worth stating some of the guidelines I regard as particularly important when simulating a specific pipe organ: 1. The stop list of the organ to be simulated, including all of its couplers, must be known. Although this might seem to be a statement of the blindingly obvious, it is much more difficult than it sounds. Later on I shall show that even professional sources were uncertain of the specification of an instrument built in 1962 and which still exists! 2. The compositions of the mixtures must be known in terms of the pitches at which the ranks commence and the notes at which they break across the keyboard. If the number of ranks varies across the compass this must be established also. 3. The tone qualities of the mixtures and mutations must be broadly known in terms of whether they were of principal or flute tone. 4. By and large, regulation is more important than an exact simulation of tone quality. By this is meant the way the subjective loudness of each stop varies across the compass, and how it stands in relation to the loudness of other registers. Thus it must be possible to establish a regulation strategy for each instrument to be simulated, based if necessary on an understanding of the most likely pipe scales, wind pressures and regulation techniques used by a particular builder. Although many other factors are relevant, I have proved to my own satisfaction over some 25 years of study that it is possible to come to a reasonable electronic approximation of the sounds of the major choruses of a pipe organ if the questions posed above can be answered. Since even answering this limited set of questions verges on the impossible for many old instruments, it is prudent not to be over-ambitious by including too many others. Although answers to virtually any question are readily available from many enthusiastic sources, as can be seen from the over-confidence of some who participate in the restoration of old pipe organs, it is vital to distinguish between fact and speculation if the result is to have any meaning for electronic ones as well. The converse to the statement above also applies: if honest answers to questions as basic as those just posed cannot be obtained, then it is virtually impossible to arrive at a sensible simulation of a vanished organ. This also applies to restorations using pipes, though obviously some organ builders do not allow such matters to cramp their style. Restorations or reconstructions of old organs can never be proved to recapture the sounds of the original instruments whether using pipes or electronics, but it is particularly true for the latter type. Nobody with any discernment and honesty can seriously argue that electronic sound is indistinguishable from the real thing. However this does not mean that one cannot learn anything at all by using digital techniques to examine various schools of organ building, and it has some decided incidental advantages. If several such organs can be simulated at the one console it avoids the considerable time and expense involved in travelling to try out the actual instruments, assuming they still exist. And if they do not exist it is about the only way that one can draw any conclusions about them at all, other than through philosophy alone. (Philosophy is that method of research preferred by those who have little interest in experiments).
Even when the target organs do exist another factor often has relevance, which is the increasing difficulty of gaining access to them. This is particularly true for the older historic instruments. Unfortunately it is precisely the growth of digital copyists over the last twenty years or so which has made this problem worse, because churches have woken up to the fact that the electronic organ brigade can make a lot of money out of copying the sounds of their organs and they are now understandably reluctant to have any more of it. Therefore re-creating an approximation to these instruments without the need to make digital copies of them assumes more importance today than in the recent past. In this article we shall take a journey backwards in time, pausing as we pass by several organs which represent various schools of organ building. Sound clips of the digital reconstructions of these organs are also included, but for the reasons just rehearsed no unreasonable claims are made for the veracity or fidelity of the simulations. The simulation system
But first a note about the organ system used to host these experiments. It is played from the two manual and pedal console illustrated below, which is an improved version of the original experimental console in that it now incorporates a capture combination system with multiple memories. The stop keys are magnetically operated by separate pistons for each department, and there is also a set of general pistons.
Current experimental Prog Organ console with new capture combination system in a corner of my studio ....
.... and the loudspeaker array on the opposite wall.
Closer view of keys and stop panel. The thumbwheel switch below the stop keys is the piston memory selector.
The instrument uses the sound generation techniques described in [1]. Some further examples of the sounds produced by the system, besides those included here, can also be auditioned from that article. A notable feature as far as this article is concerned is the simple way the system is configured to simulate a particular organ. Once the sounds have been finalised and stored in the computer, it is only necessary to create an ordinary text file using a word processor which the control program then reads and interprets. An extract from the configuration file describing one of the organs discussed later is shown in Appendix 1. Among other things, the file associates each physical stop tab on the console with the digital information inside the computer representing the sound of that stop. Therefore any tab can be used for any or all of the simulated organs, although the stop it represents is not fixed but defined by the user’s configuration file in each case. In one case it could be a speaking stop, in another a coupler and in yet another, a tremulant. One of the tabs even acted as Hope-Jones’s Stop Switch, as we shall see later. However this unlimited flexibility has a practical downside. A somewhat knotty problem encountered with a console which has to represent more than one instrument is how to label the stops in a relatively simple manner. This is one of those sorts of puzzle which have any number of potential solutions, ranging from the cheap and cheerful to the ultimate in electronic display sophistry. In this case I chose the simple route, using labels printed by a computer mounted on wood strips which are hung on small brass pegs. The stop tabs themselves are blank. The method is illustrated below. By this means it is quick and simple to re-configure the console when it is necessary to simulate a different organ. To switch from one organ to another it is only necessary to click on the name of the configuration file for the desired organ on the computer monitor, having first set up the stop names at the console in the manner shown.
Illustrating how the stop tabs were labelled Each note of every stop can be simulated individually and independently, corresponding to the separate pipes of a real organ. This also applies to the separate simulated pipes of each rank of a mixture, a very different matter to merely copying the composite sound of each note as is usually done. Simulating the mixtures carefully is particularly important. There are six sound channels available each with its own multiple-unit loudspeaker system, and stops can be routed to any channel or combination of channels. The system is flexible enough to simulate the spatial variation across a rank of organ pipes by “panning” each note on the keyboard in a different way between two loudspeakers. Thus the C and C# sides of an organ can be simulated as a stereophonic sound image which varies across the keyboard, as can more esoteric effects such as the pronounced spread of sound from an en chamade trumpet stop. Six loudspeaker channels are generally adequate for simulating relatively small organs in small or medium sized rooms. They create a genuinely multiphonic sound field, much more realistic than listening to an organ recorded merely in stereo on even the best CD and with the best of hi-fi systems. Just as with a CD, an unfortunate downside is that when making recordings of the system the result has to be mixed down in some way to ordinary stereo, meaning that much of the spatial realism is lost. This has to be borne in mind when listening to the sound clips of the organs to be described. Registration combinations can be set up and captured for any of the simulated organs and brought into use via thumb pistons. The combinations for all the simulations are retained, and those last set for a particular organ are automatically available when it is next called up.
Because the system is programmable to represent any desired instrument, it is called Prog Organ.
Tuning and Temperament
Some of the organs to be described hail from the 17th and 18th centuries when equal temperament probably did not exist widely. However there is abundant evidence from that period of the hunger for temperaments which would allow music to be played in all keys, of which Bach’s “48” is one of the best-known examples. In this study I used this as an excuse to side-step the temperament problem by tuning all the organs to equal temperament. This is not because of any lack of understanding; indeed I have studied the subject for some time, and only last year had an article published on one which I invented [3]. However, to introduce so controversial a subject as temperament here would without doubt divert attention from the main thrusts of the article. An advantage of digital organs is that they can be tuned readily to any temperament, thereby leaving it up to those who disagree with my approach to adopt one which gives them greater satisfaction. Much the same remarks apply to the tuning standard adopted. Here I have used A = 440 Hz except when there was strong evidence for a different one, and in these cases it is mentioned in the appropriate section. Sound Clips
Examples in mp3 format of each simulated organ are included for download, and a few remarks are necessary about how they were recorded and how best to listen to them. In aural terms you can visualise a pair of microphones as having been placed reasonably close to the pipes of a pipe organ, with the ambience of the building captured solely by them and not from additional microphones placed elsewhere. In other words, the ambience is "dry" rather than "wet" and adjusted to approximate the ambience of the original buildings. Do not expect the 10 seconds worth of St Paul's cathedral type of reverberation washing around your ears which manufacturers impose so often on their audio samples - they do this to hide the details of the noises their organs make, and it is unnatural to the point of being ridiculous. What you hear here is the sound of accurately-simulated pipes in a realistic acoustic.
The best reproduction will be obtained in a normal listening position with a pair of high quality hi-fi speakers, fed by an appropriate stereo amplifier. Alternatively, good stereo headphones can be used (e.g. Sennheiser HD 650). With anything much less than either of these options you will simply be listening to the inadequacies of your system, and these will make it difficult to form judgements about the organs themselves. A good computer sound card (e.g. the Audigy range, X-fi, etc) is also essential - onboard sound chips are not as good.
All the clips were recorded in real time in a single take by real players at a real console, warts and all, not merely invented by somebody pratting around off line with a MIDI sequencer as is so often done. The warts make effective watermarks!
(Please note - earlier sound clips in this article were recorded with some bass cut. This has now been re-instated so that you no longer have to use bass boost when listening to the audio samples). St George’s Church, Dunster, Somerset (Hill, Norman & Beard, 1962)
We now come to the meat of this article, a discussion of several organs simulated by this organ system. But in an article dealing with vanished organs, why start with a recent one which still exists? The answer is that it was during an attempt to simulate this relatively recent instrument at Dunster, a delightful village at the north east corner of Exmoor, that I encountered several problems which first led me to think about doing the same thing for some older ones, thus leading eventually to the work described here.
St George's, Dunster - two faces of an ailing organ The organ was built by Hill, Norman and Beard in 1962, most of it in an elevated case in the north aisle with two 8 foot fronts in curiously disparate styles facing east and west, though there is also an ugly pile (the only word for it) of mechanism and sundry pedal pipes dumped unscreened on the floor beyond it. It is played electrically from a detached stop key console. Some 45 years on the instrument is suffering, and the church has had to embark on that tedious journey well known to many others to keep their organ playable. One hopes that the money will be found, which is why I have emphasised the need in the picture above, but it is also one reason why I decided to simulate the organ digitally - should the worst happen at least one can thereby preserve an echo of what it sounded like.
Although the Dunster organ still exists, it was surprising how many versions exist of its stop list! For example, at the time of writing, entry N05562 in the National Pipe Organ Register (NPOR) contained some errors in the stop names, some omissions, and it included a 3 rank Cornet on the swell which is not present [2]. Fortunately I had first visited this organ about 1980 and so was able to distinguish between fact and fiction fairly readily. My notes and recollection of the correct disposition were confirmed by correspondence with Philip Wells. Note that these criticisms are not intended unkindly; the NPOR acknowledges that some of its data may be unreliable and always undertakes to correct it in such cases. I have included the example to demonstrate how difficult it is to establish even the most basic information about organs, particularly those which no longer exist or which have been altered. It is especially important not to rely entirely on secondary sources for one’s information. The stop list of the Dunster organ is at Table 1. It is a good example of the one-organ-will-do-for-everything type of instrument that was so common in the brashness of the mid-20th century. Note the traditional British great organ diapason chorus, but with the addition of a splashy French style Trompette (en chamade, of course). The swell is quite different, having echoes of a Baroque flue chorus built on a 4 foot Principal. However it still had to have its Celeste and its sub and supers as well. There is also an attempt to make it serve as a Positiv division with a collection of mutations based on a curious mix of flute and principal tonalities. And, naturally, there had to be the quite exceptionally useless Swell Unison Off which was a de rigeur feature of virtually every organ at this time, and of many since. There is quite a lot of extension, borrowing and duplication, and all of it was simulated exactly.
Table 1. St George's, Dunster (Hill, Norman & Beard 1962) I considered this organ worth simulating because it is redolent of the type built widely in Britain half a century ago, a school which reached its apogee at London’s Royal Festival Hall and at St Albans. “How Bach would have loved an organ like this” we were often told as students (though fortunately my first teacher was more enlightened). I had dim aural memories from Dunster that, although splendid in some respects, it somehow just did not coalesce into anything of substance. I felt it was neither fish nor fowl, and I wanted to simulate it to see if this judgement could be confirmed a quarter of a century on. And to counter all this politically-correct disparagement as well as to show that I was hoping to be proved wrong, let me admit now that I would have given my eye teeth to have had an organ like this in any of the churches I have played in. Thus I simulated it because I also wanted it in my studio as well. This is the only organ discussed in this article from which I had some recorded sound samples to guide the simulation. They are not very good ones because of the technical limitations of the day, so they could not be used directly in a digital simulation. Nor was there anything like a complete set, as not all the stops had been recorded. Nevertheless, it was something to go on. I must acknowledge the part played by the late Rev Eric Pratt who recorded the samples back in 1981 and kindly made them available.
I have to say that when playing the simulation I was rather disappointed to find that my earlier impressions of the real thing were confirmed. Although the range and variety of the flue choruses on the great organ is attractive and useful, with the splendid Quintaten also made available on the pedals, the Trompette is of little use in my view other than for piping wedding couples into church (once you have got over your initial excitement). It is a reed with little or no chorus value particularly if used with its octave coupler, and its tonality has little synergy with the rest of the division. However the swell organ is the least satisfactory to my mind. To get anything out of it at all one has to forget anything to do with Willis-type full swells, because the 1 foot mixture is too high pitched and the 16 foot reed too close-toned to imitate such effects satisfactorily. The mixture composition admittedly does fit in with the idea of a thin chorus based on a 4 foot principal, but that’s about all. And the mutation work is decidedly incomplete with the omission of a nazard at 2 2/3 foot pitch, thereby considerably limiting the opportunities for synthetic tone building. You cannot make an eclectic instrument merely by including a sprinkling of stops from various schools of organ building. The approach can only work where each school is complete and fully represented, and this is impossible with a swell organ of only twelve stops.
Bearing in mind these remarks, I find organs of this type are at their most attractive for playing better quality Romantic works because they offer so many opportunities for quiet colouration such as in the following example:
However this doesn't stop you from letting yourself go now and again:
By playing the simulated organ people can assess its suitability for rendering various types of music, and whether they agree with my conclusions. Although the real instrument still exists in essentially its original form, the difficulties encountered in simulating it led me to ponder whether the approach might have value for those which do not. Foremost among the difficulties was the very limited sample set and the consequential need to construct the sound of each stop largely using the guidelines mentioned in the introduction. Because I considered that the digital reconstruction retained much of the flavour of the original instrument, I decided to apply the same procedure to the other organs which form the remainder of this article. St Mary’s Church, Pilton, Devon (Hope-Jones, 1898)
It may not be generally known that Robert Hope-Jones built a number of very small but nonetheless interesting church organs in Britain before he left for the USA, and that at Pilton was one. A comparable but even smaller one still exists at Llanrhaeadr in Wales [4], that one being closer to its original condition than at Pilton. I chose to simulate the original Pilton instrument digitally because of the additional challenges involved, and because the instrument itself is of somewhat greater versatility than its Welsh counterpart. Another reason for focusing on this instrument is that the church now (2007) faces closure owing to the dangerous state of its fabric [20]. In today's circumstances a redundant organ is lucky if it appears on ebay before ending its days in landfill, and preserving an echo of it in some way, even if only as a digital simulation, therefore seems apposite.
St Mary's, Pilton - the Hope-Jones console Pilton sits near to the diametrically opposite corner of Exmoor to Dunster, and an article elsewhere on this website describes the organ at St Mary's in detail [5], showing how it has become almost unrecognisable over the course of a century. The usual problem of deciding exactly what the original stop list was also existed here, and I have adopted the specification printed in Musical Opinion in 1898 shortly after the organ had been inaugurated (Table 2). There have been many interventions since, though regrettably no information was forthcoming from the firm (Hele) which has been responsible for some of them. Others have been the work of amateurs and are completely undocumented. However when I played the organ in 1992 it was reasonably clear which of the stops still contained Hope-Jones’s pipework. Apart from its diaphone, the pedal organ is derived from the great Rohr Gedackt unit.
Table 2. St Mary's, Pilton (Hope-Jones 1898) Originally this interesting and historic little instrument was played remotely from a moveable detached console situated in the chancel of the church. It was hand blown, though it must have sorely tried the organ blower with its wind pressure of 6 inches and its preponderance of generously scaled unison stops! The electric action, including the combination system with its motorised tilting tablets, was powered by rechargeable accumulators and both these and the means of blowing were not displaced by mains power until the 1920’s. Until then, somebody had the job of trotting down to the local garage to recharge the batteries most weeks (I know this to be the case). If the original pipework which remains is anything to go by, the organ was capable of immense power for its small size, with extremely loud diapasons on both manuals and an overwhelming diaphone on the pedals. Therefore it would have been a most effective hymn machine for the large congregations of its day. Yet there was also a wealth of quieter effects available, multiplied by the large number of couplers (note especially the octave coupler on the great). In playing any Hope-Jones organ you have to take full advantage of these. Its main shortcoming to my mind was the lack of anything really quiet though; one tires after a while from all those pungent strings, loud flutes and quintadenas. I just ached for a gentle stopped diapason! The organ was simulated digitally without the benefit of any sound samples from the original pipes, and an extract from the configuration file is at Appendix 1. Hope-Jones’s Stop Switch was also included in the simulation, one of the original features of the instrument which has long vanished. The Stop Switch was an ingenious registration aid which enabled a new combination to be set up on the stop tablets while still playing on the old one. The new combination then came into effect when the Stop Switch was operated. I have long wanted to assess for myself how useful this actually was in practice. Although I would say this wouldn’t I, I was extremely (indeed, surprisingly) gratified at how this simulation of a much-altered organ turned out, especially as no actual samples were used. It completely accords with my memories of the real instrument over twelve years ago in terms of its tonal and dynamic extremes and the aural weariness induced after a spell of playing it. It is difficult to make a recording which gives a suitable impression of full organ, particularly the overwhelming thunder of the pedal organ and the profundity of the two coupled diapasons in the lower reaches of the keyboard. One contemporary listener to a Hope-Jones organ remarked on the “full organ quite without brightness ... the dull cloying tone is rather wearying” [6]. Just so. In quieter vein though, the following clip illustrates just some of the tonal variety available, including the exceptionally loud and keen Viol d’Orchestre:
And what of the Stop Switch? Although fascinated with it at first, I rapidly found it could cause confusion, just as with any blind combination aid. The main problem is you tend to forget whether it is on or off, though perhaps with more practice you could get used to it. However, in a small organ which had several ordinary combination pedals, I suspect most organists regarded it as little more than a curiosity after a while. At Pilton the tab now controls a tremulant (not on the original organ), and at Llanrhaeadr it now brings on full organ. However the organists at Worcester cathedral must have found it useful because it was retained by Harrison’s when they rebuilt its famous Hope-Jones organ in 1925. What can be learnt from having simulated this organ? An awful lot in my opinion, mainly because hardly any organists today have come within a hundred miles of a Hope-Jones instrument, yet that does not prevent some of them voicing forcible opinions about their perceived shortcomings. His small organs are particularly interesting because they demonstrate, presumably, which stops Hope-Jones thought were the most important, and it is therefore surprising that they have been all but ignored by Hope-Jones scholars in favour of his more spectacular works. The organ at Pilton would have been a serviceable and generally useful church organ, besides being capable of rendering much of the preferred musical pap of the day during recitals and voluntaries. Unlike most other instruments however, it is almost impossible to play Bach on it in any sense beyond that of pressing the notes. The effects are ludicrous. Although none of these conclusions is new or surprising, it seems to me that it would be reasonable to allow students to develop their own views of Hope-Jones by first hand experience, rather than by expecting them to absorb conventional wisdom merely through pedagogy. A digital simulation would enable them to do this.
Bellahouston Parish Church, Glasgow (Cavaillé-Coll, 1874)
Aristide Cavaillé-Coll installed a small two manual organ in this Church of Scotland edifice when it was called Bellahouston - it is now Ibrox Parish Church. All traces of the original organ seem to have gone long ago, although the present instrument claims to retain a few of the earlier stops. Given its uncertain parentage (even the relatively recent 1985 rebuild is by an unknown hand according to the National Pipe Organ Register at the time of writing [14]) one might be forgiven for treating this claim with caution. Therefore, unlike the two previous ones, this really is a vanished organ.
Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. Nemo me impune lacessit! [15]
The organ was an example of the Model Organ No. 9 described later by Cavaillé-Coll in his pamphlet of 1889 entitled 'Orgues de Tous Modèles' which was prepared for the Paris World Fair of that year. Several were built, although they seemed to vary somewhat in detail which makes it all the more difficult to be certain of the original stop list of the Bellahouston instrument. It is said [14] that there were no pedal stops at Bellahouston, only couplers to the manual(s). This is at odds with some other Model 9 organs which had both couplers and several pedal stops duplexed from the manuals, and it seems almost inconceivable that there would have been a full-compass 16 foot Bourdon on the Grand Orgue without it also being made available on the pedals. There is also uncertainty about whether there was a Plein Jeu mixture on the Récit at Bellahouston as there was on some other Model 9's. Consequently I have addressed both uncertainties by simply including them in this simulation, as in Table 3 below. Rather naughtily though, Cavaillé-Coll had the habit of giving quite different names to his duplexed stops to hide their derivations, but I have not done this here.
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