Wed Jan 03, 2018 8:35 pm
There seems to be a widely held misconception about Hauptwerk. Surely the object in producing a sample set is not to create a copy of the original organ. A copy of an expensive oil painting is often called a fake, whilst a photograph of the same painting is precisly that - a photograph, not a copy.
As an organist who spends many hours each day practising on various sample sets I do not want a “copy” of the original organ, neither do I believe that it is possible to produce such a copy unless you build a real pipe organ in a real building. What I want is a sample set which allows me to practise music for long periods on an “instrument” which delights the ear (my ear!), with beautiful sounds which are appropriate to the style and period of the piece and my and/or the composer’s musical intentions. The old style electronic or “digital” organs fail on many counts because they often make quite unpleasant sounds which bear little resemblance to a pipe organ - this particularly applies to reed stops.
Hauptwerk sample sets bear a close resemblance to the real pipe organs which they have recorded, but only in the way a photograph resembles a painting. Once you start actually using the sample set the problems begin. There is no comparison with a sampled piano. There is not a single concept of an organ in the way in which there is a concept of, say, a modern grand piano. Each organ and its building is a unique instrument, subject to a million variables of acoustics, registration, weather, temperature, maintenance, fashion and personal taste. The organist sat at the console may have a completely different experience from a member of the congregation or audience. I recall an organ I have played a number of times which has an open Brustwerk about 2 feet away. Playing any stop on this manual is (for me) an excruciating experience. It drowns out the rest of the organ, yet what is heard by someone in the body of the church I cannot tell whilst playing. I recall a newly restored baroque organ I played in Spain last year. The priest invited me to play the chamade 3 feet above my head. After 10 seconds I stopped. The row was so deafening I was afraid I would permanently damage my hearing.
You see a Hauptwerk sample set is, like a pipe organ, a unique creation. In my case, I do not want a “replica” of the sampled organ, whatever that may be. I want something which is, above all, pleasant to play for hours. At the moment my greatest bugbear with sample sets is the right amount of resonance (for my taste, not someone else’s!). Even real pipe organs suffer from this. There’s the old joke about the organist who has just finished a recital in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, gets up from the console and goes downstairs to hear what he has played. Last year I heard a recital at St. Eustache in Paris which has a recent state-of-the-art organ with a mobile console which looks like something out of the Starship Enterprise. The brilliant young virtuoso organist played the Finale of Vierne’s First Symphony at breakneck speed and because of the acoustics all I could hear was a muddy mush of sound. What is the use to me of a wonderful Cavaillé Coll sample set if all I can hear at my home console is a mush of booming sound? But then my hearing is also different to that of a person 40 years younger than me.
I’m afraid this whole thread is, as the Germans say, on the wood path. As the technology develops, as computers become more powerful, surely what each Hauptwerk user will want, before handing over their money, is a product tailored to their individual taste and requirements, not a one-size-fits-all product based on an ideological pipedream.