Aaah, the Hammond Organ. What a fantastic instrument. An alltime favourite with a magic sound and magic names coming with it: the B3, the leslie speaker, the Vox, the Farfisa, Jon Lord of Deep Purple and Whitesnake, Ray Manzarek of The Doors, A Whiter Shade of Pale (which I loved to play as a teenager on my Hohner E-Orgel…), Keith Emerson knifing the organ and so many others. Not to mention the great jazz organists!
Here is a nice collection of organ solos in three parts mostly from the rock genre. Although a bit under the radar for some time now, listening to that collection makes it clear how much hammond is out there.
Yep, and this is where the journey begins, because Vox, Farfisa and many others are not even hammond organs. And when Gérard Grisey wrote „Orgue Hammond“ in the score of „Les espaces acoustiques“ he didn’t took it too literally either. But let’s start from the beginning. This little text is about the organs used in „Les espaces acoustiques“, specifically in „Modulations“ and „Transistoires“.
The Hammond Organ and Grisey’s Crumar Organizer T2
Let’s give one thing away first: the electronic organ Gérard Grisey wants has nothing to do with all of the above examples. No screaming, no knifing, no foldback, no nothing. Grisey doesn’t specify too precisely the organ in „L’espace acoustique“ (1974-1985). In the score it simply says „orgue hammond“, a term used for a group of instruments with varying technology and features, the most prominent being the Hammond drawbar organs using tonewheels, the drawbar Vox transistor organ and the transistor Farfisa organ, which doesn’t use drawbars but switches (like a pipe organ).
Now, of course only organs by the Hammond Organ Company should be called Hammond Organs. However, already Laurens Hammond used varying technology producing organs wich sounded very different. Today, after having gone bankrupt in 1985, the trade mark Hammond is owned by Suzuki and currently, no one is producing real, electromechanic tone wheel organs Hammond stands for. After the invention of the transistor, every maker of electric organs (including Hammond) changed to those and today it’s all sample based or physical modeling. In fact, most often than not it’s a mix between the two, like in the bespoke Native Instruments B4 II. It would be more correct to refer to all these different organs as electric organs but it probably has to be accepted that „hammond organ“ is an often used umbrella term and as such it was used by Gérard Grisey.
Grisey himself owned a Crumar Organizer T2, an Italian hammond organ clone with two manuals and optional bass pedals. The Crumar T2 featured drawbars for the manuals and variable vibrato. Surprisingly, it even features pitch bend, something you could do on the original Hammon organs only by turning the motor on and off. The bass pedals however are more of the „synth pedal“ type often found in transistor organs and doesn’t work with drawbars.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=youtu.be
Doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Well, in fact it sounds good because of the leslie speaker. Here’s what it really sounds like:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=youtu.be
It would be an euphemism to say that the Crumar organs were in high regard. In fact, they got mocked being „clonewheel organs“ and they sound nothing like the fat, screaming sound of the Hammond B3. History hasn’t been nice with the transistor organ and it’s distinctly thinner sound and apart from the Vox and the Farfisa no transistor organs are availabe as replicas.
Here is one more example of what the Crumar Organizer T2 sound like. At 00:26 you can hear the synth bass coming in and at 1:00 the vibrato is introduced.
Now, before we go into the details of Les espaces acoustiques, here’s some general information of electr(on)ic organs.
Basic knowledge of organs
In an (electr(on)ic) organ, the manuals have names and are numbered:
The upper console is called the Swell and is number II.
The lower manual is called Great and has the number I.
The pedals are the pedals and come in one, two or a little over two octave sizes.
Unlike the piano or the harpsichord, the pitch of an organ sound is not tied to a key. The 8 foot (8′) drawbar, however, is the root drawbar, like on any organ. When playing the lowest key, which should be a c, on both the manuals and the pedals the same pitch will sound, at that is the one of C1, or Großes C in German. It’s MIDI Note 36. It’s the second lowest c on a piano, two octaves lower than the one under your nose when you sit in front of it. Whatever you call it, if it’s 65.406 Hertz you got it.
BTW, this means that with the 16′ drawbar drawn, the organ goes down to 32.7 Hertz. Don’t even start to play the organ without a solid bass speaker!
Ah, this leads us to the highest possible pitch. The highest note on the keyboard is C7, MIDI Note 96 (in fact, only MIDI notes and Hertz are guaranteed to not cause confusion). That’s 2093′ Hertz at 8′. At 2′ that’s 8372 Hz which is not exactly world record. However, with foldback you’ll be glad to reach only half of it.
Speaking of Hertz: a traditional drawbar organ such as the Hammond B3 can’t be tuned and sits straight at a diapason of 440 Hz. (At the Sendesaal Bremen they had a B3 with a special transformator, with which it was possible to tune the organ. Seems like the organ is gone, though). Not that any orchestra will bother and will ever ask the organ for their pitch, it has to be the oboe! 🙂 With virtual or sample based organs this is not such a problem anymore. However, don’t forget to tune the darn thing to the orchestra!
Registration is straight forward, especially since Grisey only uses no, half or full registration. Plein jeu is the French term for „Volles Werk“ or „Organum Plenum“. In other words: tutti, everything, full house.
Alright, armed with this knowledge, let’s take a look at the score.
The organ that is needed
In the score of „Modulations“ and „Transistoires“, Grisey asks for an
„Orgue Hammond (grand modèle, joué par un organiste)“
respectively
„Orgue Hammond (où autre)
Pédalier: deux octaves 16′, 8′, 5 1/3′
Claviers I et II: 16′, 8′, 5 1/3′, 4′, 2 2/3′, 2′, 1 3/5′, 1 1/3′, 1′
Registres à tirettes réglables. Vibrato réglabe.“
This, of course, is what it says in the score and only the conductor will every see this.
(On a side note: In the score of „Jour contre-jour“, the requested instrument is a „Orgue Crumar modèle Organizer B où T1 (où autre marque ayant les même characteristiques)“. The Crumar Organizer B/T1 were single manual organs with limited capabilities and have nothing to do with what we deal here.)
Going through the actual organ part, these requirements can be amended with the following:
– 9 drawbars with drawbars for the manuals of a traditional hammon organ (16′, 5 1/3′, 8′, 4′, 2 2/3′, 1 3/5′, 1 1/3′, 1′), unlike those of some transistor organs like the Farfisa.
For Grisey’s music, it would be great if the under- and overtones, aka the registers, could be blended in seamlessly and not graded. More on this below.
– Bass pedal with more than the usual 16′ and 8′ registers, unlike those of most tonewheel organs.
– Vibrato with continuously adjustable speed, unlike tonewheel organs but featured in his own Crumar organ
– Leslie, although with no mention of the required speed or speeds
– Percussion settings on/off with decay slow/fast. Not specific partial is given for the percussion effect.
– Volume pedal going the full range from silent to ffff, unlike e.g. the original Hammond B3 and modern clones
This poses several problems for the choice of the instrument:
The organ that doesn’t exist
1) Most organs only posess only two registers for the bass pedal, 16′ and 8′. Moreover, on a tonewheel hammond organ like the Hammond B3 (and its digital hard- and software clones) these settings are actually fixed mixtures of a combination of drawbars. E.g. the 8′ setting on the bass pedal is similar to this setting on one of the manuals: 
This is not what’s desired for Grisey’s music, which demands complete control over the partials.
2) A Hammond B3 and similar models cannot play the full range of the lowest and the highest tonewheels over the whole range of the keyboard. Therefore, the 16′ tonewheel in the lowest octave of the manual is actually not an octave lower than the second lowest octave on the manual but repeates the pitches of that octave, albeit quite a bit quieter. The same goes for the higher drawbars in the higher register. Again, the sounds in the highest octaves simply get repeated. This whole thing is called „foldback“ and is a much desired effect for organ afficionados, because it’s what makes the hammond organ scream in the highest registers. There are even „Hammond Foldback Kits“ to install it in organs that don’t originally have it. It has, however, become such a staple that not a single current clone of a hammond organ can do without and also without giving the option to turn it off.
Which poses a pretty great problem with Grisey when he wants to have a chord held in the higher registers and slowly blends the higher harmonics like in Modulation after 26-29 – in many cases simply nothing happens because of the foldback just very slightly enhancing a pitch that is already sounding.
Issues 1 and 2 come together in Transitoires at (12), where both the bass pedal and manual I are supposed to play 16′, 8′ and 5 1/3′. Manual I is played in the lowest octave. Most hammond organs and all of its clones won’t be able to play 16′ on manual I because of fold back. And nearly all organs including almost all of the clones won’t have the ability to register 5 1/3′ in the bass, instead playing a mixture of tones at 16′ and 8′ (the one exception being the now obsolete Native Instruments B4 (II). I’ve checked with a half dozen other emulations/simulations, it seems to be a forgotten feature that some organs had more than two drawbars for the bass).
The organ, one of the few instruments where one can blend in such a controlled manner, is a great instrument for a composer such as Grisey. Grisey doesn’t use the organ to make it scream, he doesn’t use the B3 with Leslie like the above mentioned jazz and rock organists do. For him, it’s a precise tool and the organ often plays a bordun on E2 on which the whole orchestra (and the organ) blends in spectra. It’s therefore of little surprise to find that Grisey’s Crumar Organizer T2 didn’t foldback.
Indeed, the usage of a hammond organ with its changeable overtones is the ideal instrument for this. It is questionable, however, if Grisey took in account these shortcomings of the original hammond organs or if he wrote for an instrument that corrected these irregularities of the hammond drawbar organ.
3) A tonewheel hammond organ like the Hammond B3 (and its digital hard- and software clones) doesn’t feature a vibrato with continuously adjustable speed. Rather, they feature three fixed settings for vibrato and chorus. A tonewheel organ employs a special kind of vibrato called „scanner vibrato“, which has a rather mild effect and does not really sound like one would expect a vibrato to sound like.
Some transistor organs such as Grisey Crumar T2 featured a continuously variable vibrato. This vibrato does indeed sound like a rather bland vibrato one would expect from an early synthesizer and sounds quite different from the scanner vibrato used in the original hammond drawbar organs. You can listen to it in the above video.
5) Although the drawbars of an organ allow for a wide ranging change in the overtones while playing, the changes in volume are not continuous but graded in 8 steps. Unfortunately, non of the current clones of hammond drawbar organs gives the option to actually change the sounds continuously. In fact, they go to great lengths to program this „Terassendynamik“ into them.
The second part of Enno Poppe’s great piece for virtual hammond organ „Arbeit“ suffers a great deal from this steppiness. Where the partials should actually blend nicely into each other they just step into a new sound. As a great American president likes to say: „So sad!“
6) Also, some of the clones mimick the behaviour of the original to such a detail that the volume pedal in minimal position in no way renders the organ silent but only to something between pp and p. (The contemporary clones by Nord and Native Instruments mimick this obvious shortcoming and some others, like the graded drawbars, in great detail. Unfortunately without giving the choice to change this behaviour. It would be the easiest thing to do and it is strange it’s still not featured. After all, some choices that „better“ the original design like not disabling the 1′ drawbar when playing with percussion are included.)
Now, before anybody draws the conclusion that in fact a Crumar Organizer T2 or something similar is needed to play the piece, forget it. First of all, something similar means looking up manuals of 40 year old organs, most of them in shabby state. If it really works, one only knows after having travelled around and actually trying it out on the real thing. And even if the organ is in good shape, they’re forty year old electronic devices. They might turn on one day and stay silent the next, breaking without further notice. And although they can be had „for an apple and an egg“ as we say in Germany, there’s a reason for it. Buying a 40 year old transistor organ is like buying a hobby, not an reliable instrument for the stage. It’s like buying a vintage car.
But not only that, they are missing features just like the drawbar organs miss features: most of them have a synth bass and not the required 16’/8’/5 1/3′ drawbars. And of course they would need to be attached to a leslie speaker, which might require some soldering cables with rather high voltage (or current or whatever).
One really has to weigh the facts: the sound of a hammond organ is fantastic and one would lose the sound of the leaking tonewheels. There are hammond organ models without foldback but they are really old and not stage worthy.
Indeed, a transistor organ with its thinner sound probably blends better with the orchestra because it doesn’t have such a big sonic footprint („Sonic footprint“?? I sound like a jerk.)
Probable solutions
At the moment, there are no replicas of the desired instrument, which was always a mix between different technologies. Unfortunately, the clones of today really only want to be clones and not bring all the possibilities together.
Since none of the above instruments (drawbar organs, transistor organs, virtual instruments) feature all the required parameters, it might be an idea to actually recreate such an instrument digitally. However, convincing instruments require a great deal of programming skills and it would be thus very desisable if the current available software instruments by such prominent makers as Nord Keyboards or Native Instruments would not only mimick the shortcomings and idiosyncrasies of the original instruments but also give the option to mix together features of the several generations and technical realizations of the hammond organ to produce an instrument that’s capable of more than just being a clone (or in the instance of the virtual transistor organs: being a clone of a clone).
A different solution would be to use organ sounds from digital modular synthesizers like the Nord G2 or Native Instruments Reaktor and reprogram those. This wouldn’t be too hard and could yield the best results. Another option would be to use one of the sample based organs like Native Instruments Vintage Organs with a full version of Kontakt and reprogram those. This might be quite a bit harder though and require to learn programming in Kontakt’s scripting language (where for example the steppiness (is this actually a word?) of the drawbars is programmed. It’s a bit over my head to take it out).
The above described software solutions would still require a MIDI controller and although it is a bit of a shame to use something like the Nord B2(D) only as a controller and not as an instrument it is necessary to have a real two manual organ and pedals. The specific setup of the manuals in an organ allow for one hand to play on two manuals which can come in convenient, especially with the higher registration regiment. If the bass pedals can go up to 4′, a one octave pedal is enough.
With the possibility of saving and recalling sounds things can be made easier. However, using a drawbar organ with real, manual drawbars has the draw back that the drawbars will more often than not be in the wrong place after recalling a patch. And as Les espaces acoustiques often requires changing the sound while playing I ended up using only three presets and the second set of drawbars the Nord B2D features. In hindsight, a Nore B2 with virtual drawbars might have been the better choice since more presets could have been used.
All in all, changing presets while trying to follow the conductor conducting very irregular bars is probably the biggest challenge of the piece. Apart from making good use of the volume pedal.
But what about the hammond organ?
Can „Les espaces acoustiques“ be played with a hammond organ? The answer is a half yes: not only does it need added vibrato but it needs an experienced organist to remedy the foldback as good as possible. It’s certainly not possible everywhere, but e.g. the foot pedal can be employed much more often than written to actually get the organ to play the E2. Sometimes the foldback has to be masked by clever programming and all in all it’s not such a pleaseurable experience because one is constantly working against the organ and working hard finding the right drawbar settings before and in the concert. So: can it be played on a B3? Yes, but it probably shouldn’t because one has to actually play against the instrument and then it’s still not perfect.
So, what does the organ really looks like?
To conclude, Grisey’s mentioning of an „orgue hammond“ is misleading since the organ must posess quite a few features are regular hammond organ won’t have. Here’s the informaton a future player of the part should get (from the orchestra, the festival, Ricordi, whomever):
Organ and controllers:
– electric organ featuring a console with two 61 key (five octave) manuals with 9 drawbars.
– two octave bass pedals with 16′, 8′ and 5 1/3′ drawbars. If 4′ is available, one octave will do. If only 16′ and 8′ is available they will most likely be mixtures, which is not desired.
– drawbars should work in every region of the manual (no foldback like on a Hammond B3 or Vox)
– drawbars should be seamless and not introduce volume steps
– volume pedal must go from niente to ffff
– the organ must be tuneable, most orchestras play with a diapason of 443 Hz.
Effects:
– Percussion on/off with Decay slow and fast. No specific partial is mentioned.
– Leslie on/off. No specific tempo is mentioned. To my taste, the off setting is not the slow setting but indeed off.
– Vibrato: vibrato with continuously variable speed from off up to 14 Hz. If available, three specific speeds are welcome: 14 Hz, 6,4 Hz and 1,15 Hz. No scanner vibrato.
Finally some hints for the future player:
And now for some details in the score
Before you even start, know that the end of „Modulations“ and the beginning of „Transistoires“ is the same. When played one after the other, the piano chord at (44) in Modulations will be the first chord of Transistoires. The final section of Modulations will then be omitted, the part will not be played twice.
Modulations:
Although not in the score, the beginning of Modulations sounds great with Leslie on fast
The settings for the left hand are quite a bit quieter than those for the right hand. Without adjustment it’s pretty hard to get a sfffz in bar 3 in the left hand.
(18)ff is tricky. Here’s one solution: Rirst five tones RH: 5-1. After LH plays f#, c and b-flat with 5, 1 and 2 it could play the g and f on the top manual with 3 and 4. After having released 5 and 4, RH could then pick up the g and f from LH and hold down with 1. 2 can then bend over 1 and reach e-flat.
Meanwhile LH silently changed 5 -> 3 and is able to reach d and c#. RH must „crawl“ downwards, silently changing fingers to reach the c at (19). After that, just back to the exact same position to reach d-flat and finally getting out of that uncomfortable position and play d-flat and f with 4 and 5. Once more silently change from 4/5 to 1/2 and the rest is easy.
In the second bar after (19), LH can silently change to 5, 3 and 1 and then play e-flat with 1.
This does take practice, around (19) it gets pretty fast. But it’s doable.
Vibrato speed should be controlled with a pedal, since left hand is needed to move the drawbars of manual II.
Right before (23) it seems like Grisey got confused with I and II. It wouldn’t be the only time and for a non-organist to call the upper manual I and the lower II might seem more natural.
If this is indeed the case, then only the sound of the upper manual has to be changed, the pedal should have been prepared earlier anyway.
The notation at (23)ff is difficult. Does Grisey want the player to hold the keys and only move the volume pedal? Or are these indeed attacks? It’s the same notation as in (43)ff, where an attack seems not to be wanted.
On the other hand, if this is really just a written tremolo, then the difference to Transistoires (57) would be rather small.
In any case, it’s good to know how fast the 8th notes are:
9/5: 126
5/3: 116
2/1: 140
11/4: 193
12/5: 168
11/3: 257
13/6: 152
11/2: 385
Before (26) organs with foldback won’t have the correct effect. Also, the graded (stepped) entrance on most drawbar organs is not desirable. And finally it should be noted that the drawbars are not drawn in one after the other (like (18)) but only being started to be drawn in one after the other but ending all together. All this while controlling the overall volume with the volume pedal, setting the vibrato and doing a „drawbar tremolo“. It looks easy in the score but in the end one is really doing many things at the same time.
I was wondering if the vibrato is going in and out with the volume, but it’s probably really an effect on the peak of the volume curve and is coupled with the „drawbar tremolo“.
The six notes around (31) can be played on one manual with a 4′ foot setting and playing the pitches of manual II 8va. Makes for faster changes.
Modulations/Transistoires
Organ after (44/1): if the manual can’t produce 16′ this should all be doubled with the pedal.
Before (49/6) and after (50/7): why Grisey makes a distinction between Vibrato Great and Swell I don’t understand. It seems to me they can be turned on at the same time?
Transistoires
(12) This has to go fast: Leslie off, Vibrato off, Volume Pedal down, change of registration manual I and pedal, play chord/pedal and slowly come back in again. In less than half a second, please.
(16) can be played on different manuals. In fact, if the organ is not right, it has to. What is important though is the sudden change of timbre. What is even more important however is that the E with 16′ will sound throughout this whole passage!
After (18): the registration in the bass stave is for the sound in the upper stave. It seems like Grisey recommends playing the following sound on the upper manual, in which case (23f) („préparer registration clavier II“) would again be wrong.
before (24): the registration in the lower stave is again for the sound in the upper stave. It is indeed quite confusing.
(24) again the 16′ E must sound. Whereas in Modulations the organ is playing mostly spectra of E, in Transistoires its mostly employed to play the bordun and the first few overtones.
(42) and (43): Grisey probably mixed up I and II again.
Before (57): the registration is for manual II and the following passage is played on manual II only. If 4-1 or 16-8 is demi tiré, who knows?
(61) This is the only time the pedal plays in the higher octave. If 4′ is available for the pedal, a one octave pedal might suffice.
Finally one more hint: where Plein Jeu is given, one might have to take into consideration that Grisey specifies an organ with 16′, 8′ and 5 1/3′ bass registers. Whether that means if Plein Jeu on an organ with more bass registers can use more registers is probably up to taste.
After all this, there are unfortunately still some questions open:
And here’s the stuff I still don’t know
Modulations is based on the spectra of E (41,2 Hz). I wonder: if the orchestra plays with a diapason at 443 Hz, does it still work? Can a logarithmic scale be moved like that?
Scanner vibrato or Crumar vibrato?
Registration Transistoires (57)
Why not turning vibrato for swell and great on at the same time in Modulation (49)/Transistoires (6)?
Leslie speakers can have three settings: off, chorale (slow) and tremolo (fast). Does „Leslie on“ mean chorale or tremolo? Likewise, if it’s not on, is it off or chorale? If the organ would constantly play with a slow leslie, that would change the sound dramatically, probably most noticeable in the fantastic moment in Transistoires at (16).
Who knew there’s so much to talk about a simple Hammond Organ? A hammond organ that’s not even a hammon organ? Well, now we now.