Carnegie Goes Electronic

It can be argued that New York's Carnegie Hall has the finest acoustics in the U.S. It was built in 1891, well before sound became a modern science, and to this day no one really knows why an orchestra, pianist or singer sounds so well performing there. Given the problem so many new auditoriums have with their acoustics, the managers of Carnegie Hall guard their trust as though it were the Holy Grail.

Recently, Carnegie officials had to face an agonizing acoustical problem: the hall needed a new pipe organ. The old instrument, installed in 1929 but never totally satisfactory, had been removed in the mid-'60s. But to install a new console and set of pipes would have meant tearing out the stage walls and changing their shape. To Carnegie's executive director, Julius Bloom, that would have been as risky as prying apart a Stradivarius violin. What to do?

What Carnegie did was go electronic. Last week at a gala recital presented by Concert Organist Virgil Fox, the hall showed off its newest feature--a behemoth that can growl, sing, tinkle, purr and blast in a way unmatched by any other organ. A one-of-a-kind creation built by the Rodgers Organ Co. of Hillsboro, Ore., the new instrument is the most up-to-date and expensive electronic organ in the world. Carrying a price tag of $200,000, it took 23 months to design, construct and install. The finished product fairly bulges with audio-oscillators, sine-wave generators, filters, printed circuits and multiplex cables, plus enough knobs and controls to furnish the cockpit of a Boeing 747.

Guts and Power. The Rodgers sound comes from 192 speakers in 29 cabinets, four of which are 30-in. woofers (for the deep pedal tones) located high in the flies above the stage. The output of the five manuals (keyboards) comes from 18 cabinets strung invisibly within the proscenium arch behind acoustic gauze. In essence the new organ is a giant electronic sound synthesizer. Yet Fox's performances last week --despite his wearisome look-at-me antics and often histrionic interpretations of Bach, Franck, Dupre and Vierne --demonstrated that Carnegie has a superb instrument capable of Baroque festivity, Romantic mystery and 20th century guts and power. Its complex, contrapuntal layers of sound are clearer, more sharply defined than would have been possible with a conventional pipe organ. Pipe organs rarely sound as well in a concert hall as they do in the cavernous reaches of the churches and cathedrals for which they were originally intended.

Was Carnegie's new Rodgers really worth all that time and money? Emphatically yes. Fox's recital was merely the first of an inaugural series this season featuring such other eminent organists as Pierre Cochereau, Fernando Germani and Claire Coci. More important, perhaps, the new organ will permit performances of a sizable repertory of neglected works for orchestra and organ--notably the Saint-Saens "Organ" Symphony, the Poulenc Organ Concerto, and the concertos of Handel and Haydn.

Carnegie's new organ will do that in a way not obvious to the average listener. Different orchestras often have different pitches. The standard middle A, to which most orchestras tune, is 440 cycles per second. But the Vienna Philharmonic, for example, tunes to 445 for a brighter sound, while the New York Philharmonic prefers 441. Since the pitch of an ordinary organ--pipe or electronic--is immensely difficult to change, touring orchestras never bring along "organ works. But Carnegie's new Rodgers can be tuned from 435 to 445, or anywhere in between, with the turn of a single knob. Says Rodgers Co.'s tonal director, Allan Van Zoeren: "In this case, one pitch is worth a lot more than 1,000 words."

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