Musty, dusty church lofts: if that’s your first mental image associated with the organ, Cameron Carpenter is doing his best to try to change that. The 29-year-old American, who has won fans across the world with his staggering technique and keen intelligence but also has drawn jeers for his flamboyant and even campy stage presence, is not willing to settle for anything less than full-out artistic revolt. He wouldn't have it any other way.
For example, on the DVD portion of his latest release, a combined CD & DVD package called "Cameron Carpenter Live" (Teldec), he plays a four-manual Wurlitzer against a dazzlingly white, modernist background. Not only is it visually stylish, but there's not a single church pew or pane of stained glass to be seen--and that's just how he likes it.
"The organ is the last truly radical instrument," he asserts. "It is so buried within an absurdly narrow wedge of players and listeners, and so much the victim of its historical contexts of church and old, musty stuff, that it has the freedom to be an instrument of artistic revolution." In his mind, the very specific cultural attachments we generally have for this instrument is very freeing for him as an artist. "The organ has very low commercial attraction, and so expectations are very limited as well," he points out. Whether he is playing his own, absolutely chilling arrangement of Schubert's Erlkonig or trying to urge Bach's famous preludes and fugues to even great heights, he says that his musical selections, just as much as that his outre diamante ensembles and highly unorthodox performance choices, are in service of such an upheaval.
The erudite and profoundly articulate Carpenter, who was homeschooled as a child, says he doesn't understand why his more conservative detractors take such issue. "I don't understand that shutting out everything else in the spectrum of what an organ is, and what it can do, in favor of an extremely narrow definition--with its technical capacities, with its associated repertoire, with its nearly automatic associations with religion, and so forth," he says. "The organ can be lascivious, violent, dynamic, ecstatic."
"But its traditional immobility is such a huge metaphor, isn't it? Carpenter muses. "In its traditional setting, usually in a church, it's more a monument than a vital vessel. I think of it like a great monument standing in the middle of the road, around which traffic must be diverted. And think about what an organist has to do: a word that is often used is 'pilgrimage.' We have to make pilgrimages to visit the instruments, and the greatest instruments are scattered around the world. I can't have very long-term relationships with any one organ. And that's incredibly frustrating as an artist. Even pianists, who for the most part have to contend with a new instrument at every venue, at least can come home to their own instruments."
The alternative which Cameron has mapped out is a touring organ, called the Excaliber, which he has designed and will begin using in 2011. A "virtual pipe organ," as he calls it, the instrument is a modular, cross-genre instrument that can be scaled for spaces ranging from small clubs to outdoor venues to concert halls. "It takes the organ out of the church or concert hall and brings it right to people," he says. "It will make it so much more of a democratic instrument."
"I began playing a Hammond B3 organ at age six," says the artist, who was born in 1981, grew up in Pennsylvania, and joined the American Boychoir School in 1992 as a boy soprano. "My father had a business building industrial furnaces. There was such an Ives-ian juxtaposition of sound constantly--the guys working in the shop would always listen to Top 40 radio; there were all these industrial sounds; and there I was not just trying out the buttons on the control panels my father was building, but making music as well on my B3. And I think the idea of industrial machinery carried over into my fascination with the organ, with all of its rows of buttons and controls and pipes. Moreover, it was set early in my mind that music went along with the actual making of things, of useful objects, and also that I was making music in a secular setting, on an instrument very closely associated with jazz and rock rather than with liturgical or religious music. Those associations have always stayed with me very clearly."
Carpenter, who cites as his inspiration not so much other classical musicians than muses like Laura Nyro, filmmakers and fashion designers--whom he admire not just for their distinct points of view but also for what he calls their "highly developed personae." "So much individuality is quashed in classical music circles," says Carpenter, who designs all of his own stage wear, and is more often than not decked out for performances in rhinestone-spangled T-shirts and hyper-stylish white organ shoes. "I also feel a kinship to the way that I imagine drag performers feel: when you present yourself a certain way physically, within a certain character play, it's a very liberating thing emotionally."
Carpenter's approach isn't without controversy: some take issue with Cameron's visual theatrics, others with the way he stretches and pulls music flamboyantly, or with his technique. But there's no denying his innate communion with the organ. As one of America's foremost organists, Dr. John Weaver, the one-time head of both the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music's organ department observed upon introducing him to a rather dubious and generally more conservative-thinking audience at the annual convention of the American Guild of Organists: This is truly one of the most amazing musical minds that I have ever encountered, a talent of Mozartean proportions, and a technique the likes of which I don't think has existed on this planet [before]."
When asked about his influences, Carpenter's eclectic list runs from Vladimir Horowitz and Arcadi Volodos to the gritty bard Tom Waits and the pop diva Rihanna, whose music he's arranged for performances he's given in schools across the country. It's clear that as much as the widely read and erudite Carpenter is perhaps the most impassioned champion of the organ imaginable, he would have found at least one other artistic outlet in which he would have flourished quite beautifully. Cameron seems to agree.
"The organ," says Carpenter thoughtfully, "is not an end unto itself. It's a means to an end."
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
