WASHINGTON – Of the many adjectives used to describe Cameron Carpenter – “flamboyant,” “extravagantly talented” and “intelligent” among them – the quality noted most often about the 33-year-old Juilliard-trained organist is his flair for provocation.
Carpenter, who typically sports a mohawk and the onstage wardrobe of a glam rocker, and whose repertoire runs from Bach to Bacharach, acknowledges as much in his official bio, which alludes to his ability to generate “a level of acclaim, exposure, and controversy unprecedented for an organist.”
Yet just try to find a bad review of the American organist. You might start to believe that a negative word has never been written about him. The top results under a Google search for “Cameron Carpenter review” positively glow with superlatives.
Carpenter is quick to correct the misimpression of universal acclaim. Mere minutes into a long, wide-ranging phone conversation, he cites a recent “fracas” in Dallas, where his Bach-centric performance at the Meyerson Symphony Center on Jan. 17 drew the censure of critic Scott Cantrell, who lambasted Carpenter’s performance on the center’s C.B. Fisk organ as “grotesque.”
Carpenter’s willingness to talk about bad press doesn’t come across as false modesty. He sounds convincing when he says he got a lot out of the discussion generated in the review’s online comments and the backlash on his Facebook page. It’s not the first time Carpenter has been chided for his musical choices, athletic playing style and even his showmanship, which some have likened to the preening of an arena rocker, implying that such peacocking has no place on an instrument associated with stately, liturgical music.
But Carpenter has a thick skin when it comes to criticism, and he doesn’t mince words. “I don’t give a rat’s ass if it’s considered high or low, profane or sacred,” says Carpenter, who calls himself an atheist, yet who also speaks rapturously of the organ’s “ecstatic” musical qualities. “The only thing that’s worth a damn to me is that I enjoy it.”
When it comes to musical taste, Carpenter, who lives in Berlin, might be described as “radically inclusive” (a tongue-in-cheek term he also has used to describe his bisexuality). He listens, like many his age, to techno, electronic dance music and hip-hop (the latter one of the few musical genres that Carpenter says doesn’t translate to the organ, for which he has transcribed many pieces written for other instruments). Yet despite what purists might call his sacrilegious embrace of the unorthodox, Carpenter insists that he is, in many ways, a traditionalist.
“My compositional language stops around 1928,” he says. “The kind of music I want to play is big on melody and big on the development of form. I am the world’s No. 1 nerd.”
Carpenter is comfortable with such contradictions, calling the organ an “emotion generator,” a term that encompasses both its machinelike qualities – he describes the biggest pipe organs as “self-contained railroads” – and its purely rapturous sound. Despite organ music’s more typical association with the melodrama of silent movies and the transcendent spirituality of the church, Carpenter calls it “an instrument not of mythos, but of pure reason.”
The only musical member of his family, Carpenter grew up in rural Pennsylvania, near Erie, where he was home-schooled for much of his youth by his mother, Lynn, a visual artist. (His father, Gregory, is an engineer; his younger brother, Julian, an engineer and designer.) His upbringing, which he describes as religion-free, did not include exposure to church organs, and it wasn’t the sound of the organ that first drew him to play, beginning at age 6. It was a photograph in a children’s encyclopedia. As Carpenter recalls, the photo was of the Radio City Music Hall organ, with a movie screen in the background.
“That photo,” he says, “influenced me toward the idea of playing the organ as an event, not something you just sit down and do, but something glamorous.”
To this day, Carpenter says, he has a “limbic system response” whenever he sits down at the console, a feeling in his skin telling him that he’s ready “to do this thing that I do.” Carpenter compares the furious, full-body attack that he brings to the organ – an approach that he says has been known to push an instrument “literally to the breaking point” – to the physicality of a dancer.
In fact, he trained as a dancer from age 8 to 22, while honing his musicianship at the American Boychoir School in Princeton, New Jersey, and the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem before graduating from Juilliard in 2006 with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
As for his sartorial choices, Carpenter would argue that he’s old-fashioned, despite a predilection for leather, Swarovski crystals and spangled, Cuban-style heels. (He says the custom-made shoes, with their glove-like, kidskin sole, allow him to play passages entirely on the organ’s pedals, using his toes, arch and heels in the manner of a three-fingered hand. There’s no practical support, though. “That’s why you see me cross the stage with such a gingerly walk,” he jokes.)
Although Carpenter openly embraces the inevitable comparisons to Liberace – an admitted style icon – along with the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, the musician says the roots of his showmanship go back much further, beyond even such famous 20th-century organ extroverts as the cape-wearing Virgil Fox (1912-1980) and Korla Pandit (1921-1998).
“I mean, Busoni wore sequins, too,” Carpenter says, referring to turn-of-the-century piano virtuoso and composer Ferruccio Busoni.
Carpenter is equally unapologetic about his advocacy for new technology. Although he’s comfortable on a traditional pipe organ, he is quickly becoming better known for his International Touring Organ, a portable, digital instrument that he conceived of and designed with organ builders Marshall and Ogletree and that he debuted in a concert at Lincoln Center last year.
The problem with stationary pipe organs, Carpenter says, is that each one, with its idiosyncratic array of “moving parts, air columns, friction and inertia” – all of which are rooted in a physical object that does not travel – robs an organist of the intimate relationship that invariably develops between a player and his or her instrument (in the way a violinist might come to know a beloved Stradivarius). Even a professional pianist – the vast majority of whom play a Steinway Model B, regardless of whether they’re in “South Korea or Southern California,” as Carpenter puts it – have the luxury of a consistent tool, wherever they go.
With his ambition, visual flair, technological savvy, inclusive tastes and bold, boundary-breaking musicianship, Carpenter means to drag the organ, along with those who would resist changing it, into the 21st century. If that means coping with – and occasionally courting – controversy, Carpenter says so be it.
“Whether it’s John Williams or (Jan Pieterszoon) Sweelinck, I don’t think it makes a great deal of difference,” he says, comparing the “Star Wars” composer to the great Dutch composer and organist who straddled the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods.
“If the organ community as a whole is not in a position – is not tooled – to benefit collectively and commercially from the fact that there’s a newsmaking organist, then to hell with them.”
