To say that Cameron Carpenter’s persona is unique among classical organists would be a gross understatement. He is, in fact, an anomaly: a Juilliard-trained classical organist with a flamboyant, punk-rock image more stereotypically found in an underground Berlin club than on an organ bench in a church or concert hall. Carpenter’s instrument of choice is commonly — and mistakenly, according to him — regarded as religious, conservative, and archaic. Carpenter himself is none of those things; he is vocal about his secularism and passionate about his very radical, very forward-looking, 21st-century philosophies about both the organ and music in general.
In recent years Carpenter has witnessed the realization of a long-time dream with the completion and debut of his wholly original and unprecedented International Touring Organ. This season the majority of his performances are on that portable, digital instrument, and feature the fantastically diverse and virtuosic repertoire for which he, and it, are particularly suited. This weekend, however, Carpenter will take a break from playing on the International Touring Organ and give a much more traditional recital of works by Bach on the Meyerson Symphony Center’s Fisk Opus 100 pipe organ.
Ahead of his Saturday night Dallas recital, I spoke with Carpenter. He told me about how he came into contact with the organ as a young boy. “I had parents who undertook to provide me with an organ when it became apparent that I was totally obsessed with it,” he explained. “I was a homeschooled child, but in a way different from the homeschooling that we think of today, which is sort of a rather inbred, far right thing. Rather, my parents were hippies and intellectuals, and so they homeschooled me [with that mindset]. In one of my encyclopedias at home there was a picture of an organ. The moment I saw it, I knew that this was my future. It was that quick.”
He adds, “It’s worth pointing out that the organ in the picture was not a church organ, but a theater organ, which I’ve always felt was somehow symbolic, not only of my own secularity, but also my view of all music as entertainment, which of course it is.”
Carpenter’s hippy, intellectual parents provided him with a Hammond B3 to learn on at home. He started playing the organ at the same time that he started taking piano lessons, a phenomenon which, by his own admission, is nearly unheard of given the organ’s lack of general accessibility. “I was very lucky,” he says.
I asked Carpenter why, given the fact that he is most famous right now for playing on his International Touring Organ, he agreed to come to Dallas to perform the works of Bach on the Meyerson’s pipe organ. His response was lengthy and meticulously articulated. Half manifesto, half academic dissertation, and peppered with the kind of incendiary statements that are easily misinterpreted, it would be impossible to relay his response in its entirety in a blog post. In the end, it comes down to this: “I’m a working musician,” he said. “While the International Touring Organ has been, in fact, widely well-received even in the most conservative circles, there are places where it is still thought controversial or inadvisable to take that organ into a hall where very rich local people have given pipe organs.”
“In the case of the Meyerson,” he explained further, “I was invited to play a recital, and I said yes. That was a choice I made. The Meyerson didn’t say, ‘we’re not having the touring organ.’ There was never a question of that. The gig, so to speak, was to play the pipe organ, take it or leave it. I decided to take it.”
Why Bach? “When I am then faced with a pipe organ recital, my best approach is to actually go back to basics. Most places that I play want me to do the whole Cameron Carpenter Barnum and Bailey circus organ thing. That’s not something that’s actually transportable to a pipe organ without a great deal of work, and then usually it doesn’t work as well as I’d like. It is kind of an entrenchment to play a Bach recital, but in a sense one that I very much welcome, especially given that the International Touring Organ has already taken up over 97 percent of my schedule.”
On Saturday evening, in addition to playing works by Bach, Carpenter will perform a three-movement improvised “symphony,” which will likely thrill both conservative and more rebellious audience members. He explained the improvisation he has planned: “I’m playing a complete work, and it should be performed as such. It is very decidedly not, as you might imagine, kind of making it up as you go along, but rather sitting down with a composed mind to channel the musical vocabulary that’s sort of accrued in me over the years. I’m also a composer of sorts. I view myself as an anachronistic composer but one that is beginning to be taken seriously. I have a great desire to share my musical vocabulary with the world. In some ways it’s ironically quite a traditional one, so it’ll seem passé to some. But it is a very personal offering and, as Martha Graham famously pointed out, if you do not give to the world your unique expression, it is lost, because it only survives with you.”
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