Cameron Carpenter, Bad Boy of the Organ, is bringing his show to town
March 11, 2016
Labeling Cameron Carpenter a non-traditional classical musician is such an understatement.
Badass of the organ is more like it. And not only because he performs in some of the world’s most refined venues in a leather jacket and crystal-studded shoes, with his Mohawk spiked to the chandeliers.
It is for his genius with the instrument and how he straddles the world of classical and contemporary music; it is also how he has dared to design his own digital organ to take the ancient piece where it could never go before.
He is, as one German publication called the 34-year-old, “A fallen angel who gives the organ back its sin.”
Carpenter and his International Touring Organ will play three concerts during the next three days with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. It is part of his most substantial tour yet, a 44-city trek that is taking Carpenter through the United States, Canada and Europe.
“I certainly haven’t set out to be subversive in the context of the organ. Historically, it’s very hard not to be subversive,” Carpenter said during a phone call from Houston, a stop on his tour.
“The organ has been deeply associated with Christianity since the time of the Reformation and the middle 17th century. … In my case, I’m very much against orthodoxy, very much against government, and very much against religion. I’m an atheist and an outspoken one.
“I believe that the organ is fascinating partly for its representation … the bridge it creates not only between science and religion, but particularly between human emotion and information.”
He was too young to understand all that when he started playing as he grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and was quickly pegged a prodigy with the keyboard. He knew there was something special about this particular instrument.
“I do remember the feeling when I first played the organ,” he said. “I try to describe it as touching time.”
Unlike any other instruments, Carpenter said, an organ’s sound offers more potential for an artist.
“If you pressed a key for one second or one minute, the sound that was created in second 59 would be exactly the same sound, typically, in the first, second, or the third, or, if you held it longer, the 15th minute …
“It is an incredibly powerful tool if you know how to use it expressionistically and musically. … It’s almost frightening to behold once you know what that means.”
Carpenter honed his technical skills and stage presence by attending the American Boychoir School in New Jersey, then the North Carolina School of the Arts. He graduated with two degrees from The Juilliard School in 2006. Not only is his repertoire stocked with Bach and Rachmaninoff, it is replete with his own compositions, film scores and pieces by Gordon Lightfoot.
He is the first solo organist to be nominated for a Grammy for a solo album.
But Carpenter said he never set out to become a professional performer.
“I have a bizarre sort of relationship with music; in a way it’s not totally different from a lot of historical artists,” he said. “It’s not so much that we love what we do, although I do love it most of the time. It is that I’m obsessed with it; I can’t really stop.”
The passion for the music, and wanting to share it with as many people as possible, was one of the reasons why he designed his International Traveling Organ, with the help of Marshall & Ogletree, an organ-building outfit in Massachusetts.
Other badass composers
Cameron Carpenter is not the first classical music performer to conjure up the image of a badass.
Here are five other classical music figures who were not to be trifled with:
- Carlo Gesualdo
As a young man in 1590, Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa, butchered his wife and her lover, the Duke of Andria, when he caught them in flagrante delicto. Because he was an Italian prince, he got away with it. Plus, his music was as dissonant and eerie as his life.
- Hector Berlioz
In 1838, violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini knelt at Berlioz’s feet onstage to proclaim his genius, and gave him 20,000 francs (estimated at twice Berlioz’s annual earnings).
He led concerts with more than 1,000 musicians. He fell in love with an actress upon seeing her perform Shakespeare, and married her after a painful six-year wait. During that time, he was engaged to another woman, and when her family broke it off, he hatched a plan to kill the woman, her mother and her new fiance, but broke it off.
- Ludwig von Beethoven
He was a household tyrant, and could be quite rude and difficult. An archduke was forced to decree that the usual rules of court etiquette did not apply to Beethoven. But that’s just common superstar stuff. What makes Beethoven a badass is that he wrote historically great music when he was almost totally deaf.
- Franz Liszt
Some say this pianist is the world’s first rock star. In the mid-1800s, women tore off scraps of his clothing, threw garments onstage and battled for locks of his long hair and his cigar butts. A German poet coined the phrase “Lisztomania.”
And he drew to himself the Countess Marie d’Agoult, wife of a French officer, to live with him and bear his daughter and son.
- Wilhelm Furtwängler
Known as one of the greatest musicians of his time, he led the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra from 1922 to 1945. He was condemned by many for staying in Germany and performing during the Nazi era, but he never gave the Nazi salute, even when Hitler was at a concert. He refused to perform in halls decorated with swastikas. He refused to join the Nazi party and avoided government functions.
For years, Carpenter toured but, because he was an organist, only certain venues had the instrument, and none of them was alike. It took an inordinate amount of time to learn each organ before a performance.
He came up with an organ that could travel with him; it is a masterpiece in its own right.
It has its own truck and takes four people to load it. Carpenter, along with an engineer, assembles it at the venue. It consists of a “supercomputer,” amplifier units and subwoofers, and is programmed with Carpenter’s preferred sounds and instruments from a cathedral organ to the Wurlitzer theater organ. He has identical organs in America and Europe, where he lives in Germany.
“In the age of YouTube, the person needs to be able to play in San Diego and San Francisco and South Carolina and South Korea, with the same repertoire in the same way for audiences who know already what to expect,” Carpenter said. “In order to do that, you have to have a consistent instrument.”
He knows he bothers some purists.
“The organ is a very good argument for natural selection, because the aspect of a machine which adapts to its time is very Darwinian,” Carpenter said.
“It is potentially a life-saving evolution in which the digital organ is a friend of the pipe organ, not the enemy.”
He believes that this evolution isn’t only necessary for the organ, but for the organist as well if he wants to continue to grow with it.
“I consider myself to be obsessed with the organ and what happens when I meet it,” he said. “That’s something I can’t get away from.”
If you go
What: Organist Cameron Carpenter plays Saint-Saens with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra
When: 8 p.m. Saturday at the L. Douglas Wilder Performing Arts Center, 700 Park Ave., Norfolk; 2:30 p.m., Sunday at the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts, 201 Market Street, Virginia Beach; 7:30 pm. Monday at the Ferguson Center for the Arts, 1 Avenue of the Arts, Newport News.
Tickets: Prices start at $25, 757-892-6366, www.virginiasymphony.org
