Cameron Carpenter's Organ Revolution

There’s something about a person who speaks in full sentences: nouns, verbs and their descriptors lined up neatly, exactly where they should be. Of course, ‘should’ is important here, but not in the moral sense. It’s about precision, things landing squarely where they’re aimed.

It’s this precision that marks Cameron Carpenter, the 28 year-old whose playing and persona are disrupting the organ world, ‘pushing [its] technique to breathtaking heights, meshing virtuosity with musical intelligence’, according to the New York Times. Unsurprisingly, he’s picked up the ‘maverick’ moniker along the way, but  Carpenter’s response to the nickname is typically nuanced: ‘I’ve never been really keen on that,’ he says, ‘the way one or two little signifiers are often used to summarise complex things.’ At the same time, he admits he cultivates the image ‘because it’s genuine.’

Instead, ‘radical romanticism’ is his thing. ‘A romantic is a radical, because it’s a person who’s willing to break the rules on behalf of passion,’ he told Muso last November when he was touring to support Revolutionary, his first release on Telarc.

In some ways, though, this is the paradox that makes Carpenter as visionary as he is romantic. After all, the Romanticism he embraces was an impassioned response to the Age of Enlightenment, and specifically a rallying cry against its scientific rationalisation of nature. No one who’s met Carpenter will doubt his passion, but it’s often deployed against those who resist change, thwarting the technical development of his instrument. ‘My sensibility is influenced by electricity and electronic data,’ he explains.  

Indeed, among the rules Carpenter is happy to shatter is the reverence for the traditional organ that’s observed by many of his colleagues. ‘There’s a fictional ideal of pipes…whose playing actions are inadequate to the virtuoso,’ he says. Thus while ‘every conceivable string and wind player is constantly striving for tuning, there’s an acceptance that the organ will be out of tune, and a pride in the fact that organs can’t move.’

A champion and designer of virtual pipe organs, Carpenter says that as technique and virtuosity progress, unquestioning reverence for the traditional organ becomes increasingly retrograde and increasingly works against playing itself. ‘As long as the instrument stays ahead of the artist, the artform continues to develop,’ he says. The alternative is unspoken but nonetheless crystal clear.

Similarly, Carpenter’s musical tastes are unburdened by the rigid borders that often plague classical music. ‘One has to put aside any question of quality and listen to what one is responding to,’ he says. ‘If it sounds good, it is good – this is basically my approach,’ Carpenter says.

That’s in stark contrast with the ‘new conservatism’ Carpenter detects among younger organists, many of whom are ‘highly cynical’, he says. ‘I see an unexplainable amount of negativity and worst of all snobbishness among younger organists,’ says Carpenter.

Whatever tribalism plagues his younger compatriots doesn’t deter Carpenter from reaching out to them, though. Between concert gigs and recording sessions, he offers himself up as a mentor to talented high school students. Besides his distaste for the  ‘xenophobic’ attitude most organists have towards each other, Carpenter says he’s ‘motivated by my own experience as a prodigious kid, finding adults who’d treat me in a non-jealous manner.’

Carpenter’s prodigious talent will be on dramatic display at his afternoon concert next Saturday 21 November at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin near Times Square.

Photo: Scott Gordon Bleicher