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Have Organ, Will Travel

Have Organ, Will Travel

Cameron Carpenter is without a doubt the most visible organist on the planet. First of all, the 33-year-old Juilliard graduate’s abilities as a player are second to none. He possesses an astounding technique and unfailingly sure musical instincts, whether the repertoire is Bach, French Late Romantic, or his own virtuoso transcriptions. Then there’s the “package” you get encountering Carpenter as a performer on video or in person—the mohawk, the eye liner, the shiny jackets and bejeweled shoes, the rippling biceps, the out-there sexuality, his views on the Church as an institution. But none of this is what truly sets Carpenter apart from other current masters of “The King of Instruments” and what makes him as controversial as he is in the organ world. What he’ll be remembered for is this: Cameron Carpenter has had it with pipe organs, those leviathans that reside, immovably, in churches, concert halls, and even department stores. And he’s done something about it.

Since March of 2014, Carpenter has been performing publicly on a digital organ of his own design, built by the Needham, Massachusetts, company of Marshall & Ogletree. In late August, Sony released a CD/DVD set with Carpenter playing a wide-ranging program on what’s called the International Touring Organ. Carpenter grew up in a small town in Northwestern Pennsylvania but now divides his time off the road between Los Angeles and Berlin. I spoke with the musician by phone from Germany. “It sounds blasphemous, but I think it’s a demonstrable and observable thing that this organ is a much richer instrument than most of the pipe organs in the world,” he told me. “It has the ability to place the traditional resources of the instrument at the behest of the player without engaging such fundamental realities as the entropy, inertia, and momentum of moving parts and the wear that friction will bring to bear on those parts. The idea of building an instrument which could somehow short-circuit the realities of friction and momentum would have been an idea highly desirable to the great organ-builders of whatever era—people like Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, Robert Hope- Jones (the inventor of the theater organ), Ernest Skinner, or G. Donald Harrison. All of those men went to their graves trying to build an instrument that was technologically better. That the organ, for centuries, along with the clock and the loom, was the most sophisticated device built by man makes it all the more ironic that it has come to us as a church instrument. It is the most tangible example of the irreconcilability of religion and science that there is. The fact that the International Touring Organ is able to walk away from those things, both in a metaphysical and a Newtonian sense, is for me so irresistible that it just has to be told to the world.”

Electric/electronic organs have been mass-produced since the 1930s, with increasing sophistication and musical value. For about 35 years, the methodology has been “digital” with sound produced either synthetically or, better, as the result of sampling a real pipe organ. Marshall & Ogletree, a relative newcomer to the industry with under a dozen completed instruments to its name, has gone to the greatest lengths to faithfully reproduce the sounds of the organs it samples. Many manufacturers will briefly sample a note from a given stop, loop it to provide as long a tone as the music requires, and then use DSP to derive different pitches. Marshall & Ogletree’s “PipeSourcing” technique involves a 15- to 20-second recording of each individual pipe, utilizing several high-quality microphones in the nearfield. For his ITO (a considerable investment on Carpenter’s part; he owns it) M & O’s large sample library, mostly sourced from Boston-area organs, was incorporated along with samples from several other instruments the artist admires—the organ in the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California, two organs from Carpenter’s youth in Erie, Pennsylvania, and a large Wurlitzer theater organ now resident in a private home in Great Falls, Virginia. But the goal is not to emulate a specific pipe organ but rather to create an instrument that is supremely dependable and musically flexible.

Marshall & Ogletree’s very first organ—their “Opus 1” in the lingo of organ-builders—was the instrument built to replace the Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ at Trinity Church in downtown Manhattan that was irreparably damaged on September 11, 2001. It was this organ that made Carpenter a believer in the brand. “It was something immediately clear at the moment that it happened. That moment occurred on November 4, 2004, which was the day I played the first of Marshall & Ogletree’s organs at Trinity Church, Wall Street. This is an unprecedented example of an emerging, fledgling organ-builder having their first instrument installed and immediately become one of the most famous organs in the world because of the importance of the venue. It’s played practically round the clock and used extensively in television and web casts. As a student at Juilliard, I had, of course, heard about this—mostly in terms of bitter resistance on the part of organists and their outrage that a [digital] instrument was replacing a pipe organ, itself a rather telling sign of the fetishism of the physical by organists. I got to know the builders and Owen Burdick, the director of music at the church. They allowed me to play the instrument and have access to it. The first day that I played it—the first minute that I played it—I immediately saw two things. I saw that this was a much greater organ than the pipe organ it replaced ever could be and that if I didn’t have this instrument in my future, I would be profoundly unhappy.”

Have Organ, Will Travel

The International Touring Organ, M & O’s Opus 8, travels from concert to concert by truck with a driver and one technician. Setup of the instrument and all its associated amplification and loudspeakers can be accomplished in around four hours. Typically, the speaker complement includes 40 full-range Definitive Technology loudspeakers and a dozen custom-built subwoofers; amplification is provided by the Swedish pro-audio firm Lab.gruppen, chosen for dependability as well as sonic excellence. Setting up this formable assemblage of equipment and setting levels is surprisingly routine, Carpenter reports. “I have a series of complicated diagnostic tests but the organ is shockingly consistent.

We think it’s because it’s not just speakers sitting on a stage, it’s speakers that are in little chambers, not unlike pipe chambers. These cabinets are just as responsible as the speakers are for the consistency of the instrument. I’ve had it in a great many rooms and the number of changes that I’ll make from hall to hall are in the one-to-two-minutes of work range. There’s almost nothing that has to be done. Sometimes you get a situation where part of the stage is rattling or something’s loose in the venue, or there are room nodes or idiosyncrasies—but all those things can be addressed. The organ always retains its identity every place I’ve taken it. When I sit down, it’s exactly the instrument I designed.”

It should be noted that both Carpenter and M&O view the International Touring Organ as “a multichannel instrument” which should be experienced with the array of amplifiers and loudspeakers designed for it. Once it was necessary to play the ITO through a venue’s house audio system that summed the multichannel output into a stereo mix. This compromise “makes the organ, in my opinion, sound slightly two-dimensional. Well, perhaps more than slightly. It’s not something I feel is true to the spirit of the instrument,” Carpenter says.

 

Carpenter’s new release for Sony Classics, If You Could Read My Mind, effectively demonstrates both the versatility of the ITO and the performer’s exceptional musical range. On the CD are substantive examples from the core organ repertoire. There’s Bach, of course, the Organ Sonata No. 6 in G major, BWV 530. The opening Vivace darts and dances with a joyous buoyancy and, for the Lento movement that follows, Carpenter subtly varies the tonal character of the melody, employing slight but distinct variations in warmth, hue, and intensity. The closing Allegro is active and celebratory. Marcel Dupré’s Variations sur un Noël, for which Carpenter punches in the mass and timbre of a large French Romantic instrument, gets a reading that maximizes the sense of organic development inherent to the work’s theme and variations construction.

Bach and Dupré were working organists who also composed, and Carpenter, too, writes original music. His ten-minute Music for an Imaginary Film is, as expected, highly cinematic but, like the best movie music, seems to express mood and emotional states rather than on-screen action. Carpenter composes in an advanced tonal idiom, but is really much more concerned with harmonic density and texture than with issues of consonance or dissonance. The disc also holds five Song Paraphrases, original compositions that hearken back to Liszt’s opera paraphrases. Carpenter’s treatments of five popular songs (including the title track, Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind,” plus songs by Burt Bacharach, Leonard Cohen, Anthony Newley/Leslie Bricusse, and Bob Montgomery) are quite imaginative, employing some of the ITO’s more exotic stops.

Carpenter is well known for his arrangements and transcriptions, of which he’s produced more than 100. Leading off the CD is Cello Suite Elaboration, which deals authoritatively with the implications of Bach’s famous G Major Prelude for solo cello in very much the same spirit as Busoni’s great piano transcription of the Bach Chaconne for solo violin. Rachmaninoff’s plaintive Vocalise is soulfully performed, as is Carpenter’s take on Ástor Piazzolla’s Oblivion, in which the sound of a bandoneon is effectively evoked, with sudden shifts in volume and a shuddering decay of the solo voice at the piece’s conclusion. Leonard Bernstein’s Candide Overture features not just a glorious range of timbres (the carousel-like sonority near the end is perfect) but also a rock-solid rhythmic sense, as the soloist negotiates the varying time signatures and tricky cross-rhythms.

Finally, there’s one of Carpenter’s many transcriptions of a piano work, in this case Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Sonata in F Sharp major, Op. 30. Typically, organists begin with the piano, later switching to organ and leaving behind the other instrument. Not so with Carpenter. “I started the organ and piano independently, at the same time,” he told me. “I still play the piano extremely seriously and would consider the piano as my ‘workshop.’ All of the piano works that I transcribe I could perform in concert. I would hesitate to say that it would be very good—I would certainly rather hear Yuja Wang or one of my other friends play that piece than me—but I have a command of it that’s tolerable.” Scriabin was a synesthete—he saw colors when he heard music—and Carpenter’s “colorization” of the Sonata would surely have appealed to him.

The recording, accomplished at the Methuen Memorial Music Hall in Methuen, Massachusetts, is tonally resplendent with a wide dynamic range. Bassisprodigious:subwooferownerswill get a good return on their investments. One of Carpenter’s earlier Telarc releases, Revolutionary, was produced as a multichannel SACD, but I sensed no regret on the performer’s part that Sony had no interest in giving If You Could Read My Mind the audiophile treatment. “I’m a typical Millennial, in terms of my own music consumption,” he declared. “The highest fidelity that I have access to in my own home is a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones.” Carpenter doesn’t own a CD player, downloading all of his music for casual listening. A high-resolution release was “just not felt to be viable.” If a large number of Carpenter’s fans are in his demographic, that conclusion is probably correct.

Sony’s release includes a DVD that holds six performances, with four pieces from the CD—the Bernstein and Scriabin arrangements, the Bach Cello Suite Elaboration, and Music for an Imaginary Film. Purchasers also get two more of Carpenter’s transcriptions of piano works, Chopin’s Minute Waltz (the organist’s pedal work is pretty amazing) and Liszt’s La Campanella. There’s also a six-minute mini-documentary, Birth of the International Touring Organ that’s breathlessly self-promoting and melodramatic but…well, this is an artist who is, as his first piano teacher says in the documentary, “larger than life.”

Eventually in our interview the name of Virgil Fox (1912-1980) had to come up. Fox, who recorded for numerous labels over a span of 35 years, toured in the 1970s with his “Heavy Organ” programs, appearing, for example, at the Fillmore East with a light show churning away behind him as he thundered through Bach’s Toccata in D Minor. He was, undeniably, a successful classical musician attempting to expand his audience as a flamboyant “popularizer.” I’d read some earlier interviews with Carpenter in which he seemed to bristle a little at comparisons. “When I hear people say I remind them of him or getting very nostalgic about it, I think they’re probably not really listening to me,” he told a Washington newspaper in 2011. But I felt I had to put it out there, and ask Carpenter how he’s similar to Fox, and how he’s different. Thankfully, he didn’t hang up. Yes, he allowed, Virgil Fox was the best-known American organist of his day and a commercial success—parallels that the young artist certainly has no problem with—and Carpenter noted that “he was the first person to pull the organ out of the church and give it an alternative identity.” To contrast himself with Fox, however, Cameron Carpenter ultimately settled on issues of technology. “The organ that he played was ridiculously, abominably ugly. Virgil Fox was constantly in trouble with the builders of that organ because he publicly maligned it all the time. He knew how bad that organ sounded. He always called it ‘the device’ or ‘the electric.’ He didn’t have the tools, other than that he had an instrument that allowed him to play in places other than churches. Virgil Fox never had to face the problem that I had to face—the constant approach by increasingly greasy, washed-up organ salesmen from every company under the sun offering to build one or another cheap, crappy instrument for me. It was extremely tempting on many occasions to just get on with my career, as I could have done even two years ago, by having an instrument immediately available. If I had done that, we wouldn’t be speaking right now. Because we wouldn’t have an album that was worth talking about. It was such a soul-killing experience even to consider it. I did the right thing and I’ve got an instrument that, even if I vanish into dust, will still be one of the great organs in the world. It needs only a little time to be recognized as that, but time goes very fast.”

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