By F. Daniel Kent
A virtuoso composer-performer unique among keyboardists, Cameron Carpenter’s approach to the organ is smashing the stereotypes of organists and organ music while generating a level of acclaim, exposure, and controversy unprecedented for an organist. His repertoire – from the complete works of J. S. Bach and Cesar Franck, to his hundreds of transcriptions of non-organ works, his original compositions, and his collaborations with jazz and pop artists – is perhaps the largest and most diverse of any organist. He is the first organist ever nominated for a GRAMMY® Award for a solo album.
Carpenter challenges the ways in which the organist is promoted and the organ is played. His repertoire includes the complete organ works of Bach, Franck and Liszt, but he has adapted more than 200 works not for the organ: from the piano music of Liszt and Rachmaninoff to Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, to music from animé and film (Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, and scores by John Williams and Bernard Herrmann), and re-imaginings of songs by Kate Bush, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Annie Lennox. Bringing increased physicality to the organ as a former dancer, his supervirtuosic organ transcriptions of Chopin Études have led to comparisons as diverse as Vladimir Horowitz and Fred Astaire. Cameron’s embrace of fashion on the concert stage includes concert wear of his own design.
Carpenter was a child prodigy who performed Bach's complete Well-Tempered Clavier at age 11 before touring as a boy soprano with the American Boychoir for two years. He graduated from The Juilliard School in 2006 and lives in Berlin. Carpenter is one of the only performing artists to make a practice of meeting his audience in person before his performances – often spending over an hour before each concert shaking hands and signing autographs on the floor of a concert venue. Closing out his Spring tour of the US, Carpenter has two final performances Sunday, May 15, 7:00pm in Nashville, TN at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center Laura Turner Concert Hall and then Monday, May 16, 7:30pm Charlotte, NC: St. Gabriel Catholic Church.
For more information on either performance please visit www.cameroncarpenter.com.
While still in Los Angeles during the tour, Cameron Carpenter took time from his busy schedule to talk with the National Independent Music Examiner.
You are considered by many to be a virtuoso organist, but you hardly seem to fit the perceived mold of what is expected of that specifically traditional musician. How do you see yourself fitting within the larger world of organists and how do you relate to it from your vantage point?
I’ve never really considered myself part of the organ world or in fact at all motivated by the things that seem to be mainstream for most organists. Mind you, it is not of any particular significance to me to bash or belittle organists or the organ world. If anything, I feel a kind of sense of brotherhood for organists, who - in some ways - have something of a hard row as musicians. I started playing the organ because when I was home schooled my parents were very quick to expose me to every possible thing that had any element of world culture or glamour.
When did you decide that the organ would be your instrument of choice?
As a child, in a design catalogue from the 1920’s I found a picture of someone playing a cinema organ. This was very significant to me because there was one identifiable moment in my life where I suddenly became aware of the organ as an instrument. From the beginning it had everything to do with glamour, performance and secularity; this elaborately carved organ played by a mustachioed guy in a tuxedo with a silver screen behind him. I saw in that everything that was not only lacking in NW Pennsylvania in 1985 but was full of the sense of event that I already knew I simply wanted to do. I was the kind of child who dressed up and performed and danced and sang. I needed no particular training or disinhibition to do so at a moment’s notice. I was always attracted to performance and I think that is the crux of the thing that gives me not only an attraction to the organ but it also gives me an abiding wish to change and redefine much about what it is and what we can consider the organ and what we can do with it…or what I do with it.
You bear no small amount of controversy from organ purists for any number of reasons from your theatricality onstage to your openness about your unorthodox approach to relationships and sexuality. Perhaps one of the biggest points of contention seems to be the fact that you seem determined to work actively in a direction that defies tradition as it pertains to the future of the instrument. Why do you think this is such a sore issue?
Very simply speaking, from the standpoint of wanting to be able to do more with the organ as a commercially minded and extremely competitive performer I am, of course, totally inspired to break down whatever boundaries are there to the greatest degree possible. It makes my work easier and it makes it more enjoyable and freer. The organ is a channel for something that I am after as an expression. I bring my artistic aims and goals and values to it and try to bend it around them rather than the other way around. That’s why it pisses a lot of organists off, but it’s also why I think it is successful. The main ideology of the organist is that he should adapt to the instrument and do so in service of not just the music, but something that is implied as larger – the sort of dutiful grand tradition. The organ never had a student revolution so it’s a little like Austria in that there’s pretty, old buildings but nothing’s all that damaged by war. But, boy, there’s a lot of backwards attitudes, conservatism and scary thinking. That has got to change. I have no particular interest or agenda in changing the over-all behavior of day-to-day organists. I simply want to be able to do what I do and have the freedom to do it. In terms of general public reception of what an organist can be: absolutely! I want to throw those doors as wide and as fabulously open as possible but I don’t have any real inspiration in doing it for organists or the organ community. And, indeed that is fortunate because most of them would seem to reject any efforts in that direction. I’m doing it for myself and for my own success and freedom of expression in the service of music and musical expression in this surprisingly censorship-prone little corner of it.
Read Part 2 here.
***Please note: This interview is archived in its entirety at www.fdanielkent.com.***
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