Naming names: a review of a new phenomenon

This will be the first time I have discussed an organist by name. But he has said that he loves the publicity he can get without having to say anything himself. So congratulations, Cameron Carpenter – this will amount to yet another Google hit when I post it.

March 9, 2014, I attended an event I was morbidly curious to attend. It was the inaugural recital of Cameron Carpenter’s digital “International Touring Organ” (“ITO”) performed in the Starr Theater in Alice Tully Hall. Organ design by Carpenter, software and sound production by Marshall & Ogletree, console by R. A. Colby. It is a mammoth array of console, speakers, speaker cabinets, and presumably heavy padding, designed to travel with Mr. Carpenter and be played anywhere. His aim was not only to travel with an organ to eliminate the need for extensive on-site practice on an otherwise unfamiliar organ but also to have available at all times an organ that can play absolutely anything from organ music to transcriptions to Mr. Carpenter’s original compositions, just the way he wants them. But in presenting the ITO as a “solution” to those “problems,” Mr. Carpenter does not celebrate its possibilities but rather laments the “reasons” to need it in the first place, presenting it and himself as saviors of the organ from obscurity and further purist restriction.

Concert instruments are concert instruments. They are designed, hopefully, to play most organ music and to hold their own against an orchestra. In the past 20 years there have been many new ones installed in concert halls, thank goodness. Many are underused, undervoiced, or overbearing, but on the whole, who cares? I’m just glad they exist. But most organs are not concert instruments. They are church instruments, and their first responsibility is to play hymns and service music for the given congregation, then anthems for the given choir, then organ music for the liturgy, then concerts. This makes any given church organ unique and tied to the building in which it resides (another “problem” Mr. Carpenter laments in his Playbill notes). But more importantly, it is tied to the people who desired it and had it installed. And although I myself am tired of some of the purist organs I encounter in some churches, I am delighted there are still churches using an organ. Who cares if it can’t be transplanted to another room? [Actually, many of them can be with proper voicing, and often are.] Who cares if it can’t play the Mahler 5^th? Who cares if it can play Bach but not Franck? The artist needs to practice his art, no matter the quality of the canvas available. Taken this way, the ITO could look like the most expensive cop-out I have ever seen.

But it’s not a cop-out. It only looks like a cop-out when Mr. Carpenter blames its raison d’être on all these external, inane forces he laments and is presumably too lazy or advanced to work around. But if allowed to speak for itself, the ITO might be more readily accepted for what it really is – a marketing tool for one person. And if it were used for just that, Mr. Carpenter would have my blessing to use it to make millions. He has said before that he is in the business of promoting himself, not the organ. But then he goes on from there, blaming the establishment for needing him to save it from itself. He finds it silly that organists promote the instrument in the abstract rather than themselves. He has a slight point there, but it’s also slightly off-target. The organ is so much more fascinating than a clarinet or a violin, and so we organists can use that drawing power to our advantage. [God knows I am not likely to attend a bassoon or violin recital, and I loathe voice recitals.] Young people love the organ because it’s fascinating and powerful. Mr. Carpenter has done much to draw young people toward the organ, but he has done so (correctly) by drawing them to himself and dressing like what they like to see. [However, the audience I saw at the inaugural recital of the ITO was primarily of the old geezer variety. Must have been the ticket prices that drove the youngsters away. That might need to be addressed in the future. And should Mr. Carpenter ever elect to get over the whole punk thing in his dress and hairstyle, it shouldn’t affect his popularity. If it does, then there is something wrong with the audience.]

The ITO itself: It has everything it needs to play absolutely anything, I suppose. The problem is that in spite of all that variety, I didn’t hear more than about four distinct sounds. Everything sounds alike, and none of it sounds like the instrument/s it attempts to imitate. There have certainly been strides taken to make a digital organ have the acoustic expanse of a pipe organ, but this wasn’t it. The speakers were all aimed at the audience. They might have sounded fuller by being aimed at the walls or at least in multiple directions – hey, much like a pipe organ sounds. The problem with speakers is that they produce their sound out the same little opening note after note. There is no variety to the source of the sound, whereas the pipe organ has little tone producers scattered across many square and cubic feet of space, automatically giving a sense of spaciousness. This will forever be the primary barrier to digital supplanting pipe. So let it be written. But I don’t think Mr. Carpenter is trying to replace a pipe organ with the ITO; he’s just getting something that can play anything at all. His taste in what can be played on the organ is farther ranging than most of ours. But honestly, I haven’t heard all that Bach and Widor have to offer me, and so I’m staying with them for a little while longer.

Mr. Carpenter bewails in the Playbill the fact that an organist [I’ll add pianist here] has to make friends with a new organ [piano] in a mere couple days or a few hours before performing, whereas instrumentalists get to live with their instrument 24/7 for life and always have their expression available. I disagree that this is a problem to be solved for the organist. In my case and that of many others, I am constantly affirmed by audience members how well I use the organ, how much color I get out of it, how much passion there is in my playing, etc. Making friends with an organ is an art. But it’s not difficult. And I’m good at it. And so is Mr. Carpenter. Therefore, when I take him at face value, I don’t know what his problem is.

The ITO has some restrictions of its own, you know, just like the stationary organs it exists to surpass. It is the same organ played by the same organist each time. I was tired of all that the first time on 'inauguration day' and elected not to attend the second round. Audiences enjoy traveling to a famous venue to hear what’s inside. The ITO is touted for its ability to come to the audience, and when it has done that once, the appeal may be over for many. And it will be horribly expensive to move and to present, which will limit its appearances to only the richest venues. Furthermore, now gone is the creativity at making a stationary organ do what the organist wants it to do. At the inaugural recital, Mr. Carpenter bragged that he will no longer be making so many program changes as he usually does on a stationary organ. I think he has made changes in the past to highlight a stationary organ’s limitations, but if he’s not careful it could just look like laziness in not reviewing an organ’s spec before choosing a program. Duh. But the point is probably now moot – the ITO is now Mr. Carpenter’s constant companion, assuming presenters can afford its hauling charges.

Mr. Carpenter has been described as “revolutionary,” after his recording and DVD where he plays the left hand of the Revolutionary Etude with his feet. He has followed that same trend, playing the piccolo part of The Stars and Stripes Forever with his feet, etc. But his career is not “revolutionary.” The use of that word suggests that everyone will be doing things that way before long. Rather, Mr. Carpenter is an island, an aberration. No one else can step in and take over. No one else can take it to the next step. But Mr. Carpenter has the same ten fingers and two feet that the rest of us do. The difference is that he plays the way he wants to, which means that all the pyrotechnics are his invention. That would be much more difficult to do if he were trying to play someone else’s way. We all have some keyboard skills that are better than others’. Mr. Carpenter has exploited his own talent, rather than develop new ones. That’s not so hard to understand, is it? Many people could play the way he does. But few have the time to develop it, and even fewer have the inclination. Mr. Carpenter’s style is to play nearly all the time while spanning two to four manuals. There is a constant “thumbing down” of melodies and counter-melodies and a constant use of the piston sequencer. The rest of us have to practice playing in three dimensions, but it can be done, and I suspect even Bach did it. But when Mr. Carpenter renders, say, Franck with constant solos and countersolos where Franck didn’t write them, it just begins to sound weird, not revolutionary.

I haven’t figured out why all of it is necessary. Mr. Carpenter lays a lot of blame at the feet of the establishment for the existence of his creativity. What’s wrong with just being creative and innovative? And I haven’t figured out how it could be sustainable. Only Mr. Carpenter plays that way, and there is no one else coming up the ranks. It is not sustainable because no one else has the desire, ability, or need to do the same. It is not sustainable because Mr. Carpenter has not exhibited a desire to teach the style to anyone else. And so it makes much more sense to accept Mr. Carpenter as a marketer of himself and not of the instrument he has chosen for his expression or that he claims to be saving from the purist’s wrecking ball. But he blindly takes his deconstruction of the establishment as seriously as he blames the establishment for blindly taking itself. He never seems to smile; it must be serious business telling the world's oldest man-made instrument that it and its followers are full of crap. But as soon as Mr. Carpenter gets bored with all this and has no more lands to conquer, the show will be over. But I guarantee that Bach, Mendelssohn, and Widor will still be with us, uninjured.