Cameron Carpenter: The pipes, the pipes are calling
In my experience, a lot of these square pegs are paricularly bright people who've spent time thinking for themselves, who keep asking the 4-year-old's annoying "why?" over and over again, and who discover that there are so many other potential ways of getting from point A to point B.
Some become inventors or scientists. Others, great artists. The unfortunate ones, unable to cope with the difference between their perceptions and thoughts and the world around them, tune out or turn to silly distractions.
No matter where their thinking is, and whether or not I agree with what they believe, these people invariably make me re-evaluate my own perceptions, ideas, principles and habits. I feel like I've learned something in the process.
Yesterday, I had a chance to spend 90 minutes with one of these inspirational people, 28-year-old American organist Cameron Carpenter. (Photo courtesy of khayman Photography.) The interview is scheduled for tomorrow's Star, but it can hardly do justice to someone who spent 10 to 15 minutes answering each of my questions.
If you can possibly make it to one of his three morning recitals for Stratford Summer Music, tomorrow through Saturday, do it. Love him or hate him, your musical world will be challenged, if not changed.
I get an intensely visceral reaction nearly every time I mention Carpenter's name to a fellow organist. The professional view is that he is gaudy and unmindful of the artistic traditions in the field.
But one question that keeps coming up in my head is, what's the point of having great traditions and mountains of fabulous repertoire if no one is interested in coming to hear it performed? Clearly, despite conventions, competitions, multimillion-dollar instruments and some truly astonishing performers both here and in Europe, organ music is not on the public radar. And I'm not just talking about popular culture; classical music listeners don't pay much heed to organ repertoire, either.
So, along comes look-at-me Cameron Carpenter, and the organ world blushes and looks sideways in shame at how one of its own could behave in such a way.
It's easy to dismiss him -- until you sit down to hear what he has to say. Like his technique, honed over hours and hours of practice, his artistic persona is the product of deliberate choices made after a lot of soul-searching. He is no lightweight.
Here is a short excerpt from yesterday's interview, pared to its essentials. It speaks directly to music education and our unreasonably reverent attitudes to so much classical music. It's not that we need to ignore artistic traditions. We have to make sure they speak to each new generation.
If we don't do that, there eventually won't be anyone left to pass the traditions down to.
I asked Carpenter about what happened to the boy chorister and organ scholar to turn him into this flamboyant performer.
Here's a portion of his response:
“I remember my high school teacher cultivating this affected pattern of articulation and phrase structure that I had no emotional relationship with, at all. Consequently, the transferance of that information from him to me was almost based on rote. It was, like, okay, now you do this, now you do that. It felt very alien, like a subjugation of the music to this other set of circumstances that I didn’t understand at all....
It seemed de rigueur for all the other organists, but it was difficult for me to do.
I went through three teachers at Juilliard and had a very similar experience. At that point, I began to realise that there was this set of strictures or dictates that was, in some way, designed for organists but not about giving the organist an ability to communicate the emotion of what they were experiencing to other listeners....
What I ended up relating it to was a 'one-time pad,' which is the solution key to a given code, something the Germans used in the Enigma machine during World War II. It was an encoding device, and the one-time pad was a row of numbers that would set the rotors of the machine so that the incoming message was decodable. It’s a one-time pad because each of the codes is used only once.
It’s similar to this organ-world-wide one-time pad, where, if you understand the concepts that were taught, you can read the incoming information and know what they are doing. But, of course, only organists have that code.
Then, the question becomes, well, if only organists have the code, what about the rest of the people? What about decoding this music for others?
The inherent question that derives from that is, for whom do I want to play?
I like to liken it to accepted norms in how organ music is played because, for me, the organ community itself simplifies the question on both sides. On the organ-peer side, there’s the somewhat didactic, unquestioning transmission of this information. But, in a way, worse on the other side is the sensationalist school where it’s just a matter of ‘Do you want an audience or do you want to kowtow to these organ purists?’
The thing to me is that both sides are so simplistic, really. Both sides are so agenda-driven, or, at least the judgments that go into making the clearly perceptible sides in 21st century organ playing....
Whatever their origins and derivations, whenever we’re talking about these agendas, we’re not talking about music, even though we might be talking about the architecture of music or, more likely, the history of music....
It’s all about how you view how you want to communicate with people."
So there we have it: The musician needs to communicate in a way that makes sense to the here and now. What could make more sense than that?
It's one thing to play magnificently on a massive concert organ. It's another to take an ordinary, run-of-the-mill church organ and so something notable with it. Right?
So I asked Carpenter if he was in the mood to climb up to the organ loft at the church where I work as organist. The instrument is a mid-1970s two-manual Casavant organ that has nothing much to recommend it, aside from being a fine way to accompany a mass.
Carpenter smiled when he sat down at the console, saying it reminded him of a church organ he would practise on as a teenager. It took him moments to figure the instrument out an begin playing some Bach -- far more colourfully that anything I (an, er, rank amateur, for all intents and purposes) could ever have imagined doing.
Just after the 6-minute mark, towards the end of the fugue, Carpenter goes off on his own, using Bach's subject in a jazz-like improvisation that progresses like an concerto cadenza. I think it's brilliant.
I apologise for the audio, which I captured on my mono voice recorder, then played back into my iPhone so that I could extract it in a file format that I could post here. The pictures are hastily cobbled together from Carpenter's past exploits.
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