Unorthodox pipe organist eschews the church for dazzle and bling

Cameron Carpenter is set to recast the pipe organ not as an instrument of God but rather as a man-made machine worthy of awe in his Israeli debut concert in Zichron Yaakov on Saturday.

Carpenter, 34, has gained world renown for his talent, for his distinctive look — Swarovski crystals, high-heeled shoes, a mohawk haircut — and for his critical, even blasphemous opinions about the pipe organ, notably his separation of the instrument from its religious roots.

The Elma Arts Complex Luxury Hotel in Zichron Yaakov will host Carpenter’s first Israeli concert at 9 p.m. on Saturday, June 6. The Elma opened in February and is home to one of the few pipe organs in Israel that is found in neither a church nor a conservatory.

This suits Carpenter just fine, he told The Times of Israel.

“I came from a secular home,” he explained. “So I didn’t understand the instrument as having anything to do with Christianity.”

Carpenter said he believes and hopes that Israelis — whom he described as “the most stupefyingly educated people anywhere to be found” — will hold a similar view.

“My experience is that Israelis are amongst the most educated and exposed, culturally aware people in the world,” Carpenter said.

So he quickly brushed off the possibility that Jewish Israelis would be unwelcoming or unreceptive to an instrument as culturally connected to Christianity as the pipe organ.

Carpenter, moreover, sees this religious connection as bizarre.

“To this day it still seems ridiculous,” he added, “that an instrument so violent and dynamic and campy would ever be taken into religious quarters.”

“I suppose from a certain side you can see Christianity as very campy indeed,” he said. He added with a chuckle, “indeed a lot of us do.”

Carpenter, who is currently based in Germany, became “obsessed with the organ” at the age of four. That obsession drove him to study the pipe organ at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School.

‘The instrument to me has always been about progress and experimentation’

And though he has played the organ in churches around the world, even becoming the artist-in-residence at the Middle Collegiate Church in New York, his love for the instrument comes from its technical and physical nature, not its religious one.

Coming from a family of engineers, Carpenter explained, gave him an appreciation for the mechanics and the intricacies of the pipe organ.

Even a small pipe organ, he said, contains thousands of moving parts, making the instrument, “until the advent of the telephone exchange, by far the most complex device built by man.”

Its complexity and its way of producing sound also make it unique among other instruments.

While a violin makes its sound by the player crossing the bow across its strings, and a drum by the player’s strike, the organ is the only instrument that “uses an energy outside of the performer’s body” to make its music, Carpenter explained.

“The instrument to me has always been about progress and experimentation,” he said.

To that end Carpenter designed the digital International Touring Organ, which was built by Marshall & Ogletree LLC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLzgFkouSmc&list=PLr9FwYYKU07kMgLg_zz4W6Aw95NWFPhHF

Carpenter claims his is the first digital organ built “at an artistic level” that “far exceeds the pipe organ.”

The problem with traditional, analog pipe organs is a lack of uniformity, Carpenter explained.

“You’re never going to have a situation where an organist can walk into organ A in South Dakota and organ B in South Korea and have those organs stylistically match,” he explained.

His organ seeks to change that, standardizing a notoriously variable instrument.

Carpenter, however, will not be using his famed instrument during his short trip to Israel.

The International Touring Organ, though electronic, is still physically large, a behemoth and not easily transported. Digital or analog, Carpenter explained, “the instrument is an instrument of scale.”

Instead he will perform on the hotel’s own 1,470-pipe organ built by the German firm Orgelbau Klais.

The organ was hand-built and completed last summer. The pipes of the organ cover the concert hall’s back wall. The owner of the hotel, Lily Edelstein, told the Israel Organ Association (yes, there is such a thing) that no concert hall is complete without an organ.

Though Carpenter’s digital organ is a shift from traditional analog ones, Carpenter insists it is still the natural continuation of the instrument’s development.

And so too he sees his style and theatricality, not as a change, but as a logical next step.

Carpenter is known to perform with the style of a slightly more polished 1970s glam rock band.

His look can be striking. He regularly sports leather and tank tops, Cuban heels that he bejewels himself, a mohawk, spiked jewelry or silk shirts with wild patterns. He has high, prominent cheekbones, deep-set eyes and is prone to removing his shirt to reveal a muscular physique.

But Carpenter refuses to see his personal style — unorthodox though it may be — as a break from musical history.

“Music has, for centuries, always been a show,” he said. “All of classical music has been and remains entertainment.”

Though Carpenter conceded that “it may be a little out of context with some of the traditions of classical music,” he maintained his theatrical style is consistent with other musicians’ bowing to the demands of the market.

He cited the Hungarian musician Franz Liszt, the Austrian Joseph Haydn and specifically Mozart’s “Die Entführung aus dem Serail,” which was composed to please the Austrian emperor Joseph II who encouraged the production of German-language operas, as examples of great classical performers who responded to commerce.

And his theatricality and showmanship is a part of the same game.

“I have an agenda to make the organ a commercially and artistically viable entity,” Carpenter said.

Plus, he added, “it’s how I feel comfortable on stage.”