A pipeless dream: The $1.4M International Touring Organ
Among classical-music instruments, the organ ranks rather low on the scale of sexy cachet. Hipper than the harp, maybe, but certainly not the violin.
Cameron Carpenter wants to change that.
With his punk-rock mohawk and his devil-may-care attitude toward reinterpreting the likes of Bach and Rachmaninoff, Carpenter is a proud rebel in the classical world. And the Juilliard-trained 35-year-old is also an evangelist for a digital revolution with his International Touring Organ, a traveling instrument of his own design that looks like the control panel of a spaceship and aims to replace the pipe organ as the ultimate achievement in musical engineering.
Carpenter will perform Saturday, March 18, at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, and he gave us the lowdown on his $1.4 million baby. Here’s what we learned.
1. It’s not a synthesizer
The International Touring Organ is a digital instrument — a pipe organ without any actual pipes — but it is not a synthesizer.
That’s because a synthesizer, by definition, generates sound-wave patterns from scratch, which lack the nuanced timbres of real instruments. You would never confuse a synth violin for the real thing. Instead of synthesizing sound waves, Cameron’s organ — custom-made by Marshall & Ogletree Organ Builders in Needham, Mass. — uses digital samples from more than two dozen world-class organs.
2. It has a tragic backstory
Carpenter wasn’t always a digital evangelist. But his conversion came when he got a chance to play on Marshall & Ogletree’s first organ installation, dubbed Opus 1. It was installed at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York in 2003 to replace a pipe organ that was damaged beyond repair in the 9/ 11 terrorist attacks.
“It’s kind of a phoenix situation, because if it were not for the destruction of that organ, the opportunity to bring to market the conceptual stuff that Marshall & Ogletree had been working on would not have occurred in the same major way,” Carpenter says.
“I had never been a pipe organ purist, but I of course felt, compared to the assembly-line digital organs that were available, the pipe organ was obviously superior. But within 30 seconds of playing the M&O, I knew that that paradigm was now over.”
Carpenter’s organ is the eighth built by the company. He commissioned it in 2013, after years of design discussions, and premiered it at the Lincoln Center in New York in 2014. He funded the $1.4 million cost by himself, with the help of loans that are now paid off.
3. It does more than simulate a pipe organ
The wider sonic palette of the touring organ’s digital library is one obvious advantage. But so is the speed-of-light transmission of sound from keyboard to speakers, in contrast to the delay of the air-driven mechanical version. And there’s more, Carpenter says, waxing philosophical (as seems to be his wont).
“It allows the experience of the organ to transcend its physical realm and its limitations, which as an organ theorist allows you to assemble propositions of design that would be all but unthinkable in a pipe organ, for reasons ranging from economy to logistics to geography of placement...” he says.
“All kinds of things like that you can just wipe off the map without at all dispensing with what I actually
do view as the sacrosanct brain trust of centuries of logical expertise and accumulation of knowledge that the pipe organ represents.”
4. It’s a logistical nightmare … er, achievement
The other big, obvious advantage of the International Touring Organ is that it’s portable.
“All pipe organs are site-specific,” Carpenter says, “so it’s impossible to have an ongoing relationship with one single instrument that you play everywhere as a violinist might, and you wouldn’t have the chance to practice upon the instrument you perform on, which is taken for granted by most musicians.”
Even so, he can’t exactly lug his instrument around on the subway like an oboe or cello.
“It travels in a 53-foot truck,” he says. “It has workshop and carpenter facilities that travel with the organ at all times. It has a massive accoutrement of spare parts. And it has two sound systems.”