Musician assembles a moving experience
Travelling organ enables Cameron Carpenter to play with perfection every night
There’s an old saying that goes, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”
Well, musician Cameron Carpenter built a better organ — one that can be taken apart and reassembled without harming its musical abilities — and audiences are beating a path to his concert hall doors.
“I mobilized a traditional instrument,” explains Carpenter, who appears in concert April 1 at Koerner Hall. “It’s a radical means put to a traditional end. It is a traditional organ.”
The new creation was born out of a practical problem; most musicians travel with their instruments, but, when it comes to large pianos and giant pipe organs, that’s out of the question. (The organ is often referred to as the “king of instruments.”)
So travelling soloists have to make do with whatever instrument is on hand in the host hall, which can make for uneven performances on the road.
Carpenter, whose virtuosity with the organ has made him a king of the king of instruments, devoted his energies to creating a travelling organ. Made by Marshall & Ogletree of Needham, Mass., it was designed to Carpenter’s specifications.
The entire organ assembles in less than three hours and travels in a single large truck; identical European and American sound systems (housed in Berlin and Massachusetts) make it internationally mobile.
Prosaically named the International Travelling Organ, it has been through four continents since its creation in 2014.
“There’s the practical benefit of having the ability to play on the same instrument continually,” says Carpenter.
“The concert I’ll be playing in Toronto will benefit from the accumulation of all that experience brought to bear every time I play. I’ll have the same relationship a violinist would have with their instrument.”
He says the organ is a much more flexible instrument than people imagine, partly because most people’s early exposure is through church music. Carpenter’s pyrotechnics at the keyboard and pedal are not churchy tunes.
“The organ has been played in a sombre fashion and can have an image of being sombre. I would describe it more as dullness.”
Because he didn’t discover organs through church music, Carpenter was always distrustful of the “orthodoxy” of how the organ should be played or who should play. A female organ player is a fairly recent phenomenon, he says.
He describes his own relationship with his organ as “an obsession,” as an artist and their instrument “makes a world of one’s own.”
Though he is “simply not interested in the format of a classical concert,” he says he is very respectful of the classical pieces he performs. “I’m there to give a true rendering of the musical experience.”
He often reworks piano pieces such as Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. This gives the organ the “starring role” it deserves, he says. Cameron Carpenter plays Koerner Hall on April 1. Tickets from $35 at rcmusic.ca.