Dionysian King: Carpenter in Babylon
On a Sunday evening in February of this year, I attended the premiere of a new German/French documentary called “The Spirit of the Organ.” The screening took place in Kino Babylon, an arthouse cinema on the ground floor of a building from 1929 on Rosa-Luxembourg Square in a funky neighborhood in former East Berlin now in the inevitable process of Brooklynifying.
The Babylon also boasts of being the only movie house in Germany with its original organ still in position as it was first installed. The console is tucked into the lower-left corner of the auditorium, beneath the stage and at the same level as the theater’s seats.
When I arrived for the movie that Sunday evening, the notorious American organist Cameron Carpenter, who lived for some years in Berlin and continues to perform there regularly, was busy at the instrument. His modified, wide-wale Mohawk hairdo and form-fitting sequin-studded attire is instantly recognizable—his playing too.
Over nearly two decades, I have praised Carpenter’s outlandishly adventurous, eye- and ear-poppingly virtuosic talents, on some occasions also pillorying his wrecking-ball attitude to the history of the organ and to aesthetic approaches that diverge from his own.
As his Babylon prelude to the evening’s program, Carpenter was bungling his way—from memory—through a Trio Sonata by J. S. Bach. With a group of movie-goers gathered around at close quarters to admire his four-limbed fluency, Carpenter began cycling through the same passage. From my seat a dozen rows back, I could tell just in his posture and distracted performance that he probably wanted to be elsewhere. Carpenter is a gifted improviser and before too long he had pulled out of the turbulence of live performance and landed the piece at or near its intended destination.
After an introduction by an emcee to the rest of the evening’s proceedings, Carpenter stayed on the Wurlitzer’s bench to accompany the cataclysmic closing section of Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. from 1928. This silent comedy concludes with a massive storm. Carpenter rode its winds with enormous panache, unleashing torrents of hilarious, artfully terrifying mayhem. The Bach had been a bust, but when the house was full and its attention focused on the moving image, Carpenter’s Keaton killed.
The featured documentary that I had come to see was less a well-edited and edifying argument about the spirit of the organ, than a stitched-up series of episodes and encomiums from famous organists, a few eccentrics, and enthusiastic representatives of a new generation of students thrilled, as so many young people have been over centuries, by this musical machine that has for so long seemed miraculous to so many. Carpenter appeared shortly in this film too, urging organists, as he always does—if also in more tempered tones than his brasher, younger self—to burst the shackles of tradition and pursue unfettered creativity.
But Carpenter didn’t seem free that evening, even if his genius surfed confidently on the gusts of Keaton’s.
Over two decades, Carpenter has been intent on tearing down traditions and cutting the organ from its lifeforce: wind. Electronics was for him the answer, first in the Virtual Pipe Organ, then in an even more ambitious portable (if you have a tractor-trailer at your disposal) project: the International Touring Organ.
The later initiative proved unsustainable. The dream evaporated under economic realities.
But it had not disappeared at the start of the pandemic, when Carpenter took his music to the people of Berlin, putting a more modestly sized electronic organ on a flatbed truck and airing his flamboyance in housing projects and parks.
Carpenter has styled himself a “smasher of cultural and musical taboos.” His tremendous musical abilities coupled with a linguistic sharpness and intellectual seriousness that flirted with dark humor made him a kind of Marquis de Sade at the court of the King of Instruments. It was an image he cultivated by characterizing his sexuality “as radically inclusive”—a provocative inversion of woke discourse that also parallels his heterodox approach to performance and a repertoire that reimagines organ classics, helps itself to symphonies, and romps with video games and movie music.
At Babylon Kino it was back to pipes—real, not virtual, though fewer than a thousand. That’s not many when compared to the thousands of virtual sounds once at his fingers and feet and compared to the large concert hall instruments he still plays.
More dark matter than supernova, Carpenter now seems to be searching out a new way through the musical universe that he so vibrantly, sometimes perhaps even viciously, energized. Perhaps it is merely a result of aging; the engines of culture must take their energy from the young. Carpenter is now forty-five years old.
That his resolve might be ebbing could also have to do with the difficulty of sustaining his inimitable form of critique through performance, and the ensuing chaos at the keyboard and beyond. His creative art is fundamentally a destructive one. In his accompaniment to exuberant Keaton comedy, Carpenter seemed not simply to be responding to the images, but was conjuring them himself, enspiriting them with the breath of his organ art. It was if he were creating the destruction that we were watching on the screen, and I couldn’t help but hear and see in that paradox a metaphor for his mode of music and career-making.
Carpenter must know that positive energy is a more marketable commodity, easier to sell back to the grid through Facebook, TikTok, Instagram. No organist is more positively ebullient than Anna Lapwood. She has 4.2 million YouTube followers. Carpenter has some six thousand. Lapwood’s platform power helps her sell out cavernous churches and concert halls and has yielded a series of briskly-selling recordings on the SONY label. She plays on organs with and without pipes, the latter for an upcoming Arena Tour. (More on her next week.)
After Carpenter’s brilliant turn beneath the silver screen at the Babylon, he acknowledged the thrilled applause of the audience with a curt bow and stern countenance, then strode quickly down the side aisle. He looked tired and disgruntled, not boosted by his performance but beleaguered.
I had hoped to catch him in the lobby and introduce myself personally for the first time, but I couldn’t find him. He was either keeping a low profile or had fled the scene of his minor missteps and wind-powered triumph.
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