Cameron Carpenter - International Touring Organ

Cameron Carpenter regularly appears as a soloist with many of the world’s great orchestras and is also a multi-album recording artist. As a keyboard prodigy, he performed Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier at age 11, before joining the American Boychoir School in 1992 as a boy soprano. During his four years at the North Carolina School of the Arts, he made his first studies in orchestration and orchestral composition and transcribed more than 100 major works, including Gustav Mahler’s complete Symphony No. 5, for the organ. He continued composing after moving to New York City in 2000 to attend The Juilliard School. During his time there, he composed art songs; the symphonic poem Child of Baghdad (2003) for orchestra, chorus, and Ondes Martenot; his first substantial works for solo organ; and numerous organ arrangements of piano works by Chopin, Godowsky, Grainger, Ives, Liszt, Medtner, Rachmaninoff, Schumann, and others. He received a master’s degree from Juilliard School in 2006.

The same year, he began his worldwide organ concert tours, giving numerous debuts at venues including Royal Albert Hall, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Melbourne Town Hall, Tschaikowsky Hall in Moscow, Davies Hall in San Francisco, and many others. His first album, Revolutionary (2008), was followed in 2010 by the Cameron Live! Edition. His most recent is All You Need Is Bach (2016). His first major work for organ and orchestra, The Scandal, Op. 3, was commissioned by the Cologne Philharmonie (KölnMusic GmbH) and premiered in 2011.

Cameron launched his International Touring Organ—a monumental digital organ of his own design—in 2014. The realization of a dream more than a decade in the making, the organ was made by Marshall & Ogletree, the Needham, Massachusetts, organ builders redefining the digital organ as an instrument of artistic significance. Whereas traditional pipe organs are each unique so that a composition played on one will sound different from how it sounds on another, this organ’s console and extensive touring sound system ensure its musical consistency from venue to venue, both as the home instrument of the artist it was built for and an ultimate acoustical experience for the listener. Traveling in a single large truck, the organ can be assembled in less than three hours; identical European and American sound systems (housed in Berlin, Germany and Needham) make it internationally mobile.