Salt Lake Adventures

Hey everyone!

I apologize for not having posted anything for a couple of months.

School has been crazy, and I'll get home late at night tired, and ready to just go to sleep.

Such is the life of a college student.

I have played a couple of new organs, but today's post is going to focus on my trip to Salt Lake City a couple of months back. There's so much to say, that I'll just have to get started right away!

The Salt Lake Chapter of the American Guild of Organists hosted an Open Console and Organ Crawl at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral with its 2011 Bigelow Organ and at the Salt Lake LDS Tabernacle, with its world famous 1948 Aeolian-Skinner. It was a great day, and I got to spend time with some other organists, both from Utah Valley and from SLC. I drove up with my friend Bryce and we both had a wonderful experience playing these two world-class instruments.

Let's start with St. Mark's. This organ is a 40-rank, 3-manual tracker action organ built by Bigelow & Company of American Fork, UT, and it's absolutely beautiful. It's in a great little acoustic space, too. It's a great balance between live and dead. It's live enough that there is some reverberation, but dead enough that the sound is still clear and doesn't overlap with itself as it does in buildings with a more live acoustic.

More information about this organ can be found at bigeloworgans.com

Here are some great shots, thanks to Becky of SLCAGO:

This one is from one end of the organ loft:

This is from the other end, and you can see the Ruckpositiv on the left. This is a small division of German origin that hangs on the gallery rail behind the organist. It can be a whole organ on its own, and it generally contains some smaller, softer stops.

Here's my selfie, you can see the Ruckpositiv just there on the edge with the main case behind it:

Here's a shot I took of the main case, to focus on the 8' Processional Trumpet, what is known as an "en chamade" stop. These are the pipes coming straight out of the front of the case. They are very loud, and were a lot of fun to play in my rendition of "God of our fathers, whose almighty hand," inspired by Diane Bish.

I was very impressed by the organ at St. Mark's. I looked all over it, and I could not find one single flaw. It was meticulously assembled and maintained, and was a pleasure to play. Before we began playing, Adam Hansen, the resident organist of St. Mark's played snippets of a couple of pieces to show how well this organ handles both German Baroque and French Romantic music. It was absolutely amazing. He played the beginning of Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D Minor BWV 565 as the German example, and a bit of the ending of Louis Vierne's "Carillon de Westminster" as the French example. It blew me away how perfect both of the pieces sounded on this instrument. Kudos to Bigelow & Co. for designing and building such an impressive instrument!

Before I forget, here's St. Mark's small organ, which is only 4 ranks, 1 manual and no pedal. It's portable in that it can be rolled around the building, and you can either plug it in or operate it with a hand crank. This organ was restored by Bigelow in the 1980s. I didn't get to play this one, but I thought you all might like to see it.

Now on to the reason I went in the first place: The Salt Lake Tabernacle organ. This organ has a long history, which includes one of my ancestors, John J. McClellan, Jr., who I have mentioned here before. He oversaw this organ's renovation by the Austin company in 1916, and played on some of the many pipes I played that day. 

This organ has some of the greatest sounds on it! There are two great trumpet-like stops, juxtaposed with each other on either side of the case, the Trompette Harmonique and the Tuba Mirabilis, which allows the organist to create a call-and-response effect with the trumpets across different sides of the stage. This organ also has an antiphonal division, meaning that there are pipes in a chamber at the back of the room, allowing for yet more call-and-response effects. And the strings on this organ are so lush and soul-stirring it's absolutely unbelievable! This was truly a once in a lifetime experience, but I really hope it's not!

Since we did the organ crawl at the Tabernacle, I'll show the shots of me playing first, then the shots of our trip inside the organ.

Before we played, we heard a 30-minute recital played by Linda Margetts, one of the Temple Square organists, and professor of organ at the University of Utah. It was a great recital, and Dr. Margetts put her own little spin on the end of Bach's BWV 565, which was neat.

I opted to play my arrangement of "I'll Go Where You Want Me To Go," since it was a piece that would use the amazing strings on this organ, and it was a spiritual moment, as well as a nerve-wracking moment. I was so nervous, even though I wasn't performing for an audience. This is the world-famous Mormon Tabernacle Organ we're talking about here! It was more spiritual than anything, playing a piece I wrote for my sister on pipes once played by our ancestor.

Here I am playing:

And another shot with a better view of the Facade:

And a more close-up view. In case you were wondering, I only had a few minutes, so I didn't get to set my own stops. Rob Stefanussen, a frequent guest organist on Temple Square and proprietor of one of the best YouTube organ channels, set the stops for me. I wish he had given it reeds and mixtures towards the end of the piece, but I didn't tell him to, so that's okay. I would like to go back and play this piece again, and play something else that takes better advantage of the reeds.

Now for the trip inside the organ. This was really cool. It was neat to see the different stages of the organ, since it has been rebuilt 4-5 times since its original installation. Bryce and I spent an extra half hour talking to Robert Poll, the curator of organs on Temple Square, as well as one of the gentleman from the Rocky Mountain Organ Company, who assisted with the renovation of the organ when the building was renovated in the early 2000s. There's so much to know that I couldn't possibly explain it all here, but feel free to contact me, and I'll tell you more!

I will tell you this: Of all the pipes you can see, only ten of them are real, and those are the ten largest ones: the six in the two main towers, and the one on the front and the side of each of the two next largest towers for a total of ten. The rest have been fake since the beginning. But don't worry, other than the ten you see, there are 11,613 more lurking behind the scenes that provide the rest of the tones. This is a 206-rank organ, so there's a lot going on here!

There's also a neon sign on the organ, behind a grille just under the center of the facade, so it is invisible unless you are close to the organ case. It reads "Quiet Please." It is currently disconnected, as it is so old that they need a special transformer for it, and since it isn't used, they haven't bothered fixing it.

Here are some of the pipes we saw from inside. I didn't take a lot of pictures, because I was too excited, and too preoccupied with the questions I had for the curator.

Here's a violone:

And part of the Bombarde in the pedal:

Here's the plaque from the Organ Historical Society, recognizing the historical nature of the instrument. I just realized, it's also inadvertently a self-portrait, but don't let that bother you.

In the large metal room/box you see in the background are the blowers that run the main organ. Air entering the chamber is temperature and humidity controlled, and heavily filtered before it enters the blowers. This helps keep the tuning stable in the pipes.

 Here I am standing next to the main blower. This blower provides air to all of the stops in the manuals of the organ, while the smaller one behind it runs a few of the larger ranks. The large pipes had a tendency to steal too much air from the treble pipes, so they separated them.

Here you get a better view of both of the blowers. There is a third blower, but it runs the pipes at the back of the room, and is hidden from view, as are the pipes. These are behind a grille that is easily mistaken for an air-conditioning vent. The man in the white shirt and tie is Robert Poll, the organ curator.

So that was my amazing day in Salt Lake City. It was an out-of-this-world type of experience for someone as amateur as me to be able to play and visit two world-class instruments such as these, and I am very grateful to SLCAGO for letting me participate. I hope I will have the chance to again play these instruments, as well as (eventually) the LDS Conference Center, the LDS Joseph Smith Memorial Building, the Assembly Hall on Temple Square and Salt Lake City's Cathedral of the Madeleine. A man can dream, right?

I've played a couple of chapel organs recently, so I'll post those in a couple of days. I figured I'd keep this separate since this is already one of the longer posts I've written.

Summer break is coming and I will have a lot more time to take and post photos of organs! Starting in the fall, things will slow down, but I'm very excited for summer, as I'm sure you are!

Have a great day, and keep your eyes peeled for more posts soon!