A Late Update: The Importance of Tuning and Maintenance

Hey Everyone! I've been really busy with my classes in the Information Systems program at BYU, so I haven't been able to post since I started school. I've attended a couple of different church music workshops, and had the chance to play for my Stake Conference a couple of weeks ago, which was exciting and successful!

This post will be about a couple of organs I played several months ago. The first one is in an LDS chapel in Salt Lake City. I was at this chapel for a mission reunion. I only got to play this instrument for a few minutes after the reunion was over. I was one of the last people to leave. It was a typical small Wicks, with a decent Trompette and a nice Erzahler, sadly without a corresponding celeste.

Here's a photo of that instrument:

It looks quite a bit larger than it actually is. The wings on the two sides contain no pipes, but rather the pipework is all contained within the visible facade and the swell box just behind the center portion of the instrument. 

I enjoyed playing this organ, but it wasn't much to write home about. I'm including it here to document it, and to make a point later in the post.

On to the next organ, at the Provo 5th and 8th Wards Chapel. I have friends who attend church in this building, and they alerted me to the presence of this instrument. Unfortunately, at the time I visited, the phone I was using to take the pictures did not respond at all well to the lighting in the building, and the contents of the photos are barely visible. Here's a link to some good photos of the building and chapel taken by another blogger.

What I can tell you is that no pipework is visible. Not everything is enclosed, but it is behind a screen at the front of the room. You can see this in the photos on the other blog.

This instrument had no maker's mark or opus number anywhere on the console, but several characteristics lead me to believe it is a Reuter organ. These are: 1) The design of the console and 2) the specification of the instrument. The Springville 1st and 3rd Wards building has a Reuter that has a console with the same carvings as this one, and the stoplist is very similar (though the facade is much more impressive on the Springville instrument).

The unfortunate thing about both the Salt Lake City organ and the Provo 5th and 8th Wards Organ is that when I went to play them, I wasn't able to get an accurate impression of either instrument because both were severely out of tune at the time I visited. On the Salt Lake instrument, the principal rank is unified, and if you play higher than the C above middle C or attempt to use the 2' principal, it sounded like a giant calliope, except not musical at all. On the Provo instrument, most of the individual stops sounded fine, but they were out of tune in relation to each other, causing a celeste-like sound, except in an exaggerated and unpleasant manner, and with nearly every stop. 

The point is, if you or your congregation has or decides to obtain a pipe organ, PLEASE take good care of it! I know that maintenance is expensive, but it is worth the trouble! A well-maintained pipe organ can bless the lives of people for generations, but if you let it dwindle into disrepair, it will become a nuisance, and in many cases, you will lose a treasure of an instrument.

Neither of these organs had anything broken on them, but an organ being out of tune significantly limits its usability. Here are some tips on keeping your organ in tune:

• ALWAYS and I mean ALWAYS leave the swell box(es) open when you shut the organ off!!! This causes the organ to maintain constant tuning between divisions that are enclosed(such as the Swell) and divisions that are unenclosed (such as the Great), and allows them to be used together, even if the organ as a whole is no longer tuned to A-440. This is so easy, yet so many people forget it! Many modern organs default to opening the swell shades automatically upon turning off the instrument, but you should open the shades just to be safe.
• Try to maintain a consistent temperature in the room year-round. This is easy in a home, but can be more difficult in a church building. Many LDS buildings have thermostats that shut off automatically after three hours. Since this will not maintain a constant temperature in the building always, try and make sure that the room is the same temperature (or close to it) when the organ will be played. Come in 30-60 minutes early to start the thermostat before the meetings start. You can even use this time to practice! That way as the pipework detunes, it will be tuned back to its proper pitch when at the correct temperature, at least for the duration of the meeting.

Well, I hope you all have a wonderful week, and that you keep enjoying all the Bach, Franck and Widor you can! 

Here are your organ details:

LDS Wards:

Built By: Wicks Organ Company

Opus Number (if indicated):

Year: 1965

Manuals: 2

Ranks: 7

Location: 3051 S 2900 E Salt Lake City, UT

LDS Provo 5th and 8th  Wards:

Built By: Reuter Organ Company?

Opus Number (if indicated):

Year: Unknown

Manuals: 2

Ranks: 6-7 (approx.)

Location: 502 E 200 N Provo, UT

Provo 5th and 8th Wards Stoplist

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!