Organs I have played

Just thought it might be interesting (for me, anyway) to put in some pictures of pipe organs I've played over the years, listed more or less chronologically.

To begin with, a little information is necessary. If you're a rank beginner, like most people, Wikipedia's treatise on the pipe organ is a good place to start. Speaking of ranks, organs are classified by the number of ranks, or complete sets of pipes they have. How many pipes is that? Since organ keyboards have 62 keys, or about five octaves, a rank is generally 62 pipes. However, the number of stops (i.e., different sounds) is often less than that: "combination stops" blend several different ranks in the high register of the organ to add brilliance, and "celeste" stops blend two stops that are deliberately tuned slightly differently to produce a pleasant vibrato-like sound. Of course, the ranks that are used in combination stops may also be used simultaneously for other purposes, but there are usually fewer stops than ranks. For example, the Salt Lake Tabernacle organ has 206 ranks, but only 147 stops. Look at Wikipedia's article on the Tabernacle organ for a list of stops.

Now, how big is big? For me, anything over about 60-70 ranks is big. This makes the Tabernacle organ a VERY big organ. If you're interested in that sort of thing, several people have made lists of the world's biggest organs. You can find links to those on Google or in Richard Elliott's wonderful site describing the organs on and around Temple Square.

Finally, you need to know something about how organs are put together. Basically, you have a wind chest, pipes, and something that connects the manuals (keyboards) with the valves that let air into the pipes. In the early days, there was an elaborate system of wooden rods and levers that connected the console to the pipes. This system is called a tracker action. In many modern organs, the action is electric (i.e., electric valves under each pipe) or electro-pneumatic (electric control of pneumatic valves under each pipe.) These electric-based systems allow the organ console to be moved around, which can be convenient. However, most organist prefer tracker actions because trackers are much more responsive to the organist's touch and the offer tighter control over exactly how the music sounds. It's worth noting that pipe organs were the highest technological accomplishment of Western society from the Late Middle Ages until the Industrial Revolution.

So why all the different keyboards? Well, different stops can be accessed from each of the keyboards. This allows the organist to quickly change from one sound to another. It also facilitates playing the kinds of polyphonic music that characterize much of the organ literature. For example, one hand would play on one manual, the other hand on a different manual with a different registration (set of stops), and the feet on the pedal keyboard, allowing three melodies to be played simultaneously, each with a different sound. This gives clarity and definition to the music. Obviously, the larger the organ (i.e., the more ranks and stops) and the more manuals (keyboards), the greater the possibilities for variations in sound. One famous organist, on first trying out a new instrument, said, "You have not presented me with just an organ - this is an orchestra!"

Also, organs differ in general sound, depending on when and where they were built. For example, the German Baroque organs that Bach played tended to use fairly low air pressure in the wind chests and had rather severe, plain-sounding pipes. The purity of this sound is well-suited to the music written by Bach and other German composers; whether the organs or the music came first is a matter of debate. On the other hand, the so-called French Romantic organ (like most of those I played in France) is characterized by very rich and varied stops, with lots of aural color and warm reed stops. The Salt Lake Tabernacle organ is a French Romantic-style organ at heart, though its huge size also allows it to be used for German Baroque music as well. There are whole books published on organ stops and how to use them, so I won't go into that here. Suffice it to say that choosing the registration for a given piece of music is one of the biggest challenges to an organist. You have to match the demands of the music to the resources of the organ, and to your own abilities. It's always an interesting process.

The ward chapel in Salt Lake where I grew up has a small 14-rank organ (which is actually pretty big for a Mormon chapel), and was the first pipe organ I ever played. In high school, our mostly-Mormon choir sang High Mass at St. Ambrose Catholic Church in Salt Lake, and I played the organ for that. After that experience, the choir director asked me if I had ever had organ lessons. I'm sure it was painfully obvious to him that I had not! So he offered to line me up with a friend who taught organ. That is how for the ensuing summer and my first year of college, I studied with Dr. Robert Cundick, chief organist at the Salt Lake LDS Tabernacle. My lessons were actually at a little practice organ in the basement of the Assembly Hall, on Temple Square like the Tabernacle, but he did take me over to play the big organ in the Tabernacle a few times.

The actual practice organ that I played on had some pipes from Joseph Ridge's original Tabernacle organ built in Pioneer times. It was replaced by this 8-rank organ during a renovation of the Assembly Hall.

The big organ at the Tabernacle is well-known, of course. Here are shots of the organ and the console.


After my first year of college, I spent 2 1/2 years in France as an LDS missionary. One of the real highlights of my mission was the opportunity to play some wonderful and huge pipe organs in France. My first town was Orleans. One day my missionary companion and I got caught in an unexpected rainstorm. We happened to be close to the cathedral Ste. Croix and ducked inside to get out of the weather. Just as we entered the church, the organist practicing in the loft hit a big full-organ chord. The reverb time in there is on the order of 5-6 seconds, quite long, so the effect was magnificent. It's easy to see how the combination of such music and the stained glass can lift people's spirits heavenward - it certainly affects me that way. The upshot of that visit was that I was able eventually to get to know the organist and play the organ. Here is a link to a view of the interior of Ste. Croix with the organ at the rear, in front of the main rose window, the usual place for cathedral organs. By the way, the organ in Ste. Croix was built by Aristide Cavaille-Coll, probably the greatest organ factor (builder) of the 19th century. The organ in Orleans is a virtual duplicate of the Grand Orgue in Notre Dame de Paris, shown here.

After Orleans, I was transferred to Bordeaux, a much larger city with numerous churches, including the cathedral St. Andre. Like many churches in the Southwest of France, the main tower is not attached to the cathedral, but stands by itself. The first time I heard the entire Brahms Requiem was at a performance here - you cannot imagine the effect that the reverberation of a large cathedral has on such a work. It's something I'll always remember. I met one of the organists here, and was able to play this magnificent organ two or three times.

From Bordeaux, I went back to Paris but was stationed out in the far Western suburbs, a town called Nanterre, which was dominated politically by the French Communist Party and was thus not very friendly to Americans. Since the Viet Nam War was in full swing in 1967-68 when I was there, I heard all kinds of obscene terms that they don't teach you in school! We missionaries were very fortunate that the mission president encouraged us to get immersed in French culture, so we all went to Midnight Mass at Notre Dame on Christmas Eve, among other things. I also had the exceptional opportunity to play the 102-rank tracker organ at the church of St. Sulpice, where Charles-Marie Widor, then Marcel Dupre were the organists for years and years. There is a long-standing tradition that anyone who wishes may play the organ at certain times of the week, so I took advantage of that. The outside of the church is totally unremarkable, but the organ! It is regarded as Cavaille-Coll's masterpiece. Having heard and played it, it's hard to disagree.

After Paris, I was transferred to the small city of Perigueux, the capital of foie gras and truffles. It's an old town, as you can see from the picture of a street near our apartment, and still has the remains of a temple to a Gallic goddess that was 400 years old when Julius Caesar conquered the town! We lived in a building built in 1415, and could see the original hand-hewn beams in our ceiling - wonderful place to live. The cathedral there is built in a Byzantine style, and really towers over the town, as you can see in this view from across the river. One day, my missionary companion and I were near the cathedral and could hear the organ playing, so we went in. It turned out that the console was on the floor rather than in the organ loft, so I went up and started talking to the priest playing it. We eventually became friends, and he allowed me to come in an hour a day at noon to play the organ. We also became what must be a very small set of Mormon missionaries who regularly ate lunch with the priests in the rectory of the cathedral!

My next stop after Perigueux, and my last town in France, was La Rochelle, a beautiful port city on the Atlantic Coast. La Rochelle was one of the Protestant "refuge cities" established by the Edict of Nantes, which allowed Protestant churches in France and set aside a number of cities to be governed by Protestant city councils. Unfortunately, that tolerance didn't last very long; eventually Cardinal Richelieu and his troops besieged and conquered La Rochelle (one of my apartments there was about 50 yards from where Richelieu's headquarters had been) and the resulting departure of many of the French Protestants, known as Huguenots, enriched many other places of Europe and North America with talented people now unwanted in their own homeland. Somehow I met the organist at the chief Calvinist Temple (church) in La Rochelle, and again ended up with their pipe organ (a medium-sized one, as it turned out, about 40 ranks) for an hour a day.

The last organ I played in France was one of the best. On the way back to Paris to catch the plane home, I stopped in the city of Poitiers for several hours, having gotten a letter of recommendation to the organist of the Cathedral of St. Pierre. The organ there was built by Francois Clicquot in 1781, and is substantially unchanged since then. It is a four-manual tracker; it's possible to couple all the manuals together and still be playable - an amazing feat of engineering! The building has a reverberation time of about seven seconds, so it sounds just incredible! Here are a couple pictures:


After college and graduate school, I moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma and played virtually all the church organs in that city. I also had the opportunity to play perhaps the most interesting organ in that part of the world, the 105-rank Moller organ at the Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa. The church itself is built in a style best called Skyscraper Neo-Gothic. The organ is terrific, and balanced very well the 120-voice multi-state LDS choir that I was accompaning at a concert there.

I moved back to Salt Lake in 2004, and am anxiously awaiting an opportunity to play the organ in the new Conference Center downtown. We'll see.