The story of the famed Salt Lake Tabernacle Organ

In his new book, “The Sound of Mormonism: A Media History of Latter-day Saints,” historian Jared Farmer of the School of Arts & Sciences traces the history of the LDS Church through music and media. The following is an excerpt from the book, published in February by Utah State University Press.

Told conventionally, the history of music in the Salt Lake Tabernacle becomes a chronicle of the choir: its touring, its radio broadcast, its discography, and its outsized role as a PR-cum-proselytizing arm of the LDS Church. But telling the narrative chorally elides an important period—from the completion of the transcontinental railroad (1869) through the radio debut of Music and the Spoken Word (1929). In this sixty-year period, not the choir but the organ was the most famous musical feature of both Mormonism and Utah. The story of the organ is also the story of its unique architectural and acoustical container—the Tabernacle—and the building’s impact on how Mormons speak as well as sing.

After laying out the grid for Great Salt Lake City, Latter-day Saints made plans for a temple, a tabernacle, and a theater. The three buildings were completed in reverse order. Because a place for general assembly—a “tabernacle” in LDS usage of the biblical word—had been immediately necessary, settlers erected a wood “bowery” in Salt Lake in July 1847. This open-air shade pavilion remained in use for years. Later came an adobe tabernacle, a squat barn-like building finished in 1852, complete with a small pipe organ—the first such instrument in LDS history. This provisional building became known as the “Old Tabernacle” when its instantly famous successor opened in 1867. As authorized by Brigham Young, the “New Tabernacle” or “Great Tabernacle” featured an unusual design: a self-supporting oval dome without view-blocking pillars. The ellipsoidal room with vaulted ceiling—framed with rawhide-wrapped timbers—was gloomily dark and drearily plain, except for a grand organ (designed by Joseph Ridges, with casework by Ralph Ramsey) at the back, centered behind the pulpit. The building’s exterior, by contrast, looked striking, though outsiders often mocked its resemblance to a melon, an egg, an umbrella, a dish cover, a cauldron, a bathtub, a capsized boat, a beached whale, a tortoise. Yet non-Mormons could not stay away from the “Church of the Holy Turtle.” Their curiosity was too great.

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Visitation to Great Salt Lake City spiked after the joining of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869 and the construction of a spur line to the territorial capital the following year. Gawkers came to Salt Lake on their transcontinental stopover: they voyeuristically tried to spot polygamous families, they admired the Wasatch Range, and they departed with few positive observations about the social landscape. Railroad tourists applauded the industry represented by Mormon irrigation ditches; they took pleasure in the municipal hot springs (and later the lakeside Saltair Resort); and, above all, they loved the acoustic “pin-drop test” in the Tabernacle, followed by an organ recital. This tourist tradition began with concerts for dignitaries and large groups, scheduled in advance. Later, the practice continued on demand; then, in 1901, semi-weekly; then, in 1908, daily at noon (excluding Sundays) from April to October; and finally, in 1916, every non-Sabbath day, with additional evening recitals in the summer.

The current formula for recitals on Temple Square (formerly Temple Block) is very similar to that devised by organist John J. McClellan in the first decade of the 1900s. In turn, McClellan’s programming resembled the kind of daily matinee played by leading organists at the 7,000-seat Festival Hall at the World’s Columbian Exposition in August—October 1893, a “watershed moment in U.S. organ culture.” (McClellan had served as an organ’s assistant at the Chicago console and followed that instrument to its final home at the University of Michigan, where he completed his music degree.) The Tabernacle organist now, like then, chooses two or three classical pieces that show off different registers of the instrument, performs an arrangement of an old melody, and does their own take on [the LDS anthem] “Come, Come, Ye Saints.” Today’s organist plays less from the French romantic repertoire and far fewer (if any) opera transcriptions. Wagnermania has waned. But these are minor differences.

The Tabernacle Organ took its current iconic shape, including more than 10,000 pipes, with a major expansion completed in 1916, during a US fad for “monster organs” bookended by the Wanamaker Organ (1904, moved to a Philadelphia department store after debuting at the St. Louis world’s fair) and the Boardwalk Hall Auditorium Organ in Atlantic City, New Jersey (1932, billed as the world’s largest and loudest musical instrument). Unlike those two, the Tabernacle Organ grew over time, through multiple renovations. Originally pumped by hand, the wind-powered instrument gained a hydraulic motor in 1875 and an electric one in 1901. The original casing was taller than it was wide. To match the increased width of the 1916 casing, Church architects expanded the choir loft, meaning 337 seats needed to be filled. The choir’s standard performing size increased to that exact number, driven by architectural, visual, and social demands rather than musical considerations. [Tabernacle music director Evan] Stephens sometimes toured with 400 singers. No choir needs to be that big; indeed, there is a principle of diminishing returns with greater choral size. Synchronization becomes more difficult, and articulation (attack and decay) gets muddier.

But a crowd of singers paired well visually with a wall of pipes. The combination looked impressive on postcards (and later on television). Like the body culture on display at the Deseret Gymnasium, or the Church-owned Saltair, or the Church-sponsored annual hike of Mount Timpanogos, the bulked-up organ with massed choir was a sign of Mormon mainstreaming within US culture at a time when bigness meant progress.

In the 1910s and 1920s, every LDS ward [parish] with the means raised money to install pipe organs in their chapels, thus contributing to the heyday of organ culture in the United States. Across the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, US Protestants abandoned architectural Calvinism in favor of neo-Gothic luxe; many high-toned places of metropolitan worship featured grand organs behind the pulpit stage, making church more like theater. Then, in the 1920s, movie palaces added Wurlitzer organs, making cinema more like church. Radio City Music Hall in New York City had the largest Wurlitzer, with second place going to the Denver Municipal Auditorium—a secular analog, on the other side of the Rockies, to the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Finally, in the 1940s, Hammond organs began to appear in baseball parks, the arenas of the leading US “civil religion” at the time.

All of this helps explain why, in the early decades of radios and automobiles, the Tabernacle Organ at Temple Square was one of the most famous instruments in the United States as well as a top Utah tourist attraction before the Beehive State had national parks. Latter-day Saints were the first Americans to offer daily organ recitals for free—and now they are among the last to keep up the practice. In the absence of church bells, liturgical organ strains, or calls to prayers, Salt Lake City features a half-hour of keyboard favorites on a five-console, 207-rank instrument at noon.