A man recently sat in a pew inside the historic Salt Lake Tabernacle, weeping.
The man had been at the Tabernacle for an organ recital earlier that week, but felt called to return for another when he saw the Tabernacle’s principal organist, Richard Elliott, was scheduled to play Claude Debussy’s “Clair de lune.” The song had been his late wife’s favorite piece.
“(I felt) God was speaking to me, and my wife was speaking to me. … So I just sat here and wept,” Elliott recalled the man telling him, in tears, after his half-hour organ performance.
Nearly every day for more than a century, someone has sat down and performed an organ recital at the Salt Lake Tabernacle — a landmark building of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Temple Square.
The daily organ recitals, featuring a mix of hymns and classical music, have drawn in an estimated 3.5 million people throughout their history, Elliott told the Deseret News in a recent interview.
What makes the tradition worth preserving is not the metrics, however. It’s the individual interactions that follow, said Elliott, who has played 35 years at the Tabernacle organ.
Those one-on-one connections are “what make this really special,” Elliott said. “I’ve really come to know that our Heavenly Father is aware of every single one of his children and of their trials and their joys and sorrows.
“(I’ve learned) that there really are no coincidences in this life … and that our connections with each other — with our fellow brothers and sisters — are an important part of why we’re here and what we do.”
The making of Temple Square’s daily organ recitals
The tradition of daily organ recitals at Temple Square’s Salt Lake Tabernacle traces its roots back to the late 1860s, when Joseph J. Daynes — the Tabernacle’s first organist — would perform impromptu recitals for people traveling to Salt Lake City to see the Tabernacle and its working pipe organ.
The recitals’ popularity and the number of people traveling to Salt Lake City’s Temple Square grew when the United States’ first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869.
Once a rail line connecting Ogden to Salt Lake City opened in 1870, practically everyone who came into the Utah Territory wanted “to make that side trip to Salt Lake City and see the famous Tabernacle,” Elliott said. It was a marvel in what was still a small settlement in the American West.
Other organists eventually began rotating through and helping out with recitals. By 1911, the recitals had become a daily fixture.
Apart from the Church of Jesus Christ’s semiannual general conferences, the Tabernacle’s daily organ recitals — held consistently for at least 115 years — could be considered among Temple Square’s longest-running traditions, Elliott said.
The recitals stood through two world wars and the Great Depression. They were also “about the only thing that continued through the (COVID-19) pandemic,” Elliott said.
Recitals paused briefly at the start of the pandemic, but then resumed via livestream. “We were thrilled that we were able to do that, and that kept us busy, it kept us in good shape — playing-wise — and it really filled a need,” Elliott said.
“We got millions and millions of views on those programs in total, and (the recitals) gave people something to look forward to during that difficult time.”
Recitals today — and what makes playing the Tabernacle organ unique
Today, recitals take place every Monday through Saturday at noon and Sundays at 2 p.m. — featuring a single organist drawn from a rotating roster of five staff organists and more than 30 guest organists.
I attended a recital recently, with Elliott performing, and watched as a crowd of roughly 40 people trickled in to hear him play. Elliott welcomed the crowd, presented the program and then performed an acoustics demonstration — a tradition he later told me has preceded each organ recital for at least as long as he’s been there.
For the demonstration, Elliott first tore a piece of paper. Then, he dropped a pin and a nail on a wooden table. The sound of each action traveled clearly from the podium to the back pews — nearly 200 feet away.
“The acoustics of the Tabernacle are world-famous,” Elliott later told me. They’re not perfect, as no “perfect acoustics” exist, he said, but they’re “ideal acoustics for music and also ideal for getting the sound from the pulpit out to the people in the room.”
The Tabernacle’s favorable acoustics stem from its large, elliptical dome roof, which reflects and distributes sound across the structure. One can still “hear gasps from the audience” during each recital’s acoustics demonstration, Elliott said. It is a surprising experience for many.
Following the acoustics demonstration, Elliott walked to the organ bench and began to play. The organ’s sound rang and reverberated through the domed Tabernacle as Elliott’s hands jumped between keyboards, and his feet shuffled across the organ’s pedals.
That afternoon, Elliott played a mix of gentle and energetic songs, such as his arrangements of “I Got Rhythm” and “Come, Come, Ye Saints.”
“We often tell people that the worst seat in the house for hearing the Tabernacle organ is on the organ bench,” Elliott told me. The organ pipes’ sound travels along the ceiling, so from the bench, what one hears is a muddle of sound reflected from all sides of the building.
“You have to know the music really well and basically be able to go on autopilot, especially with a faster piece of music,” Elliott said. Otherwise, “it’s just a jumble to your ears.”
Despite the challenge, Elliott said playing the Tabernacle organ is “still a thrilling sound.”
The Tabernacle organ has grown and evolved throughout time — going from only about 700 pipes in 1867 to 11,623 pipes in 206 ranks today.
Back when the Tabernacle was built in 1867, the organ’s technology was all mechanical, Elliott said. “When you pushed the keys, you could feel the valves opening up and … hear the wind wheezing in the pipes.” Now, it’s fiber optics that carry the signal from the knobs and keys to the valves and organ.
Incorporating some of the roughly 130 pioneer-era pipes that are still housed in the building, however, enables Elliott to connect to the building’s pioneer history.
“Those pipes made those exact same sounds back in 1867,” Elliott said. Playing them — especially in his arrangement of “Come, Come, Ye Saints” — feels “almost as if the pioneers were here singing their hymn and just making music for us to enjoy.”
Lessons at the organ
When asked what he’s learned from 35 years of playing at the Tabernacle organ, Elliott returned to “the idea of the one” — the idea that music and the daily organ recitals are truly about connecting to the one, and that God is behind any apparent coincidence.
Guest organist James Welch likewise said his connections with people have been one of the recitals’ greatest blessings.
“You never know who’s going to be there,” Welch told the Deseret News.
Welch shared that on his July 4 recital, he met a family from Ogden whose young daughter was celebrating a birthday. The daughter played the organ, so he invited her to play a piece on the Tabernacle organ in celebration.
The experience was moving for Welch because he was roughly the same age the very first time he played the Tabernacle organ in 1963. Now, he’s played the Tabernacle organ as a guest organist for 45 years and played at others worldwide.
“It was so much fun for me to see another young person have that opportunity and, I like to think, get inspired in the same way that I was inspired because one of the Tabernacle organists let me play when I was 13 years old,” Welch said.
The future of the daily organ recital — and how to attend
Elliott said the recitals will continue as regularly scheduled through the historic Salt Lake Temple’s upcoming celebration and into the future.
“We see the organ recitals now as continuing to be something that draws people here,” Elliott said. “We expect that it will work well with the (Salt Lake Temple) open house.”
Those interested can attend the free, daily recitals year-round on the following schedule:
- Monday through Saturday at noon
- Sundays at 2 p.m.
An additional 2 p.m. recital is also available Monday through Saturday during the year’s summer months. The only days recitals are not held each year are Thanksgiving, Christmas and general conference weekends.
See more information about the recitals at TheTabernacleChoir.org.