The Organ Concert for One

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

This week I attended an organ concert—I was the lone member of the audience. I’ve had a long history with the organ—none of it involving my own musical aptitude, which is high on the “love” scale, but, sadly, low on the “competence” scale. My dad’s mother’s history includes almost 40 years of her playing the organ for her local ward—housed in the first LDS building in Las Vegas. Built long before the world-wide expansion of the church, the Las Vegas First Ward is a uniquely beautiful building (if it still exists), and for a kid who went to church in branches located in eccentric rental halls (once I actually went to Primary in a barn—a fairly clean barn, but still–a barn), it represented what a church should look like for me. I never personally heard my grandma play the organ. By the time I was old enough to notice, her hands were gnarled with arthritis, her knuckles swollen and painful to the touch. But her love of music lived on in her sons, and through them to me and all of my siblings.

When I was 12 and lived in Detroit, Alexander Schreiner’s son Richard lived in our ward. Once his dad visited and played the organ on the Sabbath (I think it was Sunday.) It was the first time I understood how sacred music had the power to transform any venue into a cathedral filled with praises to Heaven. For years afterward, when I heard Schreiner accompany the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on the radio Sunday mornings, I dreamed of a day when I might actually see that famous instrument on Temple Square. It wasn’t until I was 19 that I was finally able to cram myself onto a bench in the Tabernacle to watch Schreiner’s fingers fly over the keys during General Conference. (Note: at the time my dad was stationed in Baltimore at the NSA. When the ushers finally acknowledged the impossibility of adding one more person to our bench, I turned to apologize to the person sitting next to me for having violated accepted social distancing norms. To my shock, I discovered one of my favorite uncles, my dad’s brother, who lived in Las Vegas–2500 miles away from my home, pushed up against my right shoulder. It had been more more than two years since we had visited. In my head I still think of that moment as The Miracle of the Music.)

That same year I had a job as an early morning custodian at BYU. One of the team I worked with was a music major whose summer employment for at least 2 or 3 years before I met him had been to build small, specialty organs from the ground up for several Protestant church congregations—none of them locally–in an oddly-shaped garage out behind his house. One end of the roof angled up 15 or 20 feet high to accommodate the pipes (there’s probably a formal name for a group of organ pipes, but I have no idea what it is) which he assembled for the instruments. I took a tour of the outbuilding once. A couple of long banks of pipes were carefully laid out on the floor in what was clearly a complex numbering system. If my memory serves, he was a substitute organist for the Cathedral of the Madeleine for several years back then. (And no, I have no idea how he learned to build an organ, but he told me he was mesmerized by them as a kid, and his parents encouraged his single-minded zeal.)

The organ concert I attended was in the living room of a close friend. Her own path to the instrument was circuitous, to say the least. When they still had young children, her husband had been Bishop of my ward. They were called soon after that experience to serve as Mission Leaders in Argentina. When they came home three years later, he was called as Bishop again—this time in a Young Adult ward. Not many Gen Z members play the piano, so my friend became the de facto pianist. One day her husband asked her if she would try the organ? She’d never played the organ; on the other hand, she was a reasonably willing volunteer. She said the first few weeks were rough, but she saw a poster for BYU Education Week advertising–among hundreds of other classes–organ instruction. She signed up. One of the instructors was Linda Margetts, Organist for the Tabernacle Choir.

By the time my friend’s husband was released, Margetts had convinced this grandmother of now six grandchildren (three born in the last couple of months!) to register at the U of U for a master’s degree in organ performance (to add to her architecture degree earned many years before). In order to qualify for the program, she had to demonstrate her level of ability–not to mention her dedication, so her husband bought her an organ–three keyboards, plus a full pedal board. It sits in her living room alongside a baby grand piano. I was there with her adult children, a couple of grandchildren, and several friends the night of that required performance.

Today she’s in her second year. A couple of weeks ago she called me to tell me she was giving her year-end organ recital at Libby Gardner Hall on the U campus. Would I like to attend? Absolutely! But I had an unbreakable schedule complication. So when I walked into Relief Society the following Sunday, I sat down next to her and asked if we could negotiate? Which is how I found myself sitting on the sofa in her living room and listening to her play two of Bach’s magnificent compositions which filled the rafters of her home. I’ll be honest—there may have been tears washing down my cheeks.

When she was finished, I asked her what motivated her to take such a leap at this time in her life? She said, “My mother had Alzheimer’s. My sister and I have vowed not to let that happen to us–you choose whether or not to flourish.” A motto worth embracing—whether or not we play the organ.