Organ of the Mormon Gate vault

The organ of the Mormon Gate vault is an organ of 11623 pipes which is in the Mormon Tabernacle of Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the United States. It regularly accompanies the services by the Choeur of the Mormon Gate vault.

Construction

The manufacturer of the first organ of the Gate vault, Joseph H. Ridges (1827-1914), was an Australian convert with the Mormonisme which had brought with him in Utah small organ of its own manufacture. Brigham Young (1801-1877), president of the Church of Jesus-Christ of the Saints of the Last Days, learning that Joseph H. Ridges was an achieved manufacturer of organ, charged it with building the instrument.

The principal problem of the manufacturers of organ was to get adequate wood. Consequently, Ridges and its associates, Shure Olsen, Niels Johnson, Henry Taylor, Frank Wood and others, are reflected to excavate the area to find the wood wished, which they ended up discovering in the Mountains of Parowan and Valley Prick, with five hundred kilometers in the south of Salt Lake City.

To cut and transport these heavy wood sections were not a small matter; it was necessary to trace roads and to throw bridges on the brooks in the canyons; moreover, almost all work had to rest on voluntariate. Sometimes to twenty drivers of carriages with three pairs of oxen to each carriage went in distant mountains to cut and transport the wood sections. The drivers returned on their premises only when their invaluable wood loading was arranged at good port inside Broad Bowery with Temple Public garden.

Less than twenty month after the moment when Ridges began the construction of the organ of the Gate vault in 1866, it had sufficiently finished them so that they could be used with the conference of October 1867. At that time, the console, with its two lines of keys was built in the center and in front of the organ; there, the organist, sitted back turned to the audience, followed the directions of the leader in a mirror placed above the keyboards.

The organ original and their thirty-two series of pipes on several occasions were completely rebuilt, increased and modernized. The first replanning and enlarging in volume occurred in 1900, when one installed a pneumatic tubular console with four keyboards, with four meters fifty front the organ. In 1948, one added modernized accessories allowing a greater volume, a broader dynamic range and a richer diversity of sonorities. One also built a console with five keyboards equipped with a complex system of registers and pedals which control the eight sections of the instrument: large the organ of accompaniment, the positive one, the expressive keyboard, the keyboard of account, the organ bombard, the organ in counter-melody and the organ with pedals.

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