Mormon Tabernacle Choir Essay

Last Sunday I had the opportunity for the first time, to listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir live. I was able to attend “Music and the Spoken Word” which is the longest continuous network broadcast in the world. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed with roughly 360 members and were conducted by Mack Wilberg. They were accompanied by a phenomenal organist, Richard Elliott. The organ he performed on has 5 keyboards, 11623 pipes and 32 footpedals.
The choir opened with “I Sing the Greatness of Our God” by Fred Bock and words by Isaac Watts. This piece began with the organ playing the melody softly in triple meter. The choir came in on an off beat and sang a homorhythmic arch contour. The choir began softly and crescendoed quickly. After the introduction, the first verse was sung alternating between the men and women, they started out acapella. The choir came back together and sang the chorus of the song in unison and crescendoed with the organ until they were singing fortissimo. This piece had an overall allegro tempo and had a generally repetitive theme. It was apparent that

the music was in a major key since it sounded very warm and friendly.
The piece that stood out to me the most was the organ solo by Richard Elliott.

He performed “Sinfonia to Cantata #29” by Johann Sebastian Bach. This piece of music was beautiful and very calming to listen to. It began with one hand playing powerful chords while the other hand was playing an ascending contour, and then a little while later changed into a descending contour. This gave the song a very distinct shape. The tempo of the piece was allegro, which made it made it hard for me to keep up with. During one theme the music crescendoed while descending down the scale with a trill between notes on one hand until it was it was piano. The piece then quickly shifted into another crescendo and while the music got louder it also ascended back up the keyboard with stunning chords each played quickly and distinctly. The timing of this piece was triple meter, in a major key and had a large

range.
After the beautiful organ solo the choir moved on to the next song which was “The Lord Is My Strength and My Strength and My Shield” by Paul Leddington Wright. This piece was by far the most involved of all of the pieces performed. It was also a major key and was more of a moderato tempo. Overall this song was much softer as a whole, it was generally played piano or mezzo-forte. The song began with the first theme, which was an oboe solo performing the melody, and then just the women in the choir joined in and sang the melody with the oboe and the flute joined in. Next the flute played a different variation of the melody and then the men and women in the choir joined in singing in unison. The choir was then joined by a clarinet, oboe, flute and piccolo all harmonizing. It then shifted to just a duet with the clarinet and flute. The song ended with a softer variation of the melody played by the oboe and organ.
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir was outstanding, I found it very difficult to listen to all the theory behind the music when the music was so stunning. I loved every piece they performed.