Like a little kid in a candy store, organist Robert Huw Morgan can't keep his fingers off the goodies.
"You have to hear the big, big trumpets," he says, pulling out an ivory stop inscribed tube mirabilis. He closes his eyes and leans back on his bench high up in the gallery of Memorial Church, while high C's resound from stone floor to carved arch. "The amazing trumpet, indeed."
Morgan's fingers dance across the console to the exquisite viole d'amour -- "the love fiddle," he croons. He draws out the posaune, or German trombone, and flirts with the contre bombarde, a mellow reed with French attitude.
"It's such a great big round sound, so typical of a romantic-style, 20th-century organ," Morgan says, running an admiring palm along the finished wood. "And it's pretty typical of the period to have such a huge mixture of German, French, Latin and English."
In this centenary year of the Murray Harris, the 33-year-old Welshman is having way too much fun. As University organist, he has lined up four of his favorite British and American musicians for the Bishop George Amos Miller Organ Recital Series, eight concerts designed to show off the range and majesty of an instrument that is highly regarded by those in the professional know. The series began in October and continues through Commencement weekend.
The first organ installed in Memorial Church, in 1901, the Murray Harris has survived two major earthquakes and extensive restorations and releatherings over the years. As Morgan works the bass line, a low growl rumbles out of 26-foot-tall pipes that flank the organ. "Inside the pipes there's a reed, like on an oboe, and the reed vibrates as air goes through it," he says. "You can't really hear the pitch, but if you listen carefully, you can sort of feel the individual vibrations."
Each of the stops on the console corresponds to a rank of some 60 pipes, which adds up to "an awful lot of pipes," says Morgan -- 3,770 at last count. The biggest pipes emit the lowest sounds, and tiny, tiny pipes about the size of a pencil produce piercing high notes. "It's useless having anything smaller," he adds, "because then you'd have dogs running in circles for miles around."
