I’ve written before about one of Salt Lake City’s hidden treasures, a nifty little establishment called The Organ Loft, which is a monument to one man’s lifelong fascination with an outmoded technology:

So the story goes, Lawrence Bray fell in love with the sound of the pipe organs that once provided musical accompaniment for many old-time silent-movie theaters and, beginning in the late 1940s, he started acquiring components of these old organs as they were scrapped out of Salt Lake moviehouses. He assembled them in his uncle’s chicken coop, adding onto the building several times over the years as his instrument grew. Today, that much-enlarged (and improved) chicken coop is The Organ Loft. Owned and operated by Lawrence Bray’s nephew, Larry, it is one of the few venues in this country, and probably in the whole world, where you can see a silent movie in something close to the way our great-grandparents must’ve experienced it.

Thanks to Anne’s and my long patronage of the Loft, I’ve developed quite an appreciation for these theater organs myself. They’re amazingly complex instruments, capable of generating sound effects and taking the place of an entire orchestra. But the sound they produce is decidedly old-fashioned. When you hear one, you immediately think of a more buttoned-down age, when automobiles had crank-starters and men always wore hats. One consequence of that effect is that more modern, familiar pieces of music become unexpectedly novel when played on a theater organ. Case in point: the Main Title from the Star Wars Symphonic Suite, played on an absolutely beautiful Wurlitzer at the Sanfilippo Foundation‘s “Place de la Musique” in Barrington, IL. Give this a listen and tell me it doesn’t make you smile to imagine my favorite movie as it might have looked in hand-cranked sepia tone, with no spoken dialogue and inter-title cards explaining what’s going on:

Incidentally, Anne and I were lucky enough to see the organist, Jelani Eddington, in person at The Organ Loft a number of years ago. He’s an incredibly talented young man, who was honored by the American Theatre Organ Society when they named him the 2001 Theatre Organist of the Year. I can’t remember what film he accompanied when we saw him, though. I love middle age…

Hat tip to our colleague Jaquandor, who first posted this video over on Facebook…