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The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, sometimes colloquially referred to as MoTab or Tab Choir, is a 360-member choir. The choir is part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).
Description
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is a 360 piece choir named after the Salt Lake Tabernacle. The choir has performed in the Tabernacle for over a hundred years.
The Tabernacle houses an organ consisting of 11,623 pipes. The choir is usually accompanied by it. An orchestra or a cappella singing is used as well.
Prospective singers must be LDS Church members who are eligible for a temple recommend, be between 25 and 55 years of age at the start of choir service, and live within 100 miles of Temple Square. History The Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square performing on December 3, 2005, in the LDS Conference Center under the direction of Craig Jessop 'I am a Child of God' Menu 0:00 Music and text written by Naomi Ward Randall in 1957. Performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square in 2005. Problems playing this file? See media help.
The choir was founded in August 1847, one month after the Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley.
The Tabernacle was completed in 1867 and the choir held its first concert there on July 4, 1873.[not in citation given]
The choir started out fairly small and rather undisciplined. In 1869, George Careless was appointed as the choir's conductor and the Tabernacle Choir began to musically improve. Under Careless, the first large choir was assembled by adding smaller choral groups to the main Salt Lake Choir. This larger choir, just over 300, sang at the church's October 1873 general conference. It was at this point that the choir began to match the size of the spacious Tabernacle. On September 1, 1910, the choir sang the song, 'Let the Mountains shout for Joy', as their first ever recording. Three hundred of the 600 members showed up for the recording.
Since July 15, 1929, the choir has performed a weekly radio broadcast called Music & the Spoken Word, which is one of the longest-running continuous radio network broadcasts in the world.
Later directors brought more solid vocal training and worked to raise the standards of the choir. The choir also began improving as an ensemble and increased its repertoire from around one hundred songs to nearly a thousand. In July 1929, the choir performed its first radio broadcast of Music & the Spoken Word. By 1950, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed numerous concerts each year and had released its first long-playing recording. During the 1950s, the choir made its first tour of Europe and earned a Grammy Award for its recording of the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic'. Later directors of the choir continued to hone and refine the choir's sound.
At the end of the choir's 4,165th live broadcast on July 12, 2009, the show's host, Lloyd D. Newell, announced another milestone that the show had hit: the completion of its 80th year in existence. The show has been televised since the early 1960s and is now broadcast worldwide through approximately 1,500 radio and television stations.
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