Echoes from past
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Those famous Salt Lake Tabernacle acoustics that let you hear someone at the front of the hall whisper or drop a pin while you're standing at the rear were a bane, not a boon, in the beginning.
"The same acoustics that permit tourists to hear the pin drop on the stand also permit listeners to hear its echoes," explained Elwin C. Robison and W. Randall Dixon in a not-yet-published book. "While the echo reinforces the sound when there is a single impact, continuous speech is a different matter. As multiple echoes ricochet back and forth inside the 250-feet-long hall, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish words if there are not sufficient absorptive surfaces to stop the echoes or reverberation."
With echoes bouncing back and forth off the walls, a speaker's words were apt to become an indistinguishable muddle, if they could be heard at all above the din of shuffling feet, whispering and other noise from the congregation.
The problem became so acute that President Brigham Young at one point asked Church members not to bring their young children to the worship services.
As it happened, it was children who were called upon to help solve the problem. And what they did was re-created recently by Primary children from the Farmington Utah South Stake in a special girls' day-camp activity.
Like their Latter-day Saint counterparts of the 1870s, the Primary girls made paper flowers to be placed on evergreen garlands strung from the ceiling. But this time, instead of the actual Tabernacle, the garlands were strung in an exhibit at the Museum of Church History and Art. The exhibit opened last year to commemorate the re-opening of the Tabernacle after a four-year remodeling and seismic upgrade project.
"The plan was to hang garlands of evergreen boughs across the ceiling so that the sound, even though it went all the way to the back, wouldn't come all the way to the front again," explained exhibit planner Kirk Henrichsen to a representative group of Primary girls from the stake — where the first Primary was organized in 1878 — who visited the museum exhibit last month.
"They hung big ropes across the whole Tabernacle in almost a spider web filled up with evergreen boughs," he said. "And the first year that they did it, they put real live flowers in with the evergreen boughs. But what happened to the flowers? They wilted, while the evergreen boughs stayed green."
The next year, artificial flower blossoms were constructed from paper. "And the people that were best at making paper flowers were children with hands that could make little things and could use scissors to cut the paper," Brother Henrichsen told the girls. "So that's why we had you do the same thing that the pioneer children did back in 1875."
The visiting girls then participated in placing artificial evergreen boughs — dubbed "forevergreen" by Brother Henrichsen because they are far more durable than the real thing — in ropes being twisted expressly for stringing in the museum exhibit. The paper flowers the girls and their associates had constructed back home in Farmington were then placed among the boughs, secured in the twists of the ropes.
Then, as the group sang "The Handcart Song," the ropes were rhythmically hoisted to the ceiling with pulleys in the manner a crew might rig the mast of a sailing ship — just as the pioneers probably did it in the 1870s.
Barbara Page, who is a docent at the museum and is well-acquainted with the Tabernacle exhibit, is on the stake's Primary board. It was she who arranged with the museum to have the girls make the flowers as a service project for their day-camp.
In a conversation with the Church News, Brother Henrichsen said the ropes were hoisted using wooden pulleys and "ceiling thimbles," or guides in holes in the ceiling through which the ropes could be pulled. The ropes were then secured with belaying pins in the timbers of the Tabernacle's lattice-work roof.
Displayed in the exhibit is an actual wooden pulley and ceiling thimble taken from the Tabernacle sometime in the 1960s and preserved in the museum.
How long were such dampening methods as the garlands necessary?
"It was no longer an issue when they finally added microphones," Brother Henrichsen said. "When they stopped hanging the garlands, we can say for sure, is when Utah achieved statehood in 1896." Historical photos from that occasion show a large American flag draped from the ceiling. The flag was to express patriotism, but it was also for the purpose of acoustic dampening, and it remained in place for some time after statehood day.
Almost two years in duration — the longest of any temporary exhibit at the museum so far — the Tabernacle exhibit will remain open until Jan. 11 of next year. Until then, visitors can see the garlands of "forevergreen" boughs and flowers that the Primary children from Farmington helped construct and string in honor of the work of children who lived more than a century ago.
E-mail to: rscott@desnews.com
