The Mormon Tabernacle Choir has been producing recordings for an appreciative public for 100 years now, reportedly the longest such music career in the nation and one of the longest in the world.

As an article in this Church News edition notes, recording technology had scarcely emerged when the choir made its first recordings on Sept. 1, 1910, one of which survives today. Significantly, it is an anthem well-known to many Latter-day Saints and Tabernacle Choir listeners, "Let the Mountains Shout for Joy."

Prominent LDS composer and early Tabernacle Choir director Evan Stephens created that stirring piece, undoubtedly drawing inspiration from scriptural texts such as Isaiah 27:6; 51:3; 55:12; and Doctrine and Covenants 128:23.

Brother Stephens' exultant words call for the mountains, hills and valleys to rejoice and sing because the wilderness has "blossomed as the rose, and the barren desert is a fruitful field" with joy, gladness, thanksgiving and the voice of melody found therein.

The message alludes not only to the coming millennial reign of our Lord and Savior but to events that are to occur in the last days preparatory to that Second Advent, when scattered Israel is to be gathered and the gospel of peace is to be carried to every nation, kindred, tongue and people.

The timing for the appearance of that initial Tabernacle Choir recording is remarkable considering its historical context. In 1910, the wilderness was indeed beginning to blossom as the rose. The Latter-day Saints had emerged from a long winter of adversity and oppression. Just 14 years earlier, the territory they had established in the mountains and deserts of the West had been admitted to the Union as a state, and it was now prospering economically and culturally.

The growing fame and popularity of the Tabernacle Choir in 1910, evidenced by its music being published by a commercial company in one of the earliest mass-produced audio recordings, was itself a testament to the increasing acceptance and influence the Latter-day Saints were beginning to have in the world at large. The historic edifice in which the choir made those first recordings, and the adjacent Salt Lake Temple, with its lofty spires and granite walls, symbolized the strength and firmness of the Church itself in the latter days, though it had endured many decades of hardship.

Of course, that firmness could not have been achieved without the collective strength, dedication and commitment through the years of thousands of individual Church members in whose hearts dwelt a conviction of the truthfulness of the gospel as restored by Jesus Christ through the instrumentality of the Prophet Joseph Smith.

The acoustic technology used to make that 1910 Tabernacle Choir recording was not far removed from the phonograph invented by Thomas Edison and patented in 1878. Edison and his assistants found they could wrap a grooved cylinder in tinfoil and, by rotating the cylinder while simultaneously shouting into a flared horn attached to a diaphragm and stylus, cause the stylus to etch the sound waves of the human voice into a continuous groove made in the tinfoil. The recorded sound could then be "played back" and amplified through the horn by means of the stylus tracing the groove and causing the diaphragm to vibrate. Later refinements by others led to the use of wax and a disc as recording media.

These primitive efforts formed the foundation of today's sophisticated technology, in which a digital signal is recorded onto a disc or an electronic drive. By virtue of today's techniques we can enjoy a virtually flawless and faithful audio reproduction of an original performance and hear it again and again with home equipment or a personal listening device.

As an analogy, the process of audio recording perhaps has something to teach us about the refinement of the heart and the sanctification of the soul.

Ancient prophets spoke of the laws and commandments of God being written "not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart" (2 Corinthians 3:3; see also Proverbs 3:3; Jeremiah 31:33; Ezekiel 11:19; and Hebrews 8:10).

As an audio signal is preserved on a recording medium, the truth and power of God's word can be recorded in our hearts. Through our faith, words and good works, we can amplify and reproduce again and again the word and Spirit of God found within our hearts in a manner that strengthens us and our loved ones and blesses those around us and brings them to Christ.

As we join with Latter-day Saints everywhere in doing this, we form a resounding chorus of righteousness that reaches around the world.

With Evan Stephens, we can exclaim, "Let the mountains shout for joy!"