Instead of Bing Crosby or Mariah Carey, an Iowa monastery gets the spirit of the season from an organ built by Latter-day Saint artisans in Utah.
When my wife and I were in Iowa recently, Father Brendan showed us around his 173-year-old abbey, founded during the Potato Famine by monks from Ireland. We saw a peaceful cemetery with black crosses dating from 1850, a lovely bell tower and a stunning limestone church with 3-foot-thick walls and arched Gothic windows.
Since 1978, Bigelow & Co. has hand-built or restored almost four dozen organs for churches, homes, universities and museums across the United States. As a boy, company founder Mike Bigelow fell in love with the instrument while playing for his Latter-day Saint congregation. Bigelow told me that in the early 1980s, the Iowa Trappists asked him to make an organ for their renovated church. After visiting the abbey, Bigelow designed an organ in the Italian style, with a softer and subtler sound than the powerful organs made in the German tradition.
According to Father Brendan, “In Gregorian chant, the words are prominent. The music is at the service of the words. The organ also must follow this pattern.” He said Bigelow was “a good listener” and created the perfect instrument for the monastery, one “integral to our praise and worship of God.” “In a monastery, Advent is observed with deep appreciation for its distinctive character,” the New Melleray monks explain on their. “This is not shopping season for monks. It is not Christmas. Christmas decorations, which in the general culture appear shortly after Thanksgiving, are nowhere in sight in a monastery until Christmas Eve. Advent and Christmas are different. Advent is the period of joyful expectation. Christmas is the celebration of the birth of God into the world, born of Mary.
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