Charlie Chaplin is precariously perched atop a ladder.
His character, an assistant at a pawnshop, attempts to polish the storefront. As the ladder rocks back and forth in increasingly wider swings, an organ plays wavering glissandos to match. Chaplin and ladder finally crash down, and so does the organ in a fit of dissonant chords.
The jaunty tunes, however, weren’t recorded over the silent movie. Matt Gender, a UF alum, improvised the accompaniment on UF’s 100-year-old pipe organ at University Auditorium on Jan. 23. About 150 students, alumni and community members came to the performance, roaring with laughter as characters on screen tumbled from rooftops in black and white.
The accompaniment was part of a four-day kickoff to UF’s Pipe Organ Centennial from Jan. 23 to Jan. 26, commemorating the Andrew Anderson Memorial Pipe Organ, built in 1925.
Laura Ellis, associate director of the UF School of Music and the university’s resident organist, spent about a year planning the centennial. She arranged alumni recitals, a hymn festival, talks given by UF Organ Studio alumni and a pipe organ demonstration, where audience members were invited on stage to get a closer look.
Ellis said she intentionally lined up a variety of events to show the community “all of the different things that the organ can do.”
She reached out to former students, many who eagerly made the journey back to Gainesville. A few sported orange-and-blue striped ties on stage to show their school spirit.
Gender, one of Ellis’ former students, flew in from Minnesota to perform the silent film accompaniment. He graduated from UF in 2013 with a bachelor’s in music performance and said returning to the same organ he worked “hours and hours to get something right with” as an undergraduate was like being “a kid in a candy store.”
“It’s really what makes the trip worthwhile,” Gender said. “Being able to reconnect with this place, these people, this school — it’s just been really special to be back.”
In addition to alumni, the centennial featured renowned guest artists like Stephen Tharp, who gave the first recital Jan. 23.
Organists can’t travel with their instruments, so Tharp enjoys working with each venue’s unique organ. UF’s pipe organ was “absolutely fabulous,” he said.
“It’s always like meeting a new person and discovering a new way to play music you’ve played for a long time,” he said. “Nothing’s the same twice, and it always keeps it inventive.”
Tharp also plays the piano and the harpsichord, but the organ was his first passion after hearing it at church every Sunday growing up. Tharp said he was attracted to the instrument’s grandiosity; as he put it, an organ is a “big old machine that you could control by yourself.”
As a performer, Tharp tries to break the one-dimensional view of the organ as solely a church instrument.
“In fact, what we have is the most diversity of repertoire of any musician,” he said. “So it’s just a matter of bringing that to the fore when you do public programs.”
Like Tharp, Laura Griggs also had her first exposure to the organ through church. A UF music education alum who specialized in the organ and graduated in 1977, Griggs would turn the pages of her aunt’s sheet music at services.
She was thrilled to be part of a large crowd at each centennial event, sharing in the rapturous applause.
“I would feel something that wasn’t earthly,” Griggs said. “I realized that I was sensing God’s presence when I would hear the organ.”
But for all its holy associations, organ music goes much further than places of worship. From the unmistakable harmony and ornamentation of Johann Sebastian Bach to dramatic and exploratory contemporary pieces, the centennial put on a wide-reaching array of genres.
A concertgoer tries out the pipe organ during an open demonstration at the University Auditorium on Saturday, Jan. 25, 2025.
Maggie Tran, a 21-year-old UF keyboard performance senior who is part of the UF Organ Studio, played several pieces for the pipe organ demonstration. She said she plays a lot of hymn-based pieces as an organist for the First United Methodist Church of Gainesville. But Tran also enjoys the “really showy pieces” and more contemporary works, she said.
Most of all, she loves how loud the organ is.
“There’s a lot more you can play with in a very dramatic way, more than piano,” Tran said. “Piano is very subtle, and I don’t have the patience for that. There’s an art to it, but I decided bigger is better.”
Contact Pristine Thai at pthai@alligator.org. Follow her on X @pristinethai.
Pristine Thai is a university general assignment reporter and a third-year political science and journalism major. Her free time is spent attending classical music concerts or petting cats.
