Department of Music faculty member Barbara Moore has been featured in UVA Today for her decades-long tenure as an organist for the University Chapel! 

UVA Today's Jane Kelly sat down with Barbara to discuss the hundreds of weddings she has played since the 1960's and how tastes in wedding processional music have evolved over the years:

Barbara Moore has achieved a feat no other person in the world can claim: She has performed at more than 400 weddings in the chapel at the University of Virginia. 

“Oh my,” she recalled. “Gee. I know I’ve played about 700 weddings, but not all of them are at the chapel. So, I’d say maybe two-thirds of them, 400-plus, 450, something like that.”

She played her first wedding when she was 16 years old. Born and raised in Charlottesville, she still remembers her first ceremony in the chapel – one of hundreds she’s meticulously recorded in compact, spiral notebooks during the last 60 years.

“I had just been taking organ for like two years,” she recalled, guessing the wedding year was 1967. “And I only knew enough music to play just a little bit of time beforehand and ‘Here Comes the Bride’ and ‘There Goes the Bride.’”

Moore’s memory is as detailed as her ledgers.

“They had a priest and a rabbi and they had a Baptist organist,” she said, referring to herself while recalling that first ceremony. “So, I was a little lost. And they did parts of the service in Latin and parts of the service in Hebrew. And so I was just agog the whole time. It was just a fascinating thing.” She earned $25.

Keeping the Organ Alive

Moore earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in music at the then College of Mary Washington in 1973 and her master’s degree in organ performance at Baylor University. Now, she not only performs but teaches in UVA’s Department of Music.

This spring, she helped graduate student Bernard Gonzales practice “Menuet Gothique” from “Suite Gothique, Op. 25” by Léon Boëllmann, for his senior recital, which he later performed at his church, St Thomas Aquinas University Parish.

Gonzales arrived for his lesson at University Baptist Church on Main Street on a windy, chilly April morning and hurriedly changed into his organ shoes. “They’re different than normal shoes,” he said. “They have felt on the bottom,” so they don’t scratch the organ’s pedalboards.

“I won’t take anybody as a student who’s not an accomplished pianist,” Moore said, noting the organ is difficult to learn because of its multiple keyboards.

“Unlike a piano, you don’t just get sound if you put your fingers down. You have to know which combination of ‘stops’ to put on and how to manipulate those,” she said. “And third, you’re playing a third keyboard with your feet.”

The stops Moore refers to are a series of buttons the player presses to admit wind, or pressurized air, into certain organ pipes, to create different sounds.

Changing Tastes

Moore said she’s seen big changes in wedding traditions over the years. Celebrations no longer strictly adhere to seating the groom’s family to the right of the aisle and the bride’s to the left. Taste in music has shifted from the pieces she played at her very first wedding, like the “Bridal Chorus” from the 1850 opera “Lohengrin” by German composer Richard Wagner.

“Now anything goes,” she said. “Most brides do not want ‘Here Comes the Bride.’ That changed about, I don’t know … maybe 23, 25 years ago. They sort of got away from that. What’s really sad to me is they often don’t want organ music. It became very popular to have a string quartet. It was more romantic; more harp and flute or something.”

Moore’s most recent wedding in the chapel was April 19, the Saturday of Easter weekend. The bride, Moore said, had an “unusual request.” 

She wanted the organist to play a piano piece by composer Eric Satie for the processional.

“I thought, ‘Oh, hmm.’ But then I tried it and thought, ‘Well, why not?’” Moore said. “It’s a really beautiful piece, and it works fine on the organ.” 

Thirty years ago, Moore said she’d play at three weddings a weekend, nearly every weekend. These days, she’s more selective. But she continues to say yes to some couples because weddings are such a “joyous occasion.”

“For the most part, the brides are very kind, and they let me play what I want to play. They generally don’t know anything about organ music, and so they’re generally letting me choose or make suggestions, and if I can accommodate them, I will.”

Barbara Moore is an instructor for piano and organ with the UVA Department of Music.

Article written by Jane Kelly for UVA Today, March, 30th 2025. Photo credit Matt Riley, University Communications.