Walter Whipple

began his piano studies with Dollie Clayton McKenzie in 1952 and added organ lessons when he was ten years old. At age 16 he began studying with Tabernacle Organist Alexander Schreiner and traveled for the next three years to Utah for weekly lessons. He graduated from Idaho Falls High School in 1962 and attended Ricks College, BYU, and the University of Southern California, culminating in the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Organ Performance in 1972. The following academic year he studied musicology with Dr. Walter Pass and organ performance with Prof. Michael Radulescu in Austria. As a member of the Vienna Choral Society, he performed with the four resident Vienna orchestras and played with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Salzburg. From 1974 to 1990 Walter Whipple taught music at Rockford College, Illinois. During those years he played cello in the Rockford Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Crawford Gates. From 1983-84 he spent a sabbatical leave in Zakopane, Poland, at the workshop of Franciszek Marduła, violin maker. This experience not only led to a new hobby–building and repairing violins–but also to a career shift involving his acquired fluency in Polish. From 1993 until 2009 he taught Polish in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at BYU in Provo. He served as organist at the BYU Jerusalem Center from 2009 through 2010. As an organist, Walter Whipple has performed extensively throughout the Intermountain West, California, the Midwest, and internationally in Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, and Poland. As a guest organist at the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, he has played approximately a hundred recitals. Currently, he is a cellist with the Utah Valley Symphony and performs as organist for the Utah Baroque Ensemble.