Mack Wilberg

Mack Wilberg is the Music Director of the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. He was the associate director of the Choir and music director of the Chorale at Temple Square for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from May 1999 until his appointment as director on March 28, 2008.

Wilberg served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ in South Korea where he was part of New Horizons a vocal group made up of Latter-day Saint missionaries.

He is a former professor of music at Brigham Young University (BYU) where he directed the Brigham Young University Men's Chorus. Wilberg is active as a composer, arranger, guest conductor, and clinician throughout the United States and abroad. His compositions and arrangements are performed and recorded by choral organizations throughout the world. His arrangements also have been performed at the funerals for United States presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Public performances of his many compositions written for the Tabernacle Choir have involved guests artists invited by the Choir, such as Renée Fleming, Frederica von Stade, Bryn Terfel, The King’s Singers, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Audra McDonald, David Archuleta, Kristen Chenoweth, Sissel, Alfie Boe, and narrators Walter Cronkite, Claire Bloom, Tom Brokaw, Angela Lansbury, Hugh Bonneville, and several others.[1]

Dr. Wilberg received his bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the Thornton School of Music at University of Southern California.

Much of Wilberg's music is published by Oxford University Press, USA.

Dr. Wilberg was born on February 20, 1955, in Orangeville, Utah, and raised in Castle Dale, Utah.

As a boy living in the small mining community of Castle Dale in central-eastern Utah, 4-year-old Mack Wilberg learned to play the piano by ear. His fascination with the instrument grew until it bordered on obsessive. Mack’s mother, concerned about balance in her son’s life, sometimes had to force him to break from the piano and go outside and play. He would go outside to appease her, but then he would go to his neighbors’ home, where he would ask to play their piano. Music was more than just diversionary for him; it was his life.[2]

His family was supportive of his fervor. Every week, his mother would drive him 40 miles outside of town to where he could receive quality instruction from a gifted piano instructor. When he was 10 years old, his grandmother took him to see the Mormon Tabernacle Choir perform. He says that as he entered the threshold of the Tabernacle, the effect on him was tangible. “It felt like I had walked into a wall of glorious sound,” Mack says. Little did he know that eventually that same choir would perform his own musical creations as he stood at their fore with a conductor’s baton.[3]

He and his wife, Rebecca, are parents of four children.

• Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing, arranged by Mack Wilberg

External links

Church newsroom, Mack Wilberg named director of Tabernacle Choir