FCM News:
Principal Organist at the world-famous Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Richard Elliott appears on the Friends of Cathedral Music’s 25th anniversary season in memory of scientist and organist Dr. Robert E. Seamon.
This concert marks Elliott’s second appearance on the FCM series, 3-4 p.m. Sunday, June 2 at Cathedral of St. John, 318 Silver SW in Albuquerque.
Tickets are $25 for premium seating (front 4 rows), $20 general admission and admission is free for full-time students with a valid ID. For tickets, visit www.fcmabq.org.
Seamon passed away Dec. 25, 2009 as a result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident on Christmas Eve. He was born in Worcester, Mass. May 18, 1939, the son of H. Burton and Mildred (Bamford) Seamon.
Seamon was stricken by polio in 1946 and spent two years bedridden. He was home schooled during his illness. When a senior in high school and through undergraduate college he was organist and choir director of Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Worcester, Mass. He obtained his undergraduate degree in physics from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He was accepted to Yale University in their graduate programs both as a physics major and as an organ major. While in Worcester he studied organ under Dr. Frederick Kinsley, then recently of Riverside Church in Manhattan.
At Yale he received his masters and doctorate degrees in Nuclear Physics under Professor Gregory Breit. His thesis “New Data and Improvements in Nucleon-Nucleon Phase Parameter Analysis” was published in 1968.
After obtaining his doctorate he was employed by Los Alamos National Laboratory and worked there for 25 years except for a two-year assignment in Vienna, Austria, with the International Atomic Energy Agency. During his career he published several technical papers and received awards from the Department of Defense for work on nuclear weapons. He retired from the Laboratory in 1994.
During his tenure in Los Alamos he was organist at many local churches and served as organ consultant for instruments that were built or expanded here. He also gave many organ recitals on various instruments in New Mexico, the Northeast and abroad. In his later years he was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, which was then revised to Parkinson’s disease. In 2004 he moved from Los Alamos to La Vida Llena in Albuquerque.
