For Music Professor Thomas Harmon, who will retire in June after 34 years as university organist, mastering the organ was not the most difficult thing he accomplished as a young man. Telling his father that he had chosen music over medicine --now that was a challenge.

"My dad was a physician and strongly encouraged me to study medicine," said Harmon, who enrolled as a premed student at Washington University in St. Louis. "I finally screwed up my courage at the end of my junior year and told him I had decided to pursue music. He was not pleased."

By the time Harmon had received his Ph.D. in music and landed a job at UCLA, his father was finally convinced it was not the meager career he feared it would be. "I think he pictured me playing in a smoky cocktail lounge somewhere," Harmon said.

Harmon's love of music began in Springfield, Ill., where he learned to play the piano and saxophone as a child. He discovered the organ at age 11, when, during church services, "the sound and appearance of the organ just swept me away," he said. He would stand by the church organist during the postlude and watch her play, and she ultimately offered to give him organ lessons. Two years later, he was playing pieces in church.

His first career opportunity as an organist came in 1966 when he interrupted his studies at Washington University to take a one-year appointment as acting university organist at Stanford University. In 1967, Harmon was chosen to replace the retiring Laurence Petran, UCLA's university organist.

"One of my conditions for coming to UCLA was to have the Royce Hall organ restored," Harmon recalled. "It had fallen into disrepair." He also acquired a baroque-style organ for Schoenberg Auditorium.

Besides teaching at UCLA and performing all over the world, Harmon also served as Music Department chair for seven years.

He continued the UCLA Live Royce Hall Organ Concert Series, in which he and distinguished artists from on and off campus performed on the Royce Hall organ. Harmon's "peripatetic" recitals, in which he would perform the first half of the program in Schoenberg, then move the audience to Royce Hall for the second half, were very popular in the '70s.

Saying farewell to the university community will be difficult for Harmon, who plans to stay on until the end of June by commuting to UCLA every other week from his new home in Medford, Ore.

"I'll miss my colleagues and students," Harmon said. "I'll miss the wonderful organs on campus, the nurturing facilities, the beauty of the campus.

"UCLA is definitely a class act."