Music: Carillon

Down the steep gully of Park Ave., Manhattan, rang a flight of bells. It was a cheery Sunday midday. Sunlight drenched the apartment houses, and winked from windows as from a thousand little rain-pools; but the burghers of Park Ave. shivered in their sleep.

In the steeple of the Park Avenue Baptist Church a man was capering in frenzied activity, engaged with two rows of levers. A maze of bright wires from the levers ran up into the bell tower, where hung a newly installed carillon, gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr. The carilloneur, Anton Breese, once assistant in the Cathedral of Antwerp, pushed a lever. The 9-ton bass bell sent its huge note jarring down the street like a slow blackbird. He pushed another, and the tenor bell, which weighs no more than an ordinary country dinner-clapper, spoke clear and high.

Gillet & Johnson, bell founders, had cast the great carillon in Croyden, England, to the order of Mr. Rockefeller, who designed it as a memorial to his mother, There is no tawdry arrangement for electrical ringing. The carilloneur must strike every note by a pull on the keyboard lever. Sweat poured from Mr. Breess’s forehead as the seemingly effortless notes tripped out of the tower and careered away into the bright morning: “Abide with Me,” Schuman’s “Traumerei,” “Hark, Hark, My Soul,” “Song Without Words.” He was proud for he played the greatest carillon in the world. But the burghers of Park Avenue, dreaming of a thousand empty bottles clanked against each other by a fiend’s pitchfork, pulled the sheets up over their heads.

The following Saturday these same sleepyheads heard a tune more familiar to their jaded ears, loudly but soulfully rendered on the amazing carillon. Apropos of a wedding in the church, Mendelssohn’s famed march was, for the first time in the U. S., played upon bells.