Music: Alfred’s Bells

As an organ is to a piano, so is a carillon to an ordinary set of bells. Numbering at least 24 (covering two octaves), the bells of a carillon are tuned with the sharps & flats of the chromatic scale, are struck by hammers like piano keys. A chime or peal of church bells, from four to twelve in number, is tuned in the simple diatonic scale and the bells swing freely, emitting their not-always-melodious tones when struck by their clappers. In carillons, the biggest and the smallest bells are the trickiest to cast and tune. Ranked according to the size of their big bass bells, the world’s best carillons, all made in England, are all in North America, the largest being the 72-bell carillon of Manhattan’s Rockefeller-built Riverside Church, whose 20-ton bass bell is the largest tuned bell extant.* Others: the 72 bells of the University of Chicago Chapel; the Baird Carillon at the University of Michigan; the Bok Carillon in Mountain Lake, Fla.; the 53 bells of the Peace Tower of Canada’s Parliament Building in Ottawa. Last week small Alfred University in Alfred, N. Y. inaugurated a carillon of 35 bells which it claimed was the oldest in North America.

Good bells neither improve nor deteriorate with age. But bell founding reached its height in the Low Countries of Europe by the 18th Century, was thereafter a lost art until British bellmakers began rediscovering it about 40 years ago. When alumni and faculty members of Alfred University resolved to spend some $10,000 on a memorial carillon for President Emeritus Boothe Colwell Davis, they instructed a bell founding firm of Brussels, Michaux & Michaels, to buy 35 old bells rather than cast new ones, which would cost somewhat more. Agents of Michaux & Michaels bought the bells in municipal halls, churches and chateaux of Belgium, Holland, northern France. Many of the owners parted with their bells because they feared they might be seized or destroyed in the next war.

Alfred’s biggest bell, weighing about a half ton, is also its oldest, cast in 1674 by Pieter Hemony of Amsterdam, ablest bell founder of his time. The youngest bell in the collection was cast in 1784 by another famed bellman, Van den Gheyn of Malines. The 35 assorted bells were assembled and tuned—by scraping metal from the lower “lip” and the inner surface—by Jef Denyn, director of the Belgian National School of the Carillon. The carillon, housed temporarily in a wooden tower on the Alfred campus, was played publicly for the first time last week by Henry S. Wesson of Navasota, Tex., a carillonneur who studied with Director Denyn and, as U. S. representative of Michaux & Michaels, installed a carillon they cast for the Belgian Village at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition.

Chimes of bells are limited to simple hymns and folk tunes, or unmelodic “change ringing” which is fairly common in the U. S.† The musical literature of the carillon is larger, although it, too, has its limitations. One of these is that each bell has four or more separate “partials” or overtones in addition to its fundamental note, and when these are not all in tune with each other as well as with those of other bells, a prodigious jangling results. Thus a carillonneur must often rearrange a composition to allow for discords in his family of bells. Nevertheless, on the ancient bells of Alfred last week, Carillonneur Wesson performed a remarkable variety of tunes, ranging from Hail to Thee, Alfred to two movements from a Sonata for Carillon by Teinmerinaus.

*World’s largest bell, which cracked in casting and hence is untuned, is Russia’s Tsar Kolokol (Tsar of Bells), made in 1733, 19 ft. high and weighing 440,000 lb.

†”Changes” are rung on a number of bells by a number of ringers, in mathematical sequence. This strenuous pastime, popular in England (see Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors), involves varying the order of pealing bells so that no one succession of notes is repeated during the lengthy operation. In 1922 the Oxford Diocesan Guild and the Ancient Society of Youths rang 21,363 different changes at the rate of 28 a minute, a record.