International Carillon Day

This day April 28 has been established as international Carol and Day a day on which some special attention may be given to this unusual form of music. What is a Carol I'm looking for a moment from the poetic call to the technical. Let me read a definition drawn up by an organization known as the guild of Carolyn yours in North America. A definition which has been accepted by most encyclopedia and dictionary editors. A Carlin is an instrument comprising at least two octaves of fixed cup shaped bells arranged in a chromatic series and still tuned as to produce when many such bells are sounded together concordant harmony. It is normally played from a keyboard which controls expression through variation of touch. From this definition it will be

seen that not just any old set of bells may be correctly called Carolyn. There must be a minimum of twenty three bells and there tuning is all important. If they are not tuned according to proper procedures developed by a bell founders over years of trial and error then they will be not at all harmonious when sounded from the tower but enough of definitions. How did the carbon come about. Well it obviously started when someone had the brilliant idea to put a bell on top of the church and ring it to call people to worship. This was fairly general by the eighth century. Sometimes there was just one bell ringing and others particularly where there was a large tower at a great cathedral. Several bells big ones when monster bells such as those at Notre Dom in Paris swaying back and forth

producing a capacity of sound. People are awaken for blocks or miles around and reminded that it is time to go to church. Let's listen to a swinging peal from St. Peter's in Rome. With. With with with. With with. That was appeal in class to come. As practiced on the continent this bell ringing was and still is a very familiar part of the life of European towns and cities. I'm very fond of the description by Louis Mumford that I would like to read to

you. From you to old age from the cradle to the grave the Christian was reminded by bells of the relation of his church to the important events of his life to the Middle Ages from the towers of medieval towns and cities the bells answered each other Browns in tones dropping down on pointed Gables echoing through narrow streets and lingering in cloisters and courtyard. At daybreak the bells work up the city calling the people to make through the day. They solemnly counted the hours the half hours the quarters. There was no escape from their warning that life is short and eternity. All that matters. Even as Adam could not escape the Lord's voice in the Garden of Eden. So the man of the Middle Ages found it impossible to avoid the steady admonition of the volley of bells over his life and work.

Phil wrote Lewis Mumford. The valley of bells in England took another form. There it was known as change ringing. And it is almost never well hardly ever heard outside England. This is what brought these tears in her classic detective story. The Nine Tailors has to say about this form of Bell music. The art of change ringing is be cuter to the English. And like most English because it is unintelligible to the rest of the world to the musical Belgian For example it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully tuned Ring of Bells is to play a tune on it by the English company ologist However the playing of tunes is considered to be a childish game only fit for furriners. The proper use of bells is to work out mathematically permutations and combinations. And now here is a

sample of English change ringing the peal at Westminster Abbey. A recording made on the day in 1945. Whoa. Or as. Offered. Without returning to our original question how did the Carlin come about. We must explain that he did not evolve out of English change bringing this peculiar form of Bell music was a sort of did in footnote as far as the evolution of the curren is concerned. There is a clue however leading to the origin of the Carolyn. And it is not very far from what is Westminster Abbey from which we heard the change ringing a moment ago. It is in the tower of the House of Parliament and

it is the chime tune which should be called the Cambridge quarters because it originated at Cambridge where William crotch took a phrase from Handel's. I know that my Redeemer liveth and adopted it as a tomb for a clock. We know this tune better as the Westminster chime tune and I am sure it is very familiar to those who listen to the BBC. This chime to him sounds that the quarter the half hour and the three quarters and at the hour it introduces Big Ben. It was all to chime tunes of this type that the Carlin originated. I should make clear however that this did not

happen in England out of English chime tunes but rather in Flanders the Flemish chime tunes in Flanders the trimed who was called a worse log for stroke. At first they were as simple as the Westminster chime tune in London. Later more bells were added and more and more. They started automatically from a sort of enormous Music Box contraption later along came a covey or four expressive playing. The bells were to properly handle the Carlin was born. Let's listen now to a Carlin in Amsterdam playing in all its glory. A composition by a Dutch Carolyn your named wrote the warden. He took the simple Big Ben chime to him and made an elaborate composition for Carolyn out of it. Those bells sounded in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. And they are

still going strong. You may hear Carolyn's like this one. Some worse and some better in almost every village town and city in Belgium Holland and parts of north eastern friends. Car loans like these may also be found scattered over other parts of the world but nowhere in such quantity. There are for example only a half dozen in all British Isles. But there are over 5000 towers for change ringing in Britain. Oddly enough the largest concentration of current times outside the area once known as Flanders is right here in North America. It took rather a long time before they were imported in any numbers. In fact it was not until after the First World War before the 1920s about the only form of bell rings heard on this continent was that produced by simple chimes or by a Spanish mission bells in California.

Here's a brief Eckel of the days of father set off the bells of Santa Barbara mission. Moving from California to the east coast. We find that the CONUS did import some bells from England. They apparently did not have the time or patience to bother with the permutations of change ringing but they did like him tombstone and one bell at a time on a simple charm. Here is a rather bad recording of the old chime at Trinity Church in The Wall Street district in New York City. With.

Obviously these bells were not tuned so that they could be played in the manner of a Caroline that is with harmony. Let us listen now to a contemporary Carolynn imported from Holland. It is a four octave instrument played by a very fine girl in your Wendell West. At the first Evangelical Lutheran Church in Green Bay Wisconsin here is a hymn tune lifted from the simple who. Well perhaps the company logically is sublime. Ya. Ya. Ya.

Yeah.

At this point.

It might be well to inquire how well Carolyn is played. It is not easy work. It requires a certain amount of blood sweat and tears. And for this reason very few lady Carol and yours have lasted very long at it. Of course it is a glorious way for them to goal but we are sorry to lose the ringers of any condition. At the current school which we have established at the Riverside Church the first prerequisite for entrance is a certain toughness of physique in Flanders. There is a saying that the requirements for a curl in your or B are dear. Are good hands good feet. No gulp. A strong back and a weak mind. Back in the 18th century Charles Bernie travelled from England to Belgium and watched for the first time for him a Caroline being

played. He climbed the belfry of Ghent and found the curling your coat in his shirt with a collar unbuttoned and in a violent sweat in court in Amsterdam. Bernie found another Carolyn your in about him. He said if this Carol and your had been put into a steam bath for an hour he could not have perspired more violently than he did after a quarter of an hour of this furious exercise. He stripped to his shorts put on his nightcap and thrust up his sleeves. And he said he was forced to go to bed the instant it was over. In order to prevent his catching cold as well as to recover himself he was usually so much exhausted that he was unable to speak. Well since Charles Bernie visited the lowlands many changes have been made it is still hard work to play a big Garland but it is not quite all that hard. Dr. Burney was not too happy with the sounds that the caravans made at that time. I

suspect that they kept him awake for the Flemish so love their bells that they are reluctant to turn them off at night. Dr. Burney said about Amsterdam there is scarcely a church belonging to the Calvinists in Amsterdam without its chimes which not only play the same tunes every quarter of an hour for three months together without their being changed but by the difference of clocks. One has scarcely five minutes quiet in the four and twenty hours in a few days time. I had so thoroughly a surfeit of them that in as many months I really believe if they had not first deprived me of hearing I should have hated music in general. Today over in the new world our Carolyn's are not overplayed. Most current and yours find them an exciting musical challenge and many people who listen find them pleasing and sometimes even sparring a few distinguished composers have actually written for this instrument. Composers like Edward Eldar

Samuel Barber Gian Carlo Menotti and bobbing Johann Frankel John Cage. I wish we might persuade a few more composers to try their hand at this somewhat neglected musical medium. Here is a composition for Karl M written by stock Meese and played by Charles Chapman on the Carlin at Little Ray Virginia. We're at AM A Our Earth. I am a on. Your on. Hundred. The

end. Or a. Thank you thank. The book. Thank. You own a. Television. Movie.

As I am at. The evening ATL. And. And so we have come to the end of this program designed to call attention to Carolyn music in the 20th century. Since this program originates from the Riverside Church and since we are privileged at this church to possess what we consider a very fine Carlen it is fitting that you should hear it. Our Carol Lin is certainly a unique Carlen in one respect. It is the largest cast Bell Carolyn in the world which is also the heaviest the Borden or our Bel is the largest and heaviest

tuned Bell ever cast. Our 74 bells were given to the Riverside Church in memory of his mother by the late John D Rockefeller Jr. and it is correctly known as the Laura Spelman Rockefeller memorial Garland. It is played each Saturday at 12 noon and each Sunday morning before and after the worship service at the Riverside Church. And again each Sunday afternoon at 4:00. Visitors are always welcome in the tower when the Carolyn is being played. It is a bit noisy but very interesting and the view on a clear day is terrific. And now let us close our program with the sound of our own Carl and I am playing a phantasy on the Parsifal chime tune written by a Flemish Carolyn your named Jeff. Real tears. The at.

The at. The poll at. And the. And the.

And. And. You have been listening to a special program for international Carlin day April

28. This recorded program was produced by Riverside radio in cooperation with Rod Yonatan Donte. This is the end AEB Radio Network.