Bellissimo

I've remarked before about hearing an extremely intricate bell tower around campus. This turns out to be a major musical landmark called the Harkness Tower: I managed to wander by it while it was playing (picture at left) sometime last weekend, and then I realized there was a whole display of information and memorabilia about it in the college library. So now I'm clued in.

I've never given too much thought to bell towers, but this one is definitely exciting. "Intricate" is a big understatement: this is a 54-bell, fully chromatic 4 1/2 octave carillon, all of them connected by cable (no electronics) to an organ-like console in the tower. The lowest bell weighs over 13,000 pounds. A campus carilloneurs society performs on it daily, at least during the school year. There's a summer concert series about to start. (More info here.)

When you stand in different parts of the courtyards near the tower, the sound echoes in at you from different directions. The low bells toll boomingly; the high bells, when playing quickly, sound surprisingly much like a pipe organ.

Meanwhile, if you stand on the New Haven green at 6 pm, you can hear the City Hall tower brusquely chime out the hour on one side, while, simultaneously, the Center Church mellifluously bells out a hymn on the other side. For about half a minute you get a nice Charles Ives style overlay. Ives, in fact, was the organist at Center Church while he attended Yale.

Who knew this was such a good town for bell towers?