What I’d Climbed Up There to Do: On Learning to Play the Carillon

As a fall semester begins for students and educators, I’m sharing this essay inspired by my own college days. It originally appeared in “Bell: Essays by readers” in the March 2024 issue of The Christian Century.

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I can’t fully explain why I did it.

I thought a lot about those bells. Lying in my dorm room under the open window, I’d listen to their strange, distant music and wonder where it came from. Rarely did I recognize the songs, but their somberness spoke to me with tones so different from the classroom lectures and textbook pages I was falling out of love with. University walls hemmed me in, but the bells sent their sound out with the breeze, over blocks and neighborhoods, singing for people who would never see them. That music sounded wonderful to my ears.

When I learned where the bells were, I went several times to sit in the back of that chapel on Sunday mornings. Waiting for the service to end, I looked for the man standing at the base of the stairs who offered bell tower tours for curious visitors. We’d climb and climb, take a walkway above the vaulted ceiling, and then climb some more to the little cabin with a keyboard connected to the 72-bell carillon. A student of the instrument himself, our tour guide would play a couple of songs for us as I stood by the open windows, listening to bells all around.

After a few tours, I decided I’d ask to be taught how to play. I had a minimal music background, and I didn’t know how to explain my impulse to find a way into this music that offered itself on the wind. I could hardly believe it when the powers that be agreed to let me learn. 

Not that I was granted much time in the bell tower. The practice instrument sat in the chapel basement, but that didn’t discourage me. I made my daily pilgrimage through dark storage areas to a little room with a keyboard identical to the one in the tower. It was hooked up to chimes rather than bells, and they warned me that it wouldn’t give me the exact experience of playing the bells. I had plenty to practice, though. I’d rifle through boxes of old music, any piece giving me a chance to practice making my hands and feet work together in such a strange new way. 

I don’t know why it gladdened me to spend that time in the chapel basement. Perhaps I was hiding from my sneaking awareness that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Early classes in my major had disillusioned me. Perhaps I liked spending time in a building with people in the field of study that I’d eventually pursue. (A fair number of divinity students made their way through the chapel.) Perhaps my brain simply enjoyed exercising some long-neglected parts of itself.

Eventually, I left the university without finishing my degree. But not before I’d done something wonderful.

One spring morning, a friend and I climbed the stairs of the bell tower. I sat on the carillonneur’s bench, took a deep breath, positioned my hands and feet, and hit the batons of the starting notes. I stopped, stunned. 

I’d been warned about this: both the lag time between baton and bell and the minor third overtones that distinguished the bells from the basement chimes. Still, I froze, bewildered. I wondered what I thought I was doing up there.

“Go on,” said my friend from behind me.

His voice held no minor third overtones, but it did hold a warning. He would not be letting me leave that cabin until I did what I’d climbed up there to do. 

Heart thumping in my chest, I took another deep breath, positioned myself again, and brought fist and foot down again on the batons. I did wait a little too long, but then I finally hit the next note, and the next, and then I played. 

This essay originally appeared in “Bell: Essays by Readers” in the March 2024 issue of The Christian Century.

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