Playing Middlebury College's bells is a passion for renowned carilloneur - Jul. 7, 2004 by Ed Barna, The Rutland Herald Climbing the stairs in Middlebury College's Mead Chapel to the place where George Matthew Jr. plays the four-octave carillon, the steps get steeper and fine woodworking gives way to basic carpentry. It's a different world up under the belfry, a place where there's no way to substitute glitz for competence, and no way to cover up mistakes, with much of the surrounding campus and town within listening distance. There's only one more set of steps from here, a crude ladder nailed to a wall under an opening in the ceiling. Climb through and there are the bells, suspended in their ranks like orders of angels in mid-flight. Wires connect strikers on the interiors of the bells with controls below. Each mechanism is counterbalanced so large and small bells take about the same amount of force to sound. The controls are so sensitive, Matthew says, that when groups of children visit, he has the smallest child use her pinky finger to work the baton that moves the 30-pound clapper that plays the largest bell. In the antechamber below, some of the walls are decorated with posters from past concerts, many with signatures of visiting artists. Most people would not recognize names like Hans Hielscher (Germany), Ghijsbert Kok (Netherlands), Auke de Boer (Netherlands) and Ulla Laage (Denmark), any more than they would be familiar with notable carillon composers like Mathias Van den Gheyn, Emma Lou Diemer, Jef Denyn, Leen t'Hart, Roger Vuataz, and David Pearl (who recently composed a piece specifically for the Middlebury carillon.) But these are major figures in the ranks of carilloneurs, who have come to take part in the series of concerts Matthew organizes on campus every summer. They come because Matthew is a major figure himself, an artist who has performed widely in Europe - one poster reads "Glockenspielkonzert, Zoffingen, Switzerland, George Matthew Jr." He has also been called on to play at the dedication of a brand new carillon. There is a CD of his playing: a concert for the 16th International Carillon Festival in 2001, at Bok Tower Gardens, Fla. Few but carilloneurs would realize it, but it meant Matthew was able to record with one of the largest set of bells in the world. In all, he's toured 11 times in Europe and 25 times in the United States. He's known as an arranger and composer as well, with his name on about 100 new pieces for carillon. No one would suspect it from his unassuming demeanor and his willingness to lend his hand to smaller occasions, like 5 p.m. recitals during the school year, or playing the organ for the local Congregational Church. He sits down at something very much like an organ (a clavier, technically) in that the feet can press down on a set of levers while the hands are doing their work. The rows of levers, known as batons, can be worked with a great range of pressures, from the lightest, briefest touch to a firm, assertive push. As he begins to play - both hands and both feet going at once, each hand sometimes working two batons at the same time - a look of intense concentration comes over his face. One has the feeling that if he had decided to embark on a career in the martial arts rather than music, he would have excelled there, too. To put it another way, he seems almost to be dancing to the coordinated clangor above (a comparison he readily accepts). One of the paradoxes of life as a carilloneur is that the instrument may be the largest in the community, and its audience the most numerous, yet few people ever witness the virtuosity involved in the act of playing it. For Matthew, bells aren't just a pastime, they're a passion. Their remarkable histories, the scientific complexities of the sounds they produce, and the lore associated with their role in community life all fascinate him - as well as a repertoire of music that he and his fellow carillon enthusiasts preserve, promote and develop. The calling of the bells Matthew's introduction to carillons came when he was 4 years old, visiting the 1939 New York World's Fair. Hoisted onto his grandfather's shoulders, looking out over "a sea of people," he saw a man playing something like the organ at Christ Church in Brownsville, where his father was choir director, only this was making an incredible amount of powerful sound. "It was Jef Denyn himself," Matthew said, referring to one of the world's top carilloneurs. The spectacle made a tremendous impression that never left him. When he was studying chemistry at Columbia in New York City, that interest was renewed and intensified by hearing the nearby Riverside Drive Church's carillon, for many years the world's largest. He had studied piano and organ (he was a church organist at 13), and by 1962 he was the choir director in Scarsdale, N.Y. There, he learned that they were about to be given a carillon. "I didn't know a clapper from a sound bow," he said, but he started to get educated. When the chance came to take lessons from Arthur Bigelow, Princeton University's carilloneur, who was giving them close enough to Matthew's home in Stamford, Conn., he took it. Stamford was to be Matthew's home base for most of his career. There, for 23 years he was director of instrumental music at Rogers School, for 18 years the organist and choir master at Temple Sinai, the organist and choir master at St. Andrew's Church, and the carilloneur of the First Presbyterian Church. When he retired from his Stamford posts in 1995, Matthew moved to Middlebury. That connection started with a phone call from Middlebury College music professor Emory Fanning. The college choir directed by Fanning was coming to Greenwich, Conn., and he wanted to see the Stamford carillon, because a trustee named Alan Dragone was interested in donating a carillon to Middlebury. Matthew knew there were already some bells at Middlebury, and he knew of a church that was closing in Quincy, Mass., and its bells were available. The two sets could be put together to create a three-octave carillon, he told Dragone. Dragone, who had sold the Celanese Company to BASF and has a long history of generosity to the college, said, "You really want a four-octave carillon, don't you?" That 48-bell carillon proved more difficult to install than anyone suspected. The Dutch bells, plus the American bells in Middlebury, plus some French bells made to complete the set, produced tones and overtones that didn't sound right together. In the end, Dragone paid for the foundry at Meeks, Watson & Company in Georgetown, Ohio, to replace the Dutch bells. Matthew also serves as carilloneur at Norwich University, whose 47-bell carillon also has an interesting history. Thirty-six of them came from the Belgian exhibition at the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, via Harvard, to which they had been donated but where they had never found a home. Norwich built Adams Tower for them, and added 11 more bells in 1958. Norwich and Middlebury have Vermont's only carillons. A group of fewer than 23 bells is a chime, not a carillon, and many churches that seem to have carillons (Brandon Congregational Church, for example) are actually playing recorded music through speakers. The pre-existing Middlebury bells had come from the Meneely foundry in West Troy, N.Y., as had bell at the Congregational Church in Middlebury, Matthew said. The man who started that foundry was the son-in-law of Paul Revere, who himself made some of the country's first bells. "This is what the Liberty Bell would sound like if it wasn't cracked," Matthew said, and sounded the largest bell in the Mead Chapel set. It weighs 2,300 pounds, he said, and "it's very well constructed." One hopes, standing in the room below, that it is also very well attached. Bells to cannons to bells Historically, carillons date to the latter part of the 16th century, Matthew said. In the 15th and 16th centuries, towns in the Flemish part of what is now Belgium competed intensely to have the fanciest town clocks, and they began adding bells. From there the interest spread through Europe. Today, the Netherlands has about 200 of the world's 600 or so carillons (Matthew's license plate is "BEIAARD," Dutch for carillon), with the United States in second place at about 170. England has its own tradition of bell-ringing, from which we have the phrase "ringing the changes" on something, Matthew said. This was a kind of group bell-ringing in which a set number of bells were rung in different sequences. An example would be ringing eight bells 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8, then 2-1-4-3-6-5-7-8, then 2-4-1-6-3-7-5-8, then 4-2-6-1-7-3-5-8, then 4-6-2-7-1-5-3-8. Handbells came about as a way to practice ringing the changes without the group making its mistakes and learning their timing with the whole village listening. Bronze was and is the primary material for bell-making, though experimental bells have been produced with other metals, Matthew said. Historically, bronze has also been a leading material for making artillery, he said, so there are bells that were made from cannons, and cannons from bells. The tones that emanate from bells can carry for about a mile, he said, so they have long had a role as community alarms or as expressions of community feelings. There was a time when bells were rung for holidays like the Fourth of July, a custom Matthew wouldn't mind seeing return to favor, and they were tolled for weddings or funerals. In Brandon's Baptist Church there is visible remnant of the time 150 years ago when its bell warned of fires and other dangers - a slot is seen on the side of the church, close to the bell tower, where a rope hung for people to pull in an emergency. A note for those who know Edgar Allen Poe's famous poem "The Bells:" After researching different theories, Daniel Varholy, a student of Matthew's, concluded that Poe probably got the idea for the poem while living in New York City, listening to bells around 42nd Street that carried a long way (1840) in an age without skyscrapers. Speaking of alarms, the life of a carilloneur does not always take place placidly and above the fray. On one occasion, Matthew was scheduled to take part in a festival in strife-torn Northern Ireland, and while making a bus connection he left his briefcase in the terminal. He raced back to see if it was still there, because it contained his passport, all his music, and all his money. To his relief, he found that someone had put the briefcase on a wall outside the terminal. He went over, reached for it, and heard a voice behind him say, "I wouldn't do that if I were you, laddie. The Bomb Squad will be here for it in a minute." Ring out, wild bells What makes bells unique as musical instruments is the variety of tones they produce when rung, some of which persist for a long time. Matthew said one of the world's largest bells, a 30-tonner at a Russian monastery, is said to make a sound that can be heard for 12 minutes if rung loudly. The shape of a bell, in which circles of different diameters are all giving off sounds, makes for an extremely rich auditory environment, Matthew said. For a large bell, there can be as many as 50 different harmonics, as these supplementary tones are called. This can cause problems for composers, Matthew said. It's almost as if a bell is two instruments, because the strike tone is accompanied by a tone at the interval known as a minor third, which can sometimes be heard for up to 10 seconds. It's an emotionally darker tone than the strike tone, so if the notes of a piece aren't arranged carefully, there can be a clash from it seeming to be in both a major and a minor key. For Matthew, one solution to this problem has been ragtime. The syncopations of rags lend themselves just as well to church bells as to fancy house pianos, so he has arranged a number of works in that genre. Up in the carillon room at Mead Chapel, one of the pieces of memorabilia quotes a poem about bells: Now an evanescent whisper, Soon a burgeoning cry ... Oh, triumphant bells, Echoing throughout the world, Breathing, speaking, ceasing not. - Daniel Varholy, '97 If so, that will in large part be due to the labors, invisible but audible, of people like George Matthew Jr.